Greta Garbo’s Queen Christina Yearns to Break Free
Note: This is the hundred-and-seventy-third in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my third favorite 1933 film, QUEEN CHRISTINA, directed by Rouben Mamoulian.
QUEEN CHRISTINA is high camp. The intensely revisionist biopic costume drama from director Rouben Mamoulian, theater veteran and the ironic savior of early creaky talkies with his fluid camera, stars Greta Garbo in her best performance yet…at the very least, in sound. It also reunites her, recalling their superstar silent pairings, with John Gilbert. QUEEN CHRISTINA, among even earlier sound films of his, puts the lie to the myth that Gilbert’s voice couldn’t cut it in the new era. And ultimately, the movie is an incredibly flamboyant yet somehow understatedly sensual experience that depicts a woman aching to escape her conditions…even if those conditions are the apparently attractive “trappings” of being queen of Sweden.
QUEEN CHRISTINA is very clearly divided into three acts at a time when many films ran 70 minutes and didn’t totally adhere to current perceptions of a neat and tidy ending. This 99-minute-long movie starts out with Christina’s father, Gustavus, dying in battle, on a set that is reminiscent of the then-current design of World War I pictures. We briefly see Christina as a girl of six and then as a grown woman, somewhat cold yet attuned to the desire to bring peace to her country while what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War was raging. It is in these moments that I was struck by how much of QUEEN CHRISTINA, its beginning at least, could serve as an allegory arguing for pacifism, informed by the relatively recent experience of World War I.
From the smoky battlefield scene that opens the film to Christina’s call for peace to end a senseless war based on national boundaries that ignore the regular people who live within them, Mamoulian, writers H.M. Harwood and Salka Vierte, and dialogist S.N. Behrman seem to be creating a film that will make broader political points at first. Vierte was an intellectual later accused of being a communist, and may have been a “fellow traveler,” and Mamoulian was himself blacklisted for his unionizing views; these facets of these individuals does not inherently indicate an opinion on war and the “War to End All Wars,” but their progressivism is indeed noted in the film’s first act.
Although an immediately apparent cheese prevents QUEEN CHRISTINA from feeling like a fiery polemic, by design from, if not all involved, then certainly its studio MGM, its title character’s idealism is palpable and humanistic. Complementing this characterization is Behrman’s Romantic dialogue, which serves up lines like “Peace I will have!” from Garbo’s character before transitioning into lower-case “r” romanticism. But this transition doesn’t suddenly debase the ambition of QUEEN CHRISTINA.
Christina yearns to break free from the designs of her court, from the well-meaning yet strictly patriarchal figure of her chancellor (MGM stalwart Lewis Stone) to the scheming of former lover and treasurer Count Magnus (Ian Keith). And so she does, with the help of valet Aagus, played by C. Aubrey Smith with a “character actor” aplomb that makes the character immensely likable and sympathetic, culminating in his glycerin-formed tears running down his face in one of QUEEN CHRISTINA’s climactic moments. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This desire to break free instigates the film’s second act, in which Christina and Aagus journey out into the snow, meeting the Spanish envoy Antonio (Gilbert) as he gets stuck in the snow. This “meet cute” has a homoerotic overtone that will only be deepened as all involved in the Spanish delegation believe Christina to be a man, as she is dressed in men’s clothing and has an apparently masculine demeanor.
Now is a good time to address the sexual “politics,” as it were, of QUEEN CHRISTINA. The real Christina of Sweden has had many historiographies painted of her lesbianism, bisexuality, androgyny, etc., and whatever the reality, her figure has become one of unconventional gender and sexual presentation. Garbo is not made up to be nearly as ambiguous, although of course one’s internal identity is not always represented on the outside, especially in repressive conditions; still, there is some suspension of disbelief required to fall in with Antonio and Co.’s understanding that Christina is actually a man in the standards of the time. Much has been made of Christina’s impassioned correspondence with intimate friend Countess Ebba Sparre (played by Elizabeth Young in this film), represented mostly in QUEEN CHRISTINA by heterosexual, chaste kisses and friendliness. I say “mostly” because there is certainly an interpretation of sexual “deviance” of the Pre-Code era to be found in a more masculine-dressed Garbo kissing her feminine friend with her hands holding the other’s head.
In any event, this gay thread is certainly marginalized in the face of a similarly scandalous ideal: a multi-day, pre-marital fuckfest, for lack of a better and more tasteful word. You see, Christina and Antonio meet at the nearest countryside inn, where the queen, still posing as a minor male lord, has landed the last room in the house. Antonio turns off his irked Spanish disdain for the snowy Sweden to enter into chummy conversation with who he thinks to be a fellow nobleman and the pair ultimately decide to share the room together. There is a homoerotic tension building throughout this scene that is hard to ignore, and even when Christina finally reveals her female form through underclothes to Antonio, and he says he knew there was a deeper connection between them, one has to appreciate the complicated sexual politics of a 1933 film portraying two leads with essentially unconventional relations with the same gender.
