Anna Karenina

Opening on a bold close-up of Claire Bloom as Anna Karenina, this limited 1961 BBC retelling of Tolstoy's classic has one major draw. A mere year before he started work on his signature role, a young Sean Connery plays the dashing Count Vronsky and makes an admirable foil to Bloom's love-struck aristocrat as the two run headlong into an affair that shocks the St Petersburg society and threatens everything the two hold dear.

For those who never had the pleasure of reading the novel, this necessarily truncated version is a good early stab by those at Wood Lane to create a sweeping epic on the most limited sets imaginable. These budgetary issues are made clear very early on when an establishing scene in a train station is so obviously shot on a small studio stage that the characters are only able to take two steps in one direction before turning and walking in the opposite direction to give the illusion of travel! Similarly, when lines are fudged they are simply let fly since evidently one take is all that is afforded the actors who have to get their mouths round tricky Russian pronunciation (watch Stiva’s attempt to describe the cross that the Tsar has bestowed on Count Karenin half-way through the film).

Anna travels to Moscow in order to visit her brother Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, who is engaged in a number of extra marital affairs and needs some familial advice. On arriving at the station, she meets Count Alexis Vronsky, a nobleman who becomes immediately smitten with Anna and the two carry out an illicit affair that is doomed to tragedy. This "recently discovered" adaptation will come as news to anyone who has owned the American release which has been freely available for over a year now and, whilst Connery is very watchable, there is little suggestion of what will befall him in the year to come.



Released on DVD on 27th September 2010 by Simply Media.

Reviewed by Simon Cole.