Anna Karenina
(1935), 95 min. b&w

Anna continues to meet with Vronsky at social events, and people are starting to talk about them. At a croquet match Anna tells Vronsky, "This can't go on. I have a husband and a child. This must end."  She fights her feelings for Vronsky, yet to Countess Lidia it appears that Anna encourages Vronsky. The Countess tells Karenin that she is shocked. Karenin pretends it is nothing, saying, "To be disturbed by such trivialities would be undignified." Although Karenin says this, he is secretly disturbed. Lidia replies,  "If Caesar's wife is above suspicion, it is because the tone is set by Caesar."

Karenin is pleased that Anna is home.

Countess Lidia says she's shocked by Anna's behavior.

When Anna comes home late Karenin warns her that she is becoming an object of disagreeable talk. "There are certain rules of decorum that cannot be disregarded," he says.

"The attentions you have been receiving from Count Vronsky have been generally noticed," he continues. "Your conduct and deportment were not altogether what could be desired. . . . I'm not inquiring into your feelings Anna. I've no right to ferret into your soul.  I'm only concerned with appearances. . . . I'm working on a government bill which requires the concentration of all my energies. To subject me to annoyance at a critical time like this is very inconsiderate. . . . I must make you understand: First, the importance of public opinion. Second, the effect of scandal on your son. Third, the inviolability of the marriage tie."

Karenin claims that he loves Anna. She replies "It isn't me you love. It's your career and appearances."

Karenin confronts Anna after she comes home late.

Karenin notices how intensely Anna follows the race.

Vronsky is also receiving criticism because of the scandal. His mother is upset that he is allowing Anna to interfere with his career. The General sends message to Vronsky that if his name continues to be linked with that of a certain lady, he will be forced to ask him to resign from the regiment. But Vronsky is in love and prepared to give up everything if only Anna will leave Karenin and marry him. She refuses to do this because she cannot bear to leave her son.

At the horse races Anna watches Vronsky compete (riding a horse named Froo Froo). Karenin notices how intensely Anna follows the race. Vronsky falls, and Anna jumps up, concerned. Karenin looks around, more concerned about people noticing Anna.

On the way home Anna tells Karenin that she loves Vronsky and cannot bear Karenin. She's afraid of Karenin. Karenin says he believes in marriage as a sacrament — they must remain a family because of his position/status. Karenin also says he realizes that marrying Anna was a mistake, but this is a mistake he must bear for the sake of his public duty and for the sake of his son.

"You have done what I particularly asked you not to do."

"You will never see this person again."

After a month of forced separation, Anna comes to Vronsky's house. "I had to come." She tells him how unpleasant it is at home, how she feels like a prisoner while Karenin watches her, cold and polite. Vronsky convinces her to come away with him. They travel to Venice and spend an apparently blissful time together. When boredom begins to set in Anna and Vronsky return to St. Petersburg.

Vronsky visits his old army friends. Many of the officers are planning to resign from the army and form their own private regiment. They invite Vronsky to join them, but he feels he cannot. Anna would be devastated if he left her. Still, he's tempted because he's bored, and restless for new adventures. The happiness that Anna and Vronsky have enjoyed is ending. Anna can see in Vronsky's eyes that he has regrets about having given up his army life. Also she is terribly upset that Karenin won't allow her to see her son Sergei. Her reputation is ruined; people make disparaging remarks about her in public. To make matters worse, she notices Vronsky flirting with Princess Sorokina at the opera.

Karenin tells Sergei that his mother is dead.

"You will never enter this house again."

On Sergei's birthday Anna goes to Karenin's house early in the morning and goes right to Sergei's room. The servants are reluctant to tell Karenin because Anna had always been kind to them. They let her have time with her boy. They warn her when Karenin is coming, and Sergei cries as she leaves him. Karenin says to her:

"This is insupportable. I told my son you were dead. Why do you make me out to be a tyrant? . . .  You will not enter this house again. You will never see Sergei again. . . .  I told you that before you went away. do you hear?"

Anna feels horrible.  Vronsky complains about enforced leisure in the country. "Why did we come here?"  Then he receives a letter from Yashvin inviting him to join a regiment of volunteers, to fight the Turks.  Anna is upset at the idea of being left alone, and thinks that Vronsky merely wants to escape, that he no longer loves her.  She makes him angry, and he blurts out that he's sick and tired of love. He does love her, but leaves in anger, giving her no words of comfort. 

