(Edmund Goulding, US 1927, 82 min.)
Greta Garbo and John Gilbert star in this tale of a woman who leaves a cruel marriage for her lover but who still wishes to be with her son. Based upon Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, this later proved to be the only film that the great actress remade — to lesser poetic effect — in the sound period. After the screening, a look at Love’s alternate ending. Live piano by Phillip C. Carli.
Program Notes
1927, a significant year in film history, is popularly conceived as a landmark which signified the transition of cinema from silent to sound with the advent of the The Jazz Singer. Though Donald Crafton argued The Jazz Singer’s reputation might not justify it as the single film which established the new direction to talkies, it is clear that its enormous box-office success made it stand out as one of the most important films during the transitional period. Edmund Goulding’s Love was released that same year in 1927. Starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, Love was even more popular at the box-office than The Jazz Singer.
What stimulated its popularity? The widely publicized romance between the glamorous Gilbert and the mysterious Garbo was undoubtedly one major factor. Gilbert, one of the leading male stars of the silent screen, was acclaimed as the great lover; dynamic, vigorous and reckless. By 1926, he was paid $10,000 a week by MGM. Garbo, a newcomer from Sweden to Hollywood, had only appeared in two silent films by MGM, and her weekly salary was only $600. When the two stars started production on Flesh and the Devil, they fell in love. Their romance fed into the press and ignited the success of Flesh and the Devil. After the film, Garbo was a certifiable celebrity. With Gilbert’s support, Garbo went on a strike after Flesh and the Devil was completed and won herself a better salary. When Love was released, the original title of Anna Karenina was cleverly changed by MGM so that the advertisements could read “Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Love.” Whether the two were really in love or not, the duet of Garbo and Gilbert brought about phenomenal attention for the film and won praise from the press. Motion Picture magazine concluded that “With the start they’ve got, Miss Garbo and Mr. Gilbert are in a fair way to become the biggest box office mixed team this country has yet known.”
Love, starring Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina, was adapted from the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It was Greta Garbo’s unforgettable performance that contributed to the success of Love. Anna Karenina is one of the most adapted novels of all time, and in the silent era alone, there were six renditions of the story adapted for the screen. Around the world, the story has been adapted for film in Russia (and later in U.S.S.R.), Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Austria, India, Argentina, United Arab Republic, and the United States. For Love, Garbo delivered one of her best performances – one that “outshines any other performance she has given on the screen,” according to the New York Times. Her performance was so mesmerizing that the Times commented, “her singularly fine acting as Anna held the audience in unusual silence…” Garbo loved playing the part of Karenina, and she requested a remake of the story in the sound era, hence the 1935 MGM sound version, Anna Karenina. For this second version, Garbo was presented with the New York Film Critics Circle’s first annual award as Best Actress.
Love has two alternate endings – one was specially arranged for the European audience and the other for the American audience. Certainly, one of the two endings paid tribute to the original novel and its social reflection, while the other ending was tailored for the prevailing tastes of American audiences.
~Wang Ying, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
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