Queen Christina
by Rouben Mamoulian
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Elizabeth Young, Greta Garbo, Ian Keith, John Gilbert, Lewis StoneDirector: Rouben Mamoulian
Brand: GARBO,GRETA
Cinematographer: William H. Daniels
Producer: Walter Wanger
Writer: Ben Hecht
Writer: H.M. Harwood
Writer: Margaret P. Levino
Writer: S.N. Behrman
Writer: Salka Viertel
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-09-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Queen Christina
Movie Review: Glamour!
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Queen Christina
Unhappy at the thought of an arranged political marriage, the queen of Sweden is ready to give up everything when she falls in love with the Spanish ambassador.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 6-SEP-2005
Media Type: DVD
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