Customer Reviews

Queen Christina

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4 star:		(10)
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before i bought this movie i was told that it is nothing but garbo, garbo, garbo, i was not disappointed!

its opening holds back the swedish sphinx for siveral minutes, opening with a beautiful close up of that irresistable furrowed brow. from there is is a tour-de-force for her, her two famous scenes, the touching scene and her final close-up which holds a special place in the hollywood archives.

also i was forewarned about john gilbert, his acting voice-totally miscast. i disagree. i liked him in the part, okay he over acts in places, but hey-he and garbo re create that charismatic chemistry that explodes in "LOve" and "Flesh and the devil", also it made me sad to think this was his last, sadly dying not long afterwards.

i was disappointed in two things which are muffed over by the garbo vehicle, the extras and the music.

somehow i dont think Swedish peasants had a stong clear american tinted voice, such as the opening "I used to be king of Sweden".

The music is brutish in the "touching scene". it gives the lovely sequence an almost comic aspect, best to mute your tv while it is on, garbo needs not say a thing to be heard.

What makes this exciting is that it is the only scene that i see her cry, when Gilbert dies in her arms, she buries her head, raised it with a tint of a tear in each, she leans over him as if to kiss him, instead covers passionately his face with a cover, and proceeds into the greatest final close-up i have ever seen, the scene switching from her walking towards the bow, the sailors shouting as they proceed to sail, her touching the bow, the wind blown sails, and slowly the camera finds those haunting eyes-magnificent!

In my view Garbo's greatest film, and her most personal. Among my other favorites are Camille and Ninotchka, but Queen Christina is her stand-out classic above all others. I have read that Garbo was personally exicted by and involved in this production to an extent unparalled for her, motivated by the Swedish (her homeland) history and the opportunity to play one of history's most enigmatic figures, the queen who "abdicated her throne for love" (though this portrayal is, of course, largely "Hollywoodized"--you can probably throw most expectations of historical accuracy out the window, just set back and behold).
Here is every aspect of the legendary Garbo in one film: the breathtakingly beautiful woman, the amibiguous sexuality, the great tragienne, the aloofness, the boyish playfulness, the restless longing to escape any enforced tableaux or expectations of others and live her own life by her own terms, all things she had in common with Queen Christina. Here also is her warm, memorable final pairing with her former real-life amor and frequent co-star John Gilbert.
Two legendary scenes stand out: Garbo walking about, as if in a daze, memorizing the inn room in which she and Gilbert have just spent the night (a scene almost lost due to censors), and of course the final, unforgettable closeup, the greatest closeup in the history of cinema--simply stunning, as is the heartbreaking farewell to the dying Gilbert moments before. Not to be missed scenes also are Garbo running out of the castle into the bitter cold, rubbing snow in her face like a child, and the warm relationship with her elderly attendant, C. Aubrey Smith, who dotes on her like a daughter, combing her hair, tending to her every need with tender love and protectiveness. --One of the overlooked subtexts in the film is the parentless Christina's relationships with two major father figures, Lewis Milestone (another frequent co-star) as a palace official, who vehemently protests Christina's decision to step down from the throne, along with the personal attendant, C. Aubrey Smith, with his benevolent, Mark Twain face, caring for Christina in a motherly fashion, wanting only her happiness, wherever that takes her....
In life Garbo indeed appeared reclusive and aloof, though I suspect she was simply a very shy person who perhaps never fully comprehended what it was we all wanted from her. But here, in Queen Christina, actress and woman merge. Garbo opened up for us in a way she had never before and would never again, fully showing us both her great strength and acute vulnerability, and the result is spellbinding, a treasure forever, Garbo's gift to us all, and we are all the beneficiaries.

The gloriously beautiful and gifted Greta Garbo gives an alternately commanding and comedic performance as Sweden's cross-dressing monarch, Queen Christina. Christina falls in love with a Spanish ambassador, played by Garbo's real-life ex-beau, John Gilbert, and in doing so, changes the course of history.

This film has a dated artificial look to it. The sets LOOK LIKE SETS, and the action often feels stagy and claustrophobic, as if it were conducted on one of MGM's cumbersome sound stages (which it was).