Once the deception is up, Christina and Antonio spend a few snowed-in days at the inn, hidden within the curtains of a four-post bed, even as attendants wonder at the “closeness” of these suddenly fast “male” friends. Even as Christina has revealed her identity to Antonio, she has not revealed her status, and so when she wanders the room, touching and staring at the various items and decorations to remember the room forever, we feel her reluctance to return to a world where Antonio will be an official guest and she will be a queen pressed to marry her cousin and war hero Charles (Reginald Owen).
But return they must, and when the jig is up as the film enters its third act and Antonio gapes at who turns out to be the Queen of Sweden, none other than the woman he came to know intimately at a snowy roadside inn, I can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. It is not a laugh at the expense of the two lovers, but instead at the circumstance of birth and location that leads one to become an exalted ruler, duty-bound yet ultimately privileged beyond compare. But as Christina’s strength of character reveals, that privilege is not the ultimate lifelong ideal.
Count Magnus, jealous of Antonio, stirs up anti-foreign sentiment among the “common folk,” another jolt of political reality from the director-writing team. The pressure, plus what is essentially an imprisonment of Antonio, brings Christina to send the diplomat home (who by the way, in an ironic reveal, was sent to Sweden to propose marriage between the queen and his king). Before he goes, Antonio arranges a duel with Magnus in neutral territory even as, as is revealed, Christina informs him of her intent to abdicate and join him at, as Antonio later puts it, the “isle of the moon, population two.”
But QUEEN CHRISTINA is a film starring Garbo, and in a tragic twist of fate, Antonio is defeated by Magnus and killed. The great restraint of Mamoulian of leaving this dueling action unresolved in the moment, and showing Christina’s discovery of his failing body on board the ship on which they were to sail off into happiness together, is a masterstroke and leads into the tear-jerking final shot of Garbo staring off into the distance at the prow of the ship, backed by dramatic choral music that should stir the soul.
All this plot summary, which I hope was injected with enough of my reading of the film’s significance, does not really communicate the subtlety of Garbo’s performance. Not since THE SAGA OF GOSTA BERLING (1924), indeed Garbo’s first film, was I so affected by the legendary star’s glances, sadness, and general tragic mien. Her quiet moments are just as often matched by the somewhat outdated bold statements for peace, abdication, the need to escape the court, etc., but Gilbert similarly occupies a character who, in one moment, talks too much, and in an other, calmly regards the object of his affection with love and a simple line like “I understand.” It’s a great tragedy that Gilbert would die only three years later, but also, that he was not recognized for his potential in the sound medium and his role in the success of QUEEN CHRISTINA.
QUEEN CHRISTINA is visually grounded in expansive sets and costumes that communicate an idealized version of the period even as they ground it in a kind of austere, Protestant sensibility. The images of the snowbound inn perfectly complement Christina’s desire to retain the space in her mind (I want to remember it too!) and later serve as the painful reminder of what could have been as Garbo stares out over the ocean. William H. Daniels, as cinematographer and the man who worked with Garbo the most, arranges so many delicious scenes with dramatic yet soft lighting that I often turn into the Leo meme from ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) pointing at the screen and uttering “that’s a good shot.”
It’s a wonderful thing to feel the palpable weight of a director’s orchestration of elements like performances, set design, cinematography, music, and more while experiencing each of those factors without the baggage of extreme showmanship that calls attention to itself. In that, QUEEN CHRISTINA and Mamoulian fit into 1933 as a year of the elevation of Classic Hollywood artifice, a year in which other filmmakers like John Ford and George Cukor were fundamentally evolving the images and language that would define the decade and beyond.
Just as its makers were fomenting the full-fledged escape from the creakiness of early talkies, QUEEN CHRISTINA’s depiction of its titular monarch’s struggle to just live, and not exist as just an executor of duty, is breathtaking and laden with significance. Christina stretches, and in some cases breaks, the boundaries of royalty, governance, sexuality, intimacy, and more, and spearheading the period piece Pre-Code revolution is Garbo, a figure who had already defied contemporary stardom expectations and who would baffle studio moneymakers and fans alike when she would later exit the industry to exist privately for about five decades. QUEEN CHRISTINA’s most obvious revisionism may also test the limits of some viewers’ suspension of disbelief abilities, but in the end, its testimony to love and visual splendor could make a true believer out of you.
