Anna Christie
Tonight is not the 1930 Clarence Brown/Greta Garbo sound version or even the Jacques Feyder/Garbo version made for Germany; it is the initial film version starring Blanche Sweet, released on the heels of Eugene O'Neill's Broadway production, and quite faithful to the stage play. In fact it is the “one film version of his plays that Eugene O'Neill called ‘...a delightful surprise...remarkably well acted and directed, and in spirit an absolutely faithful transcript.'” -Eileen Bowser, The New York Times, June 15, 1978.
“The broad acting is very much in keeping with the heightened emotions of O'Neill's melodrama and contemporary reviews stressed this authenticity and the problems that regional censors might have with the film. Blanche Sweet successfully melded her role as a classic silent screen heroine with O'Neill's overtly melancholy imagination.” -The Museum of Modern Art.
It is thanks to The Museum of Modern Art, Blanche Sweet, and FIAF (The Federation of International Film Archives, numbering 58 affiliates in 45 countries), that this long-lost American film was found. There were rumors that prints of Anna Christie existed in eastern Europe, and as Eileen Bowser, Film Archivist of the Museum of Modern Art, relates the story of its discovery, “it was not until the FIAF Congress held in New York in 1969 that Blanche Sweet was able to beseech the film archivists she met (there) about her lost film. The delegate from Yugoslavia believed that his archive held a copy.” We are happy to say that the Eugene O'Neill Foundation has now acquired a print for its collection at Tao House in Danville.