Vivien Leigh or Greta Garbo: Who's the Best Screen Anna Karenina?

The Internet Movie Database includes 24 adaptations of Anna Karenina, the very long novel Leo Tolstoi wrote between 1873 and 1877. The Florida Grand Opera just closed its first season in Miami's new opera house with the première of David Carlson's third opera, with a libretto by Colin Graham. Along with its beautiful and dramatic music, the Carlson/Graham opera (the second "Anna Karenina" opera in English) is notable for following the novel in giving considerable attention to the Tolstoi figure (Levin) and his beloved (Kitty).

The two best-known screen adaptations--the 1935 one with Greta Garbo in the title role, directed by her favorite, Clarence Brown, with Basil Rathbone being cuckolded by Fredric March (as, respectively, Alexei Karenin and Count Vronsky) and the 1948 one with Vivien Leigh, directed by Julien Duvivier (best known for directing "Pépé le Moko") with Ralph Richardson and Kieron Moore as her husband and lover--pare down Levin's role. Both are showcases for tragic star turns by iconic figures.

The camera famously loved Greta Garbo--to such a degree that I've never been able to form an opinion on whether she could act. I'm not even sure that she was beautiful. Definitely, she was striking and suggested mysterious depths. Vivien Leigh's acting was often condescended to by critics as inferior to that of her husband, Laurence Olivier. Perhaps there was some merit to this invidious comparison on stage, but Leigh commanded the viewer's eye onscreen without the trickery and mannerisms Olivier had to employ to hold attention. In that her two Academy Award-winning performances were of considerably different characters (though both were Southern belles, which Leigh was not): Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind" (1939) and Blanche DuBois in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951, the next movie she made after her turn as Anna Karenina and one of only nine she made after GWTW).

Both versions dramatize the double standard in which a known adulteress is shunned by "polite" society, but in which her male partner continues to be welcomed and fidelity is not expected of men, only of women.