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Hollywood Classic Anna Karenina to Air Sunday

Mining through the rich collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society's library and archives and the WCFTR reveals a wealth of information about the film and its stars, Greta Garbo and Fredric March. Greta Garbo was a phlegmatic beauty from Sweden, Fredric March a smooth and skilled actor from Racine, Wisconsin, with a few years of the New York theater scene under his belt. The magic they make onscreen in "Anna Karenina" is tantalizing. As one critic described it, "The train pulls into the Moscow train station, a cloud of steam envelopes the exit of a first-class car and then a woman emerges from the cloud. The figure is aristocratic, the face is a vision. But it's the eyes that enthrall the viewer and Vronsky. ... Set in the face of classic structure were large, sad, luminous eyes that expressed a limited but intense emotional range."

But if producer David O. Selznick had had his way this version of "Anna Karenina" would never have been made at all. He was concerned that the film would be another of Garbo's expensive historical dramas and a box office disappointment. Fredric March even admitted that he was "fed up with doing costume pictures." Fortunately, Garbo prevailed and the film triumphed. The lead couple's expert acting, and the skill of director Clarence Brown (Garbo's favorite director) and cinematographer William Daniels (again, her favorite) resulted in a cinema classic.

Greta Garbo had played the role of Anna once before, in the silent film "Love" (1927, MGM). Vronsky was played by John Gilbert, her lover in real life, and the passion they displayed on screen shocked and delighted audiences around the world. In this film, however, the passion was purely theatrical. Garbo had left John Gilbert at the altar and retreated into herself, and Fredric March was happily married to actress Florence Eldridge. Years later he noted wryly, "Co-starring with Garbo hardly constituted an introduction."

The Fredric March Collection was the very first film and theater collection to be donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society. March championed the idea of a research collection that would document film, theater and television history, just as the Society's existing Mass Communications History Collections documented the history of advertising, broadcasting and public relations. Several years later, in 1960, under the guidance of archivist Barbara Kaiser and University of Wisconsin-Madison theater professor Robert Hethman, WCFTR was born.

Fredric March's long and distinguished career is documented in his own collection, and in papers donated by the Wisconsin Players (the UW-Madison dramatics club where he discovered his love of the stage.) March graduated from the university with a degree in economics and did a stint as a banker in New York City. Thanks to the Theatre Guild and fellow Wisconsin actor Alfred Lunt (whose papers are also held at Society) banking's loss was performing arts' gain. March's collection contains many annotated scripts which provide remarkable insight into the actor's craft.

Greta Garbo's later career is documented in the collection of producer Walter Wanger. In 1949, almost 10 years after her final film, "Two-Faced Woman" (1941, MGM), with a screenplay written by WCFTR donor S. N. Behrman, Garbo agreed to do a screen test for Walter Wanger, hoping to star in a costume drama titled "The Duchess of Langeais." The film was never made, but the sole copy of that screen test exists in the collections of the WCFTR.

:: Posted September 19, 2005