The parodists have it wrong. They’ve turned the phrase most identified with Greta Garbo—“I want to be alone”—into something that might have issued from Bela Lugosi. Garbo did not pronounce the “w” as a “v” (she says “want,” not “vant”); she did not declaim those...

Today is Sunday, Jan. 14, the 14th day of 2007. There are 351 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Jan. 14, 1784, the United States ratified a peace treaty with England, ending the Revolutionary War.On this date:In 1639, the first constitution of Connecticut...

Mamoulian's latest film [Queen Cristina] is the result of a defect both of sentimental intuition and of culture. We should not need to speak of culture if sentimental intuition and the breath of art had inspired the producer or the actress [Greta Garbo] on behalf of the producer. Who cares whether Shaw's Joan of Arc is really the Joan burnt at the stake by the English or if Shakespeare's Coriolanus is really the tragic Roman patrician? Their strong artistic vitality excludes all possibi...

Queen Christina follows quite closely the career of Sweden's notorious seventeenth century queen as it was known to most of her contemporaries, without benefit of modern pathological psychology. The one serious concession it makes to presumed movie demands is in giving Christina an abiding passionate love for the Spanish ambassador, whereas the rumors of the time credited her with no more than a passing affair of scandal…. Where the film falls down as an historical picture is chiefly in its fa...

Taking the subject of Christina, enlightened despot, Lesbian, free-lance adventuress, ["Queen Christina"] substitutes for all the strange facts bearing upon her reign and exile the considerably mildewed fictions of the Graustark cycle. To be sure, it borrows enough facts to make a setting; it indicates the Swedish court, and makes itself pleasant with glamor while it may. But then come the big scenes, the Od's-wounds-milady-'tis-but-a-scratch. In the end, it reduces the complex c...