The love triangle theme was a staple of the Garbo repertoire, and she played Tolstoy’s ill-fated Anna Karenina twice. In Brown’s 1935 version Garbo’s Anna rebels against Basil Rathbone as her imperious husband, Karenin, with Frederic March as the seductive and smitten officer Vronsky. Though the novel’s rich observations and characterizations are telescoped for the film, nineteenth-century St. Petersburg is lavishly detailed, and the plight of Anna and Vronsky skillfully linked to the decadent and hypocritical society in which they live.