DVD review from The Movie Snob

Anna Christie (C-). Entertainment Weekly alerted me that a big collection of Greta Garbo movies was being released in a new DVD boxed set, and Sam's Club made that boxed set affordable. Last night I figured out which was the shortest one and threw it into the player. It happened to be this, Garbo's first talking motion picture. Frankly, it's not very good. The audio quality is so bad that I finally gave up and turned on the English subtitles after about ten minutes. All of the acting is way over the top, which is perhaps to be expected from actors used to performing in silent movies. And the movie is adapted from a Eugene O'Neill play, and it has a very static, stagy feel to it. Anyway, the idea is this: at first we meet Chris Christopherson, a drunken old sailor in New York City. He gets a letter from his 20-year-old daughter Anna, whom he hasn't seen in 15 years because he left her and her mother with relatives on a farm in Minnesota. She's coming to see him, so he hurries off to get sobered up. Anna (Garbo) then arrives at the same bar and pours out her tragic story to an old barfly--her mother died years ago, she was raped by one of her cousins, and she has come to NYC after spending time in jail for prostitution. She conceals her sad past from her father, and from the good-hearted Irish sailor that she later meets and falls in love with. But can she keep her secret buried forever? I hope the other movies in the collection are better.