Real Americans

TCM has, for some years now, devoted August to a Star-of-the-day programming. Today is Greta Garbo, and the ones tonight have been from her silent period. One of them is "Love", which is "Anna Karenina". My Russian period was so many decades ago, I couldn't tell you anything about the book or any of the movies made from it. I caught it about half-way through, and she's one good lookin babe.

So, we get to the end of the film, and Vronsky has found Anna's boy (he's been looking for them for three years, of course) at a riding academy who tells him that his mother visits him every day since his father died. At that moment, Anna makes her entrance; Anna and Vronsky hug and kiss and the three leave stage right with "The End".

But that's not the end. We get some text on the screen, which tells us that what we just saw was the "happy" ending demanded by the studio for American distribution, and that we'll now see the alternate (other countries) ending.

The action returns to the point where Anna is leaving St. Petersburg on a train. Instead of getting on the train, she jumps in front of it, a suicide. Hmm.

So, off to the wiki for some explanation. Turns out that the studio hot shots never read the book, so didn't know how it ended, naturally. The alternate ending fits what Tolstoy wrote. And it gets better. Kind of. According to the wiki

(American exhibitors were given the choice of whether or not to use the revised "happy" ending. Theaters on the coasts mostly picked Tolstoy while theaters in Middle America mostly picked the happy ending.)

So, naturally, the bumpkins can't deal with Russian literature. Why am I not surprised?

And, just as naturally, they'll eat a ton of bullshit from a demented would-be czar. Why am I not surprised?