However, "Queen Christina" is worth seeing because of the sheer pleasure that the ever effervescent Garbo generates through her skillful portrayal of the eccentric monarch. Garbo on screen never fails to captivate. She is often better than the movies she appears in.

See "Queen Christina" for the joy and artistry of Garbo's performance. You won't be disappointed.

Many film buffs agree that this film is the quintessential Garbo movie. The film was tailored especially for the star, and Garbo felt a certain spiritial affinity in playing a monarch of her homeland who lived from 1626-1689. To vintage-film TV watchers, this film is strangely obscure, yet this just might be Garbo's greatest performance (at least a close tie to CAMILLE) in her finest Hollywood film. Like the actress herself, her Christina inspires awe as much as adoration - it is a stunning performance, with her the closing shot being one of the most famed in the history of motion pictures. Salka Viertel, a friend of Garbo, tailored the part for her friend - (Garbo had spent 18 months vacationing in Sweden prior to filming this) - and her Christina is a fascinating, ambiguous, charismatic incarnation. The lustre of this production wasn't dimmed in the least by the equally romanticised albeit easily forgotton THE ABDICATION which starred Liv Ullmann in 1974. The movie owes a great deal of its taste and visual flair to its director, Rouben Mamoulian and the film isn't nearly as dated as one would suppose. The beautifully lit photography by William Daniels is excellent, the sets are eloquent and well-chosen supporting cast is first-rate. Twenty-six year-old Laurence Olivier was originally chosen to play Don Antonio, but he was replaced by John Gilbert, Garbo's former vis-a-vis, both on screen and off. This is his best-preserved sound performance; he would be dead at 38 three years later. QUEEN CHRISTINA met with widespread critical enthusiasm - as did Garbo's fine characterization of her countrywoman - but the film did not tickle the fancy of the hoi polloi during the depths of the depression, and it did badly and the box office, nor it win the awards it merited.

Greta Garbo is the reason to see this film. When she's on the screen you can't take your eyes off her. When she's not on screen you're wondering how long it will be until you see her again. Wow! They definitely don't make 'em like Garbo anymore! I could have done without John Gilbert who plays Garbo's Spanish lover. His bulging eyes get real old real fast. Some of the other "bit part" actors have a tendency to ham it up. Of course you don't believe for one second that Garbo could fool anyone by pretending to be a boy but that's a minor criticism. In conclusion, GARBO, GARBO, GARBO!

That's what it offers... glamour! The 1930s, that era of the Great Depression, had glamour figured out. Black-and-white cinematography somehow out-glamours color, the sound-stage painted backdrops of Sweden in winter out-glamour the most brilliant computer simulations of today, the langourous flow of sustained scripted scenes out-glamours the quick cuts and fades of current movie-making, and above all Greta Garbo out-glamours anyone in film history. Garbo was ineffably, soulfully gorgeous. Her acting skills, learned in the silent era, were more stagey than the current fashion approves, but she had magical presence on the screen. John Gilbert, the 'fading' silent star whom she demanded as her leading man in this production, was even stagier and perhaps campier in the role of the Spanish Ambassador for whom the Queen abandoned her throne, but he also had glamour, a Prince Charming presence. All in all, "Queen Christina" is a glamourous fairy tale, an operatic opening-night pageant of languid beauty.

The film "Queen Christina" is roughly as faithful to Swedish history as the film "Jaws" to the novel "Moby Dick". Hey, they were both about fish! If you want a factual biography of KING Christina Vasa, the most famous woman in 17th C Europe as well as perhaps the most interesting, you'll learn more from five minutes' reading on wikipedia. If you want a plausible depiction of events and society during the Thirty Years War, stick to the writings of Grimmelshausen and stay clear of Hollywood. The passionate love story at the heart of this film is pure invention. Christina's abdication was not an elopement, and it was just the beginning of the most compelling portions of her life. Her years as a girl King under the management of Axel Oxenstierna are in fact rather obscure, and her roughly eight-year reign as her own monarch was anything but successful. In reality, she bankrupted the regency by transfering most of her royal funds into the hands of the greedy nobility, resulting in a concentration of wealth and land-ownership that primed Sweden for centuries of maldistribution, exploitation of the peasantry, and stagnation. Swedish history, until the rise of the labor movement, was a laboratory for the failure of 'pure' capitalism, as absolutely nothing "trickled down". The truly important half of Christina's famous life took place in her years of exile in Italy and France, where she became arguably the greatest Patron of music of the Baroque era, yet music isn't mentioned in the film. Likewise she became easily the most prominent "convert" from Lutheranism to Catholicism; her prominence as a convert, indeed, was so great that her glaring unorthodoxy of belief and of lifestyle was beyond any correction that Papacy might have desired to impose. She was, in short, an 'untouchable' freethinker, an icon of independence for the boldest figures of the next generation. One could, with just a flare of hyperbole, call Christina the first "modern" woman.

