The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Garbo had retired long before I became a cinema-goer but I heard about her all my life and eventually I caught the odd performance - Queen Christina and Grand Hotel spring to mind - on TV and saw for myself what all the fuss was about. As a Billy Wilder fan I watched Ninotchka over and over but that was about it until this week when I bought a boxed set of six of her talkies. This, of course, was the first one, produced right at the dawn of Sound in 1930 with all the attendant problems connected with new technology and yes, it is static and yes, it is an obvious stage play adapted crudely for the screen but above and beyond this is GARBO, a towering presence, the personification of charisma and yes, she does render everything else inconsequential. O'Neill didn't do happy endings so it's not the faithful adaptation of his Pulitzer prize-winner that it might have been but here again Garbo makes that academic.

This movie is a toned-down adaptation of the play by Eugene O'Neill. The main problem with the movie is the portrayal of Anna Christie. In the play, Anna Christie is a whore. She is explicitly described as being as such. This point is crucial to the story. Yet, when Greta Garbo enters the movie, her attire is anything but garish. She simply does not look like a hard-bitten street-walker. As for Greta Garbo, she is absolutely beautiful. She is the star of the movie. She is exquisite and her performance is superb. Marie Dressler's performance is wonderful too. As far the male actors, their acting is stagy and hammy. This movie is definitely dominated by the female performers and it is because of them that this movie is watchable. Nevertheless, by toning down the dialogue, the movie loses the dramatic power of the play, and although the movie is good, if it had stayed true to the original story, it could have been great.

This is Garbo's first ever talking role but she acts as if she has done nothing else before.What makes the movie however hard and also sort of unpleasant to watch is it's storytelling. The movie is set up like a stage-play, so most of the time the characters just sit around and talk. All we see in the first 30 minutes for instance are characters being drunk and complaining a lot about life. The movie is of course also based on a stage-play, so no great wonder that the storytelling in this movie also feels like one. But if I want to watch something like this I would to to the theater. There are of course some good stage-play to movies translations but I guess that back in 1930 they didn't had a real good idea yet or the experience to translate a stage-play well to the silver-screen. The movie is now instead a sort of a bore in parts, since its obviously dragging at moments. The movie is also of course very limited in its settings and the movie often jumps from the one setting to the other, as if the curtain had dropped and a new set had been build-up during the break. The movie just never really feels as one big whole and it instead feels as if it consists out of different acts. It's a very static movie.It's not just only a hard movie to follow because of its storytelling and settings but also because of all of the heavy accents of the actors. On top of that, the sound recording quality of course wasn't that good yet back in 1930 so not everything that is being said is understandable.Also the picture quality of the movie isn't that good anymore. Time hasn't been kind on it. The image is sort of fuzzy in parts and the movie is perhaps more gray than truly black & white.It is definitely true that the movie gets better and better when it heads toward its ending but it didn't made me forget it's way weaker first 30 minutes and disjointed storytelling in the movie overall.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

The most famous thing about this movie is that this was the first time Garbo talked in a motion picture. Aside from that 'milestone' (if you want to call it that) this is a movie that doesn't go beyond creaky melodrama, with Garbo trying her best not to fall asleep.The plot involves Greta Garbo returning to her Father after 15 years abroad. Her father, who is a captain on a barge, is happy to see her, even though she's acting a bit cagey. She soon falls in love with a grizzled seaman, who also notices that something, a barrier if you will, is holding her back.Anyways, the two fellows don't particularly like each other and soon come to blows over Garbo, when she diffuses the situation by revealing her Big Secret which is no surprise to us, if you've read the video box (damn you MGM!!) Garbo is nothing but arms in this movie, she acts and acts flailing her arms about, and gets grating quickly. The two male leads are alright. Probably the best performance comes from the classic silent actress Marie Dressler, who plays the drunken captain's even drunker girlfriend. What a performance! It's too bad the tagline couldn't have read, "Dressler Talks!"