“That same year when The Flesh and the Devil was shot MGM, wanting to exploit the romantic feeling between Garbo and John Gilbert which already filled Hollywood news, plunged the two actors in a very soft version of Anna Karenina, directed by Edmund Goulding, with the title of Love (such generic title was chosen in order to advertise the movie with the headline: Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Love). For Garbo the meeting with Anna seems both natural and necessary: the perfect literary icon of romantic self-destruction finds the face and the body which for a sort of deep genetic affinity will be able to give back every light, every shadow, every shiver of her abandonment and her desperation. Instead and quite surprisingly the studio decided to give the story a softer turn, to tame her wildness. Goulding’s film extends the happiness of Anna and Vronsky, lulled by their scenes of bucolic love among the trees, in their shining white clothes, in the embraces that Goulding and Daniels study in a perfect balance of chiaroscuro. Then the scene of solitude, Garbo’s now slender body at the centre of cold luxury, her encounter with Vronsky reflected by a large mirror, when both seem already ghosts and their passion a shadow oppressing her. But even leaving aside the absurd ending of many prints still circulating (Anna and Vronsky happily reunited after Karenin’s demise), the first Anna Karenina, more sensual and less stylised than the subsequent version directed by Clarence Brown, does take away from Garbo that fate which was hers by right: and it would make of her final suicide a sort of pure sacrifice, and not the dark, passionate surrender at the closing of desire, not her relinquishment to what should be expected lurking behond the principle of pleasure (and Garbo seems to have known it always)”.

Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n. 10, 1997