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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 19368
Released: September 6, 2005 |
| Our Price: $4.88 |
| Used Price: $4.18 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
To escape the burdens of rule, Sweden's Queen Christina rides into the countryside disguised as a boy. There she meets and secretly falls for a dashing Spanish envoy on his way to the royal court. Imagine the envoy's delighted surprise when he and the young "nobleman" must share a bed at an overcrowded inn. Greta Garbo gives a luminous performance in this lavish costume drama, starring with her one-time off-screen fiance John Gilbert and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. "It had been so enchanting to be a woman, not a queen. Just a woman in a man's arms," Christina murmurs to her lover when her true identity is revealed. But she knows her people will not accept her marriage to a foreigner. Torn between her duty and her heart, she must make a fateful decision.
Description of Queen Christina:
Arguably Greta Garbo's best MGM movie--depending how you feel about Camille and Ninotchka--this tale of the 17th-century Swedish monarch who preferred men's togs to gowns plays the most provocative games with the great star's ambisexual personality. At her request, Rouben Mamoulian directed (all three Garbo's-best-movie candidates were done by the best directors she worked with: Mamoulian, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch). Two sequences are legendary: Christina memorizing the room at a snowbound inn where she has first experienced love; and the long, concluding closeup of a queen become ship's-figurehead--as blank as a tabula rasa, and filled with all the meaning and emotion seven decades of audiences have chosen to see there. Those scenes are anthology pieces, but unlike most Garbo pictures, the whole movie is intelligently scripted and sustained. With Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, and John Gilbert--Garbo's premier silent-era costar--making a tentative comeback as her love interest. --Richard T. Jameson
Queen Christina Reviews:
KING Christina 
2009-07-07 - Set in the 1600s, Rouben Mamoulian's QUEEN CHRISTINA is considered by many to be Greta Garbo's best film. It is if one accepts this as a total work of fiction, perhaps.
The real Christina was mistaken for a boy at birth, and when this error was discovered was still raised as a son and called "prince." She had her father's homely looks and was proficient in such manly activities as horseback riding, fencing and shooting. Crowned "king" at age six, Christina's education was tailored for a male royal, with tutoring in religion, philosophy, Greek and Latin. Her teachers said she had a male temperament.
Christina's autobiography reveals she never wished to marry and that the usual concerns of women were foreign to her. Contemporaries believed her to be gay-- more likely Christina was transgendered. She courted beautiful women, wore a mixture of male and female attire, moved, spoke and behaved as a man, having many male comrades (not lovers).
After abdicating the throne at age 28 in favor of her cousin Charles, Christina traveled extensively for many years in France and Italy.
The movie version of this unusual royal gives only a couple of hints as to her gender identity and sexuality. The script instead chooses to center around a fictional love affair with a Spanish ambassador. It's well done but historically VERY unsatisfying. The real Christina was far more interesting than Garbo's. A great opportunity to tell her fascinating story was squandered in this pre-Code motion picture.
As for Greta Garbo, she was a fine actress with a hard, angular face that's especially noticeable in her portrayal of the manly Christina.
John Gilbert was often paired with Garbo in silent photoplays and he's with her here for the last time. Gilbert's acting career was not (as is claimed) destroyed by his voice --which was fine-- but from a severe case of alcoholism, plus quarrels with MGM directors and their bosses who then actively sabotaged him. He made one more movie after "Christina" and died in 1936 of an alcohol-induced heart attack. John Gilbert was 36 years old at time of death.
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Parenthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 10 viewer poll rating found at a film resource website.
(8.0) Queen Christina (1933) - Greta Garbo/John Gilbert/Ian Keith/Lewis Stone/Elizabeth Young/C. Aubrey Smith/Reginald Owen (uncredited: Akim Tamiroff/Tiny Sandford/Edward Gargan/Hooper Atchley)
Garbo's most sensitive screen performance
2009-05-24 - QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933) was the first movie which Greta Garbo made as part of a secret development deal with MGM studios. Other stars like Clark Gable had campaigned without success to head their own production units inside the MGM. When it became clear that Garbo wouldn't submit to the same rules and restrictions as other contract players, a deal was brokered so that she would continue--under a reduced workload--as one of MGM's most valuable box office attractions during the lean years of the Depression.
With a script tailored by good friend Salka Viertel and sensitive direction from Rouben Mamoulian (with whom she'd later have a torrid affair), QUEEN CHRISTINA is one of Garbo's most effective and personal films, the story of Sweden's legendary Queen Christina, a woman renowned for her affairs with both sexes. The character's bisexual leanings--painted so blatantly in Garbo's scenes with Elizabeth Young (as Christina's lady-in-waiting)--leave precious little doubt as to their true relationship.
QUEEN CHRISTINA also marked the end of Garbo's screen partnership with John Gilbert. Although the two had enjoyed a long-standing relationship off the screen (exploited to tremendous effect in such silent classics as "Love" and "Flesh and the Devil"), it had ended by the time that Gilbert played Don Antonio to Garbo's Christina. He sadly passed away three years after his performance.
Regarded by most as Garbo's greatest performance, QUEEN CHRISTINA deserves a place in every classic movie collection.
A Great Vehicle for Garbo
2008-01-27 - Garbo is Garbo here, and that's really all that needs to happen. She is splendid and it's worth sitting through this otherwise rather silly film to see her. Historically, it's not at all accurate but if you are more interestd in Hollywood glamour than reality, then this shouldn't bother you.
John Gilbert really does look awful, and it's very hard to imagine that anyone would fall instantly in love with him. But then it's even more difficult to believe that Garbo as Christina, dressed in man's clothes could convince anyone that she was a man. Maybe if they had removed her lipstick and eyeliner...but that's show business.
It's a great film for die hard Garbo fans who overlook all these flaws just to see her. Others, beware.
Maybe Garbo's best 
2007-06-23 - Many of the films of the great Greta Garbo are a trial because so often she was the luminous centre in absurd stories with unworthy costars. "Queen Christina" is one of the handful of films which rise to her level.
The films tells of the abdication of Christina of Sweden when she fell in love with a Spanish nobleman. The film starts slowly and not very well establishing Christina's persona as a peace maker surrounded by a court of ambitious war mongers. When it shifts into romance and the usual problem of royalty in films, loyalty and responsibility to country versus personal needs, it improves immeasurably. Garbo is subjected to a barrage of close ups by the director Rouben Mamoulian but they are carefully placed and she survives magnificently, superbly conveying her changing emotions. The object of her love is John Gilbert, a giant silent screen star and ex-lover of Garbo, but here towards the end of his career. He is not completely convincing as a worthy object of her desires. He looks popeyed and weedy. The film has 2 very famous scenes - when Garbo "remembers", filmed to the rhythm of a metronome, the room where she and Gilbert slept together and the ending at the bow of the ship when her blank face is scrutinised and the audience fill in the blanks. The film is sumptuously made in the MGM manner and there is an excellent supporting cast, particularly C Aubrey Smith.
The film's print is dirty and obviously unrestored. There are no extras except the original trailer so if you want to learn more, you will have to purchase it in one of the Garbo Collections which contain documentaries.
Queen Christina
2007-06-21 - Mamoulian's film creaks a bit with some broad playing from secondary actors, but Garbo's luminosity more than makes up for it. She is not only ravishing, but her persona is tailor-made for the strong, mannish role of Christina. Former fiancé Gilbert is also fine as Antonio, which places the subsequent demise of this actor's career squarely at the feet of studio boss L.B. Mayer, who didn't like him. Ian Keith, Lewis Stone, and C. Aubrey Smith lend skilled support in this, one of the screen's crowning early biopics.
