Queen Christina

Movie Information

The Asheville Film Society will screen Queen Christina Tuesday, April 5, at 8 p.m. in the Cinema Lounge of The Carolina Asheville and will be hosted by Xpress movie critics Ken Hanke and Justin Souther. Hanke is the artistic director for the Asheville Film Society.
Score:
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Genre: Historical Romance
Director: Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight)
Starring: Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Ian Keith, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith
Rated: NR

Both Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina (1933) and next week’s Asheville Film Society showing of Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932)—both fine in their own right—were deliberately placed as lead-ins to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). Certain aspects of The Dreamers will have more resonance if seen after the two earlier films. But on its own merits, Queen Christina is probably the best film the legendary Greta Garbo ever made. It’s certainly in the running, and has two of the most iconic Garbo moments in her entire filmography. The film is more or less a biopic of the 17th-century queen of Sweden, but it’s not that interested in history. Its interest lies in being a romance, and it certainly succeeds at that. It also succeeds in making Garbo a much more human figure than was usually the case. But there’s more to the film than that and Mamoulian’s brilliant stylistic approach. The film—taking advantage of its pre-code freedom—actually manages to not only touch on Christina’s bisexuality, but does some even more subversive gender-bending of its own. That’s certainly a surprise coming from conservative MGM.

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About Ken Hanke
Head film critic for Mountain Xpress from December 2000 until his death in June 2016. Author of books "Ken Russell's Films," "Charlie Chan at the Movies," "A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series," "Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography of the Filmmaker."

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