Queen Christina (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Historically, Queen Christina of Sweden (1026-89) was a short, ugly, mannish monarch who enjoyed smutty stories and slept with one of her ladies-in-waiting. In the cinema Greta Garbo makes her a more feminine creature. Since perversion, under the Hays code, must be treated, if at all, with levity, the only masculine trait exhibited by Queen Christina is a taste for trousers. She employs a valet (C. Aubrey Smith) instead of a chambermaid, washes her face with snow, reads Voltaire and says that she expects to die "not an old maid, but a bachelor." None of these eccentricities, however, prevents her from reacting normally when Don Antonio (John Gilbert) arrives as an envoy to invite her to marry the King of Spain. Christina encounters Antonio at a country inn where he mistakes her for a boy until they share a room together. When they emerge three days later he knows everything about Christina except that she is Queen of Sweden.
Christina's indiscretion with Antonio has prompt consequences when he re-encounters her at court. Her subjects and her prime minister (Lewis Stone) want her to marry Charles, the Prince Palatine (Reginald Owen). Count Magnus (Ian Keith), who preceded Antonio as her paramour, regards Antonio as an interloper. When moonlight sleigh rides make it apparent that Christina and Antonio have resumed their liaison, Christina takes three bold steps. She rebukes a rabble which has gathered on the palace stairs, hands her crown to Prince Charles and sets off to meet Antonio at the Port of Danzig whence they will sail for a tropical romance. Before he reaches the Port of Danzig Antonio has a duel with Count Magnus. He is dying when he arrives at the boat and dead when it sails, with Christina peering sadly over the prow.
When Greta Garbo returned last year to the U. S. to impersonate Queen Christina, her purpose was not only to advertise Sweden, but to rehabilitate John Gilbert as a cinemactor. More than any other individual, Gilbert had helped Garbo start her career to fame when she appeared in Hollywood seven years ago. As Garbo's popularity rose, Gilbert's dropped so low that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer did not renew his contract. The script for Queen Christina by Playwright S. X. Behrman was designed to give both Garbo and Gilbert a chance to be elaborately amorous. Director Rouben Mamoulian was handed superb backgrounds of snow, stone interiors, and thrones to work with. Because closeups are important in any Garbo picture, Director Mamoulian shows her sad, mobile face when she is commenting on the miseries of Queenhood (bitter), examining a snow field (dreamy), arguing with her lover (gay), eating a bunch of grapes (ardent).
Queen Christina is a historical romance of the classic type, serious, handsome, euphemistic and unreal, in which Garbo's performance, like most of her previous ones, is more enigmatic than explanatory. Good shot: the first meeting of Antonio and Christina when he tips her a thaler for helping to get his coach out of a snowdrift.