But back to Garbo! There was an obvious motive for casting the Swedish actress, at the height of her fame, in the role of the Swedish monarch, aside from which the two women may well have had much in common. Garbo's voice, with her Swedish accent quite well modulated, was still a throaty alto, a voice that might have commanded male councilors, a sensuous but plainly masculine voice. Christina WAS raised, in effect, as a man; she did dress as a man at times, sit and walk like a man, dispense with niceties and proprieties like a man. Both Christina and Garbo have been plausibly 'identified' as bi-sexual in orientation. Christina was patently a woman of superior intellect, and one gets the impression that Garbo, who had virtually no school education, was a deep thinker by Hollywood norms. Possibly this similarity of 'being' was what enabled Garbo to occupy the role of Christina so fully. For my mother's generation, Garbo was Christina, and many soulful young beauties aspired to be Garbo.

Garbo is enchanting as Queen Christina in this moving film. The highlights are numerous, but notable among them is the scene where she undresses in the inn, to the surprise and delight of the Spanish envoy, Antonio. The next sequence is a curtained bed at the break of dawn. Hmmm, wonder what happened in between time? Another moving scene occurs as the queen addresses her subjects. Her consternation, coupled with love and agony, is both poignant and subtle as she speaks to her people "who are said to love [her], but do not wish [her] to be happy." The final shot is poetry in action, captured for the ages. The ship has set sail, and Garbo, st the stern, the wind rustling around her- she, who feels freedom and yet has tasted sorrow and despair, is framed like the Mona Lisa- subtle, sublime, sensuous- somewhere between the extremes of human passion, she becomes art- transfixed in a moment that shines above the commonplace and reaches for the extrodinary. Here she is at her pinnacle. Here is the moment- preserved and completed- never to be equaled or repeated. Buy it or miss the experience.

There was a brief time and place when the silent films had faded and talkies had begun, yet the people who survived the transition brought to the screen a sensitivity and level of emotion that has not been equaled since. Such is the value of Garbo's performance in "Queen Christina". Christina was Garbo's 8th talkie. Prior to this Garbo had been in nearly 20 silent films, starting as early as 1920. Her best known silent films were "Flesh and the Devil" (1926) which was directed by Clarence Brown, and "Love" (1927) in which she co-starred with John Gilbert. She was nominated 3 times for an Oscar ("Anna Christie", "Camille", and "Ninotchka") but never won. She is listed #5 on the AFI's list of Greatest Actresses.

John Gilbert co-stars, but his name appears in small print under the title. Quite a difference from the first time he and Garbo worked together. Their last film together had been in 1928 ("A Woman of Affairs") and in that time Garbo had become one of the top screen personalities and Gilbert's career had declined, partially due to his soured relationship with MGM head Louie Mayer. But Gilbert never managed to make the transition to talkies complete. Even in Queen Christina you'll find his performance and even his appearance to be more appropriate for the silent screen.

There are some talented actors in this film, though most of them are wasted. C. Aubrey Smith and Akim Tamariff play aides. Smith was a marvelous actor known for his roles as an aristocrat, though he plays an aide to Garbo here. He appeared in more than 100 films from 1915 to 1949. He gave us memorable roles in a host of films, including Major Hamilton in "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" (1935), Lord Capulet in "Romeo and Juliet" (1936), and Colonel Zapt in "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937). I remember him best as Col. Williams in "Wee Willie Winkie" (1937) with Shirley Temple.

