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A ten-hour series has an advantage — perhaps eight hours — over a movie. This Anna has the capaciousness and subtlety that the film versions, good as they were, necessarily lacked. Tolstoy had originally thought of calling his novel Two Marriages, and a major theme of the book is the contrast between the happily allied Kitty (Caroline Langrishe) and Levin (Robert Swann) and the ill-matched Karenins. The series is able to develop that subplot and prove, so far as Tolstoy was concerned anyway, the thesis of the novel's famous opening sentence: "All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion."
Most of the exteriors were shot in Hungary, and the streets of old Budapest served for the Moscow and Petersburg of a century ago. The only missing ingredient, an important one, unfortunately, is a sense of Russian spaciousness, a feeling not so much of a country as of a vast sea of land.
The TV camera is more at home in the salon and ballroom scenes, which perfectly convey the elegant Frenchified world of the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy, where everything is al lowed so long as it is hidden. Nearly everyone is having an affair like Anna's and Vronsky's, and adultery seems to be the thing the rich do best.
Byron had obviously not been to Russia when he wrote that "what men call gallantry, and gods adultery, is much more common where the cli mate's sultry."
Anna Karenina is a story of contrasts, happiness against unhappiness, warmth against cold. It has been told well before, but, except in the book itself, of course, it has never been presented with such building strength and certain inevitability as in this production from the BBC.
—Gerald Clarke