Word: karenina
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...Anna Karenina" at the University this week is certainly not Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." True, the essentials of the plot remain, and such changes as have been made are justified by the necessity of condensation. But the spirit of the original has been lost and the characters vitiated beyond recognition. Only Anna and Alexei Karenin retain a spark of life; the others are bloodless lay-figures. Least excusable is the mutilation of Konstantin Levin--in the book a sensitive, passionate, inarticulate, self-contradictory idealist, but reduced in the picture to a formal and awkward lover. Frederick March was no more...
Herbert Marshall achieves perhaps the most moving performance in his portrayal of a generous and sacrificing friend, Frederic March, so wooden in Anna Karenina, makes something of a comeback as a gay young officer who goes blind in the war. In fact one of the bleakest scenes in months is where he's sitting around, blind and hopeless, trying to be nice to some stupid children. He puts across his various moods of hope and black despair with a reality and depth of feeling that Mr. March's audiences are not always treated...
...three attractive principals, a superior screen script and a climax which deserves a place on that roll of honor and profit which includes such classics as the life-preserver sequence in Cavalcade, the dance of the coffee rolls in The Gold Rush, the heroine's suicide in Anna Karenina...
...Mussolini Cup for the best foreign film of the year: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Anna Karenina (TIME, Sept. 9); because, ''The excellent interpretation of Greta Garbo, joined with the efficacious and human translation into images of Tolstoy's masterpiece, makes of this film a work of undoubted artistic value...
Considered as a reproduction of a celebrated novel, Anna Karenina is intelligent, reasonably faithful and less likely to arouse squeals of affected agony from literary hair-splitters than any other recent effort of its kind. Considered on its own merits as a picture, it is the liveliest in which Greta Garbo has appeared since Mata Hari and should on this account delight millions of cinemaddicts who have never of Tolstoy and could not spell out his stories if they had. Good shot: Vronsky's first glimpse of Anna, through steam blowing across her face from the engine of the train...