blanche-2 Garbo's first speaking line, and it must have been thrilling to have such a tremendous foreign star able to make that transition from silent to sound.The movie is "Annie Christie," the year is 1930, and it is an adaptation of the play by Eugene O'Neill. It concerns a young farm woman, Anna, from Minnesota who comes to New York to find her father, whom she hasn't seen in 15 years. Molested some time earlier, she hates men and has prostituted herself. Her father takes her on his barge, and she comes to love the sea. One day, they rescue a young man (Charles Bickford), and he and Anna fall in love. However, neither he nor her father know anything of her past.Garbo is very beautiful and her command of English is amazing. You can tell that she understands every word she is saying, just as you can tell when some actors have learned their role by rote. She acquits herself very well.Marie Dressler as Marthy, a friend of her father's whom Anna meets in a bar, is marvelous, playing each scene as a drunk. And you really think she is. As someone wrote, you can smell the alcohol on her breath.That's the good news. The bad news is that this is a very difficult film to watch. Sound and dealing with the camera when you have sound was all very new. The camera didn't move around so it is a very static movie. The actors have several scenes where they all talk at once. An acting teacher once said, "Eugene O'Neill was our greatest novelist." The actors don't just talk at once, they talk incessantly. There is no action to be had. I love Eugene O'Neill, I have seen his plays on stage. This film is 85 years old, and it shows.Definitely worth seeing, however. After all, "Garbo talks!"

Claudio Carvalho In New York, the alcoholic skipper of a coal barge Chris Christofferson (George F. Marion) receives a letter from his estranged twenty year old daughter Anna "Christie" Christofferson (Greta Garbo) telling that she will leave Minnesota to stay with him. Chris left Anna fifteen years ago to the countryside to be raised by relatives in a farm in St. Paul and he has never visited his daughter.Anna Christie arrives and she is a wounded woman with a hidden dishonorable past since she had worked for two years in a brothel to survive. She moves to the barge to live with her father and one night, Chris rescues the sailor Matt (Charles Bickford) and two other fainted sailors from the sea. Soon Anna and Matt fall in love with each other and Anna has the best days of her life. But when Matt proposes to marry her, she is reluctant and also haunted by her past. Matt insists and Anna opens her heart to Matt and to her father disclosing the darks secrets of her past. "Anna Christie" is the first talkie of Greta Garbo and a heartbreaking story of a young woman that finds redemption through love. I bought the DVD with both versions of 1930 and 1931, and the version in English is restored and has additional scenes in the beginning and in the ending; however, Jacques Feyder's version in German is better than Clarence Brown's. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Anna Christie"

mozli Viewing both of these films concurrently is not a bad idea to get a sense of early film production and acting for the camera styles. I give the nod to Garbo(but not by much)in regard to her naturalness. Robeson is majestic. But his performance is aimed for a large proscenium theater. Something else that struck me was the movies themes of empowerment for women and minorities. There hadn't been any films coming out of Hollywood yet that allowed the voices of marginal characters like Anna and Brutus to take the foreground. These were very progressive films for their time. It's quite probable that O'Neill saw the writing on the wall way before everyone else did about the future of America.

MartinHafer This version of Anna Christie is better than the earlier silent version starring Blanche Sweet, though it is not a huge improvement. Unlike the earlier film, this one has expanded the father's mistress' role into a larger and comedic one starring Marie Dressler and the production values are a bit better overall. This isn't to say that I loved this movie--mostly because the story just seems very old-fashioned and corny but also because Dressler's comedic performance in some ways detracts from the focus of the film. However, in 1930, this sort of melodrama starring Greta Garbo (in her first sound film) played very well, but by today's standards, the acting at times just seemed "over-the-top" from time to time. Despite this, the story still is pretty compelling and the film is quite watchable.This film, by the way, was a "pre-Code" film. This means that the film was very racy by standards imposed just a few years later--with plot elements such as prostitution and some minor cursing. Those not used to the pre-Code films might be surprised by all this, but films made up until about 1935 or so often had nudity, violence and plot elements that NEVER would have been allowed in later years.Oddly, the DVD version of this film offers BOTH the original American version and the German version that was made concurrently starring a German-speaking cast. In the early days of "talkies", some studios (such as MGM and Universal) often made duplicate movies by using the same sets at night after filming wrapped for the day! In some cases, they had Hollywood actors phonetically speak the lines in different languages (Laurel and Hardy made some of these--in which they spoke in Spanish along with Spanish co-stars). And, in others, an entirely new cast was used (such as with the Spanish language version of Dracula). In the case of Anna Christie, Greta Garbo made a German language version with all new co-stars that is supposedly better than the American version. HOWEVER, the DVD did include this German version but with absolutely no subtitles or dubbing! So, as long as you are willing to watch an entire movie in a language you don't understand or know German, it's a waste having it on the DVD. Why didn't they include English language captions?!? I would have loved to have seen it in this case, but am not willing to try to guess at what they are saying--my knowledge of the language just isn't good enough to understand everything that's being said!