Garbo talks. A fascinating cast and a convincingly murky atmosphere help overcome the primitive sound techniques that plague this stagy, somewhat preciously presented adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's famous if overrated play (first filmed in 1923 with Blanche Sweet and William Russell).





Garbo, the cinema's great silent sphinx, who first spoke in this film, plays the title role, a woman who flees the mean-spirited farm family her sailor father left her with and ends up a prostitute. Renouncing her profession, Garbo returns to her father (George F. Marion, Sr.), living on a broken-down barge as the film opens.





During a storm Garbo and Marion rescue an Irish sailor (Bickford) from drowning, and though Bickford soon falls for Garbo and proposes, she angrily exorcises all her past pain by revealing her background as a whore. Although Bickford abandons her at first, genuine love eventually reconciles the pair. The public fascination with the mysterious Garbo heightened Anna Christie's popularity.





Although critics and public alike were justifiably captivated by her husky, accented voice and famous delivery of her opening lines: "Gimme a viskey, ginger ale on the side ... and don't be stingy, baby!" parts of her performance are exaggerated, reminiscent more of off-key silent-screen posturing than the equally intense but refined technique she would soon master.





The sometimes mugging Dressler, on the other hand, in the star-making role of the aging wharf rat who commiserates with Garbo throughout the film, steals every scene she appears in and manages to convey both touching pathos and a rich humanity.





Much of the film's creakiness is due to the cumbersome sound equipment that prevented director Clarence Brown from using his noise-making cameras freely. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for this film and "Romance", Garbo remade the film in German with Jacques Feyder (director of The Kiss, Garbo's last silent) and, reportedly, she liked Feyder's version better than Brown's, of which she said, "Isn't it terrible? Who ever saw Swedes act like that?"