Julien Duvivier (1948)
The running time in the BFI programme was ‘to be confirmed’; the film they showed ran 111 minutes. It seems the print available was only recently unearthed and is half an hour short of the full movie: Wikipedia and IMDB agree that the original lasted 139 minutes. Perhaps as a result, a few things barely make sense. Michael Gough (in his cinema debut) is very striking as Konstantin Levin’s elder brother Nikolai but, as he’s on screen for around ten seconds and a couple of lines, it’s not clear who he is: he might as well just be one of the other workers on his brother’s land. The latter’s political idealism hardly registers at all. Even though a few days’ separation from her son Sergei is the reason for the heroine’s sad expression when we first see her face through the window of the train travelling from St Petersburg to Moscow, there’s not enough of Anna and Sergei to allow a viewer to understand how terrible it is for her to lose the boy to her husband when their marriage perishes. These important omissions make the length of time devoted to Anna’s sojourn in Venice with Vronsky all the more surprising, though the Venetian scenes are well enough done. But Julien Duvivier’s adaptation of Tolstoy – with a screenplay credited to himself, Jean Anouilh and Guy Morgan – is strong in conveying Anna’s inescapable passion for Vronsky and the inexorable closing off of the possibilities open to her. The picture’s odd rhythm in its second half may partly be the result of clumsy excisions but it actually helps to get across a sense of Anna’s life going round in ever-decreasing circles.
The shocking deaths of the novel are all interestingly translated to the screen. The accident in which a railway worker falls under a train on Anna’s arrival in Moscow happens matter-of-factly – but in a way that you can’t get out of your head. It really does seem to be the bad omen that Anna feels it be, and to presage her own end: that too is impressive, although of course more fully dramatised. In the cavalry officers’ steeplechase, in which Vronsky’s mare Frou-Frou is fatally injured, Duvivier concentrates on the spectators rather than the participants and this works well – Karenin’s determination to have the last word, in spite of his wife’s socially embarrassing preoccupation with Vronsky’s state of health after his horse has come down, has particular impact. Anna’s own humiliation at the opera in St Petersburg is also effectively done because the rejection by her social peers doesn’t take the form of serial cold shoulders but is focused on the couple in the neighbouring box – the husband talks to Anna at first and is then warned off by his wife. A seance at which Countess Betsy Tversky presides is very well staged: Duvivier juxtaposes the conversation among those at the table (and with the spirits) with what’s going on in the background between Anna and Vronsky – under what they assume to be cover of darkness but which the arriving Karenin can make out, as his eyes adjust to the lack of light in the room.
At first, it’s almost odd to hear Vivien Leigh with an English accent – it’s certainly a reminder that you think of her as Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche Dubois. Leigh’s playing of Anna may seem a little unvarying (particularly in the light of seeing her Scarlett, as I did, less than twenty-four hours later) but her characterisation has depth and she’s very convincing as someone who, from an early stage in the relationship with Vronsky, simply has no choice. Ralph Richardson makes a brilliant entrance as Karenin, meeting Anna on her return from Moscow. As Karenin first registers the threat of Vronsky, there’s a sudden look of true devastation in Richardson’s eyes – which is quickly absorbed as Karenin resolves to ignore it. Well aware that he bores his wife, Richardson’s Karenin is always determined to use his rectitude to justify himself and to keep the hurt Anna is causing him at bay. Kieron Moore’s Vronsky is relatively very weak and his accent bizarre – was he trying to disguise his Irishness? The effect is of someone trying to do an accent but not a particular accent and it makes no sense as virtually everyone else is RP English. Still, at least there’s an initial connection between Anna and Vronsky and, because Moore cuts a good enough figure in military uniform, he looks reduced in civvies, once Anna and Vronsky are living together, which seems right. It’s a pity that Hugh Dempster as Oblonsky and Niall MacGinnis as Levin look confusingly similar – like brothers rather than friends – because both are otherwise good; so is Martita Hunt as Countess Betsy. Although Sally Ann Howes is samey as Kitty and a few of the other performers are a bit awkward, the posh vowel sounds that are so often a problem in English films of the period are fine here, in the high society of Moscow and St Petersburg. Duvivier’s descriptions of social and household ritual are remarkably fresh, visually fluid and dynamic. The score by Constant Lambert is strong too and intelligently rationed. As a whole, the film isn’t cushioned by melodramatic conventions to assure the audience that it’s only a story – perhaps a main reason why it was a commercial failure.
22 November 2013
