Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Anna Christie
A woman comes back to the father who sent her away as a child, and finds he has made a saint of her.
MGM sold it on two words, "Garbo talks!", and then made the audience wait for them: she arrives in a waterfront saloon well into the picture and orders whiskey, ginger ale on the side. Frances Marion kept the bones of O'Neill's play. George F. Marion repeats the old barge captain he played on Broadway, and Marie Dressler, as the drinker Marthy, all but takes the film; Min and Bill, also on this channel, followed within the year. Charles Bickford is the stoker who wants to marry the woman he has imagined. Watch Garbo listen while the two men decide what she is.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Clarence Brown
- Photographed by
- William Daniels
- With
- Greta Garbo · Marie Dressler · Charles Bickford · George F. Marion · Lee Phelps
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Marie Dressler steals Anna Christie from Garbo in a supporting part, and before the year was out MGM gave her a waterfront picture of her own. The same fog, the same bottle, a different woman at the centre.