Anna Karenina

Julien Duvivier's 1948 British film tells Tolstoy's novel through Vivien Leigh's Anna. The wife of an official, Anna travels to Moscow to visit her brother and meets the cavalry officer Vronsky on the way. The attraction surfaces quickly, but in Petersburg society only the woman pays for it. The French playwright Jean Anouilh worked on the screenplay, and the adaptation narrows the novel's social panorama to concentrate on Anna and her husband Karenin. Ralph Richardson's Karenin is the most praised element: cold, brittle and rarely reduced to caricature. Leigh's Anna was compared endlessly with Greta Garbo's reading of fifteen years earlier. Who it's for: viewers who enjoy classic literary adaptation and postwar British studio filmmaking. Who it's not for: anyone hoping to see the whole novel, and the Levin strand in particular; the film largely removes it.