NEW REGENT

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1041, 4 August 1930, Page 15

NEW REGENT

“ANNA CHRISTIE” Perhaps one of the most momentous screen occasions of the past • few months is the showing at the Regent Theatre of Greta Garbo’s first all-talk-ing picture, “Anna Christie,” adapted from Eugene O’Neill’s famous play. That this gifted Swedish actress lias drawn to herself a tremendous following intensely interested in her work was proved by the hush which fell over the large audience as she spoke her first screen lines. “Gimme a whisky—ginger ale on th’ side —an’ don’t be stingy.” At first perusal of that sentence it seems hardly possible that Greta Garbo could have uttered it. at least not the Garbo that filmgoers have been accustomed to. a high-strung, tempestuous, society Garbo, a Garbo of adventure, a Garbo of affairs. Well, so far as “Anna Christie” is concerned that Garbo is dead. Instead we have a woman of a nameless world who. sick at heart, stumbles into a saloon on one of Now York’s old waterfront streets, looking for her father. And in the end when Anna learns that slip means everything not only to her father, but also to Matt, a sailor whom they havo saved from drowning, she finds herself at the start of a new life.

The Regent’s programme also includes a long list of interesting talking featurettes.