Tamiroff is best remembered for his role as the Uncle Joe in Orson Welles "Touch of Evil" (1958) and twice was nominated for Best Supporting Actor ("For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "The General Died at Dawn"). He plays an aide to Gilbert. Does an adequate job, but his talents are wasted.

Lewis Stone plays Garbo's court adviser. He was a major star in the 20s and 30s and was nominated for an Oscar for "The Patriot" (1930). Between 1914 and 1953 he made more than 150 films; his memorable roles were as the warden in "The Big House" (1930), Doctor Otternschlag in "Grand Hotel" (1932), Commissioner Smith in "The Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932), and "Doc" in "Three Godfathers" (1936). He's probably best known for his continuing role as Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy films (1937-46).

Reginald Owen gives his usual good performance as Garbo's cousin and a military leader, but he's on screen far too little and barely says a word. He's best known as Ebenezer Scrooge from "A Christmas Carol" (1938) and made nearly 100 films including "Mary Poppins" (1964) and "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" (1971).

Rouben Mamoulian directs. Mamoulian made only 20 films, most of them in the 30s. Queen Christina was his 6th film. Prior to this he'd had success with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931) and Marlene Dietrich's "Song of Songs" (1933). Mamoulian was known for his agile camera work and this style is amply demonstrated throughout the film. Visually the film is a treat, although at times the narrative does lag.

Walter Wagner produced this lavish film, complete with many outdoor scenes. In Wagner's 34 year career he was responsible for more than 60 films, such as the Marx Brothers first talkie "Cocoanuts" (1929), Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street" (1945), Ingrid Bergman's "Joan of Arc" (1948), Susan Hayward's "I Want to Live" (1958), and Elizabeth Taylor's "Cleopatra" (1963). Cleopatra was his last film and the only one for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

Williams Daniels is the cinematographer. Garbo insisted he shoot all her films, which he did, except for 2 ("Conquest", "Two-faced Woman") which turned out to be flops at the box office. When not working with Garbo, Daniels was a favorite of Erich von Stroheim, who was Garbo's favorite director (even though she made 6 films with Brown). Daniels lensed more than 150 films. He was nominated 3 times ("Anna Christie", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "How the West was Won") and won once ("Naked City" in 1948).

The film received good reviews and was a box office hit. For Garbo fans it is certainly a must see and I think it's her best performance, although her presence in virtually every scene does get overpowering. The final shot is a long close up of Garbo's face. It took nearly 50 years for any actor to match the power of this final scene (Klaus Maria Brandauer in "Mephisto").

QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933) was the first movie which Greta Garbo made as part of a secret development deal with MGM studios. Other stars like Clark Gable had campaigned without success to head their own production units inside the MGM gates. When it became clear that Garbo wouldn't submit to the same rules and restrictions as other contract players, a deal was brokered so that she would continue--under a reduced workload--as one of MGM's most valuable box office attractions during the lean years of the Depression.

With a script tailored by good friend Salka Viertel and sensitive direction from Rouben Mamoulian (with whom she'd later have a torrid affair), QUEEN CHRISTINA is one of Garbo's most effective and personal films, the story of Sweden's legendary Queen Christina, a woman renowned for her affairs with both sexes. The character's bisexual leanings--painted so blatantly in Garbo's scenes with Elizabeth Young (as Christina's lady-in-waiting)--leave precious little doubt as to their true relationship.

QUEEN CHRISTINA also marked the end of Garbo's screen partnership with John Gilbert. Although the two had enjoyed a long-standing relationship off the screen (exploited to tremendous effect in such silent classics as "Love" and "Flesh and the Devil"), it had ended by the time that Gilbert played Don Antonio to Garbo's Christina. He sadly passed away three years after his performance.

Regarded by most as Garbo's greatest performance, QUEEN CHRISTINA deserves a place in every classic movie collection.

Mamoulian's film creaks a bit with some broad playing from secondary actors, but Garbo's luminosity more than makes up for it. She is not only ravishing, but her persona is tailor-made for the strong, mannish role of Christina. Former fiancé Gilbert is also fine as Antonio, which places the subsequent demise of this actor's career squarely at the feet of studio boss L.B. Mayer, who didn't like him. Ian Keith, Lewis Stone, and C. Aubrey Smith lend skilled support in this, one of the screen's crowning early biopics.