Later, regretting her words that angered Vronsky, Anna dashes off to the train station to see him before he leaves.  At the station Anna searches the crowd for Vronsky and sees him holding hands with Princess Sorokina as he bids her farewell. Heartbroken, she sits alone at the train station until dark and then walks over to the tracks and throws herself under the wheels of a moving train. Anna's relationship with Vronsky has ended at the same place it began — the Moscow train station.

Behind the scenes photo with cameraman Bill Daniels and director Clarence Brown on the left, and Greta Garbo and Basil Rathbone in the sleigh	As "husband" and "wife" in Anna Karenina Garbo and Basil Rathbone are caught off guard by the roving lens, as they indulge in an informal chat on the set while awaiting their next scene. Photo by Grimes, MGM, 22 June 1935
Basil Rathbone on the set of Anna Karenina	Here Garbo is laughing gaily with March as he takes her in his arms for a rehearsal of a ballroom dancing scene. Behind March stands dance director Chester Hale, expert on mazurkas.

Anytime you try to condense a 900-page novel into a 95-minute film some major elements of the book must fall to the wayside. What is missing from this film adaptation of "Anna Karenina" is the entire love story of Levin and Kitty. Levin is the hero of the novel, who is looking for the meaning of existence. In this film Levin and Kitty are minor characters. This is really the story of Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky, and even that is condensed. All references to Anna's and Vronsky's illegitimate child were removed from the film by the censorship agency. In spite of its shortcomings, this 1935 adaptation of Anna Karenina is very well regarded, and a favorite of many. The costumes and sets are fabulous, and the cinematography impressive. The decadence of Imperial Russia is clearly visible throughout the film.

The cast was wonderful, except for Fredric March, whose portrayal of Vronsky is very stiff. Vronsky is supposed to be incredibly handsome and charming, and needs to be in order to persuade a married woman to give up everything for him. Fredric March just doesn't have that appeal. If Vronsky had been played by Errol Flynn, most of the women in St. Petersburg would have left their husbands for him!

Greta Garbo was stunning and magnificent. She's totally believable in the role, and earned the first NYC Film Critics Best Actress Award for this performance. Garbo had played the role once before, in the 1927 silent film Love, with John Gilbert. Fredric March's Vronsky seemed rather shallow and uninteresting.

Rathbone's portrayal of Karenin was perfect: realistically cold and yet also sympathetic. Basil credited Garbo with inspiring him to give one of the best performances of his life. In an interview in Motion Picture magazine, Rathbone said, "In Anna Karenina I had what many would call a brutal and merciless part as the the husband, yet it is a character that is real. No caricature there! My own attitude toward Karenin is that he was a man who honored the institution of marriage, and there was no brutality about him. He was an upstanding citizen, married to a very physical wife, whose tragedy was nothing compared to his. He is, indeed, the central character of the story. I should like to play it again."

 "Before I played Karenin I was puzzled about the technique of film acting, and wasn't satisfied at all with what I had been doing. During the filming of Anna Karenina I watched Garbo and learned from her what I think is the secret of good screen acting; play your part with the least possible physical movement and the greatest possible mental projection. It is different on the stage. There your whole body is constantly exposed to the audience and you must have perfect coordination from head to foot....Physical movement is far more important on the stage than it is in films. In films mental projection means everything. And Garbo has this power of mental projection to a superb degree. I learned from her how little to do in order to get the greatest results. My work improved one hundred per-cent. Now, when I play a part, subconsciously I ask myself: What would Garbo do with this?"("Hissed to the Heights — That's Rathbone," Motion Picture magazine, July 1936, p. 74)

In his autobiography Rathbone has quite a bit to say about Anna Karenina and the character of Karenin:

