Although Garbo had been at MGM for just two years, in which time she had only had two films released, she knew she was worth more than the $600 a week her current contract gave her. She had scored solid reviews and strong box office with her first two American films. As studio publicists raved about her torrid love scenes with John Gilbert in the still unreleased Flesh and the Devil, and gossip about their offscreen romance spread, her fan mail began to approach her leading man's 5,000 letters a week.
At Gilbert's urging -- they were living together at the time -- she campaigned for a new contract to start at $5,000 a week. Instead, studio head Louis B. Mayer simply informed her that she was to start work on an adaptation of Anna Karenina co-starring Ricardo Cortez and Lionel Barrymore and directed by Dmitri Buchowetsky. Only Garbo wouldn't report to work. Mayer put her on suspension, threatened to have her deported, threatened to replace her with a look-alike and even threatened to burn off her current contract with minor roles. But she just laughed him off, countering that if she had to she could stay in the U.S. by marrying Gilbert, whom Mayer hated.
Then MGM released Flesh and the Devil, which turned out to be Garbo's biggest hit to date. Realizing that he needed the independent star more than she needed him, Mayer finally agreed on a contract raising her salary to $2,000 a week, increasing to $4,000 the second year, $5,000 the third and $6,000 the fourth. And still it wasn't enough. The new contract wasn't supposed to kick in until Anna Karenina was completed, so Garbo got sick -- too sick to report to work for a month. And she won again, convincing Mayer to backdate the contract to the beginning of the year.
Conveniently, Garbo's return to work coincided with the completion of Gilbert's latest picture. With the tremendous box-office reaction to their teaming, Thalberg decided to replace Cortez with Gilbert. In addition, he brought on Edmund Goulding, already famous for his ability to showcase female stars, to direct. With the new team, Thalberg decided to change the film's title to something reflecting the star pairing. Someone suggested Heat, but that would have resulted in marquees reading "John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in Heat." Instead, he called the picture Love, using the tag line, "John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in Love....What more could be said about a picture -- see it."
And that's just what the public did. The film scored solidly at the box office, despite mixed notices. Most of the reviewers found the film rather one-sided, putting all the focus on Garbo at the expense of the other performers. This was tempered by their delight in Garbo's work. Mordaunt Hall in the New York Times said "Greta Garbo, the Swedish actress, outshines any other performance she has given on the screen" and called her "a blonde Mona Lisa." Variety used language that seems rather inappropriate today in light of what Garbo's career would become; they called her "the biggest skirt prospect now in pictures."
One element helping the film's box office was the addition of a happy ending that reunited Anna and Vronsky after her husband's death. At least it helped outside the major American cities, where this rather original take on Tolstoy's story played like gangbusters. For the major U.S. cities and Europe, however, the film kept the novel's original ending, with Garbo throwing herself in front of a train - the same ending that would be used when Garbo re-made the film, with Fredric March in the lead, in 1935. For this TCM presentation, both endings will be shown, giving viewers a chance to decide for themselves how Anna's tortured romance should have ended.
Producer & Director: Edmund Goulding
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lorna Moon
Titles: Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings
Based on the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Alexander Toluboff
Score: Howard Dietz, Walter Donaldson, Ernst Luz Principal Cast: Greta Garbo (Anna Karenina), John Gilbert (Vronsky), George Fawcett (Grand Duke), Emily Fitzroy (Grand Duchess), Brandon Hurst (Karenin), Philippe De Lacy (Serezha, the Child).
BW-83m.
by Frank Miller
