Reviews from 1928: Motion Picture Magazine, Photoplay and Picture Play

Very interesting reads...

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LOVE

starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert

MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE

March, 1928

This is a pretty bad movie. It would have been pretty bad anyway, but posing as an adaptation of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" it is especially offending. The bare outline of the story can be traced to Tolstoy - the tale of the lady who loves her lover a good deal but her baby son a little more - but beyond that there is no similarity. Lovers of Tolstoy will be disappointed. Those who like to study the Gilbert-Garbo embraces will be disappointed. In fact, the only people who won't be disappointed are those who, like myself, have always thought of Greta Garbo merely as the only woman in pictures who dresses worse than Alice Terry. Because Greta is surprising, and her grace and beauty and fine acting make a cheap, melodramatic picture into something at least interesting, if not good. I recommend it solely that you may see what she was able to do with little help from the script, the director or John Gilbert.

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LOVE

starring John Gilbert and Greta Garbo

PHOTOPLAY

November, 1927

"Love" is right. The original title of "Anna Karenina" would have been wrong. It isn't Tolstoi, but it is John Gilbert and Greta Garbo which, after "Flesh and the Devil," is what the "fans" are crying for. Tolstoi's devastating analysis of the tragedy of illicit love is almost completely made over into the recounting of a love affair between a desirable woman and a desiring man, beautifully presented and magnetically acted.

You will have tremendous sympathy for Anna and Aleksei Vronsky, two honorable persons who are the victims of an anti-social force. Even in the new set of circumstances invented for them by Frances Marion, there is something of the original strength of their characters. And Anna throws herself under the grinding wheels of a train at the end, thereby risking an unhappy ending as one little concession to Tolstoi, the censors and those who love the novel. But if you think that the finer side of the book - the romance of Kitty and Kostia Levin - is even hinted at, you are nothing but a silly. The movie has separated the wheat of sex from the chaff of preachment.

And so the film comes to us as a glamorous and picturesque romance, untroubled by stern moralizing and flecked by comedy generously presented to Tolstoi in the person of George Fawcett as a Grand Duke.
Credit Gilbert with a double assist. Not only does he give a great performance, but he assisted Edmund Goulding in the direction. Greta Garbo is beautiful and touching. Brandan Hurst, as Karenine, also gets in on the glory.

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LOVE
starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert
PICTURE PLAY
March, 1928

Any picture which brings forth John Gilbert and Greta Garbo is important to many, however unimportant the picture itself may be. Paradoxically, "Love" is just that. "Man, Woman, and Sin," reviewed elsewhere in this department, is a far worthier picture, but I shall not expect many to agree with me. So let us to "Love."

In the first place, it is based on Tolstoi's novel "Anna Karenina," but the basis is slight enough to have warranted giving the picture a name in keeping with what people expect of a Gilbert-Garbo romanza. For example, in the novel, Vronsky - the character played by Mr. Gilbert - kicks his horse! And Vronsky is only one of many loves encountered by Anna in her insatiable quest of the absolute.

Now, neither of these details would ever do in a screen hero and heroine, so Vronsky does not punish his horse for throwing him in the steeplechase, and Anna casts her slumberous eyes on no other gentleman. In the novel, she throws herself in front of a locomotive in despair, because all her experiments with love have left her unrequited. But in the picture she sacrifices her life to bring about Vronsky's reinstatement in his regiment. But the characters, as I see them, are unsympathetic, and the story, a Russianized "East Lynne," trite and unimaginative, in spite of the glamour of a superb production and the indisputably greater glamour of Mr. Gilbert and Miss Garbo.

In the first place, the screen has shown us a multitude of other ladies who have cast home, husband, and child aside in order to run off for a holiday in the country with a younger and handsomer man. Usually, pains have been taken to justify such rashly importunate conduct. In "Love," there is no justification. The only fault I could find in Anna's husband was a poor complexion, which should have been more than overbalanced by Phillipe de Lacy as her child. The mother who could desert such an offspring - wouldn't you say she deserved to be run over by a train?

Of course, the subtitles and the actors would have us believe that the high blood pressure that took possession of Vronsky and Anna at first sight was of such intensity that it sublimated their emotions into a great love - a love great enough to make selfishness heroic and the elopers sympathetic people with the courage of their convictions, rather than cowardly weaklings like the majority of humanity who don't elope.

All of which is by way of saying that "Love" is false. Not false to lie, because impetuous lovers do persuade wives to forget their vows, but false in attempting to romanticize ignoble characters by fine acting, luxurious settings and sensuous atmosphere, when the same story, if transpiring in the suburbs or the slums, would bring down the wrath of picturegoers because of its sordidness - that is, if the roles had not in the first place been rejected by the players as harmful to their reputations.

Now that the end of my tirade is reached, it is only fair to say that Mr. Gilbert and Miss Garbo do succeed in making romantic figures of Vronsky and Anna, that Edmund Goulding has achieved all the luxury, glamour, and sensuousness he strove to capture - and that "Love" remains at best a superficial and unsatisfying picture. But who am I to say that superficial pictures don't pay?