"Here, in the making of this picture, is the almost perfect example of a loss of integrity that becomes inevitable when a single label is tabbed to a character of many dimensions. Karenin is not a heavy, a motion picture term that Tolstoy would have shuddered to hear defined. Anna had married Karenin of her own free will: they have a son, a boy of about ten years old. She falls in love with a very attractive young man, Vronsky, who is more of her age, Karenin being somewhat older than Anna. That she had fallen out of love with Karenin might be held much to Karenin's account. But he had not been cruel or unkind, rather he had been insensitive and possessive, and without much imagination. His faults are quite evident and Tolstoi does not spare him. That Anna should have fallen in love with Vronsky was quite understandable to all except of course Karenin. But surely this does not make him a villain." "There is one scene in Tolstoi's novel that had to be eliminated from the picture script for reasons of censorship. ... This scene is vital to any appreciation and understanding of the character of Karenin. It is that scene where Anna is about to give birth to her lover's child. Karenin sends for Vronsky, and quietly in his study he tells Anna's love that his mistress is about to become the mother of his child. This is no time or place for Karenin and he leaves Vronsky alone to face the hour of his making. There is bitterness in Karenin at this moment, and who shall blame him? But there is also a pride and integrity born of his conservative and unchangeable background, and maybe a degree of compassion for the bastard child about to be born to his Anna and her lover. To eliminate this scene is to present Karenin unjustly — a dimension—several dimensions of his being are eliminated from the estimate we are asked to make of him." (In and Out of Character, page 139) In another interview in Motion Picture magazine Rathbone said, "Karenin is a human being—a man whose point of view you can see even though you don't wholly sympathize with it. To me he's an even more tragic figure than Anna—for there's no greater tragedy than that of the person who feels, but is so bound by convention that he can't give expression to his feeling. I can understand him. I can put myself into his shoes as I couldn't into Murdstone's, and I've never been so happy or at ease in any picture."  ("It's Cheers for Basil Rathbone Now," Motion Picture, August 1935, p. 76) Rathbone relates how he helped little Freddie Bartholomew prepare for the scene in which he, as Karenin, tells his son that his mother is dead. Basil suggested to Freddie that he imagine that he's being told that his cherished guardian Cissie is dead. Basil felt that the technique worked, and Freddie's performance was deeply touching  (In and Out of Character, pages 93-94).  I personally felt that the scene in which Anna visited her son for the last time was much more emotional. Freddie certainly did a fine job in all his scenes. Rathbone had met Greta Garbo at a luncheon at John Gilbert's house about six years before filming Anna Karenina. She was very friendly and seemed completely at ease; they had played tennis together and swam in the pool together. Yet, when they met on the set of Anna Karenina, she was very formal, and gave no indication that she remembered ever meeting Rathbone before. Basil asked her for an autograph and she refused! He was confused and hurt by this, and found Garbo a mystery.  (In and Out of Character, pages 141-142) In this video clip Karenin confronts his wife about the "disagreeable gossip" he's hearing about her. Video clip courtesy of Turner Classic Movies

Review from The Motion Picture and the Family, 15 October 1935 Review from Motion Picture Herald, 6 July 1935 Review from Screenland magazine, November 1935

Most of the reviews of Anna Karenina raved about the stars, Garbo and March, and said nothing about Rathbone other than to mention that he was in the film. A few reviewers wrote a bit more about Rathbone:

• "Basil Rathbone is excellent as the husband." —New York Times, 31 August 1935
• "Basil Rathbone is magnificently irritating as the convention-bound, petty government official who is is husband of Anna." —The Film Daily, 19 July 1935 (Read the full review below.)
• "Little Freddie Bartholomew is pretty fine and Reginald Owen and Basil Rathbone rate their share of honors." —Modern Screen, September 1935  (Read the full review below.)
• "Rathbone, . . . and others support splendidly." —Motion Picture Daily, 1 July 1935   (Read the full review below.)
• "Maureen O'Sullivan, Basil Rathbone, Phoebe Foster, Reginald Owen, and Reginald Denny are outstanding in the supporting cast." —Movie Classic, October 1935 (Read the full review below.)
• "An almost perfect choice for the part of Miss Garbo's husband is Basil Rathbone." —Variety, 4 September 1935   (Read the full review below.)
• "The film's most fascinating characterization is offered by Basil Rathbone, whose cold cruelty in banishing his wife is shown to be the by-product of his own broken heart (though Rathbone never allows himself to descend into cheap sentiment)." — Hal Erickson, Rovi

Read full reviews here:

Review from The Film Daily, 19 July 1935	Review from Modern Screen, September 1935	Review from Motion Picture Daily, 1 July 1935
Review from Movie Classic, October 1935	From Variety, 4 September 1935

 Anna Karenina was awarded the Mussolini Cup for the best foreign film at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. In addition, the National Board of Review named Anna Karenina one of the Top Ten Films of 1935.

See more pictures on Page Two and Page Three.

Photos on this page and pages 2 and 3 are from the film Anna Karenina © 1935 by MGM.

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All original content is © Marcia Jessen, 2015