Love in a Cold Climate

By Gerald Clarke

PBS has a breathtaking star in its new series, Anna Karenina

In his working notes Tolstoy made her ugly, giving her a narrow, low forehead and a nose so big that it was almost deformed. But in looks at least, Anna Karenina has been lucky. The author himself fell in love with her, performing a graceful act of plastic surgery before he introduced her to the public, and over the years she has been portrayed by some of the loveliest women in the world. The great Garbo played her twice, and Vivien Leigh added her exquisite beauty to the part 13 years later. In this ten-part series from the BBC, premiering on PBS Sunday, Feb. 5, Anna is again well served. Nicola Pagett, who played the Bellamys' willful daughter Elizabeth in Upstairs, Downstairs, may be closest of all to the character Tolstoy imagined 100 years ago.

For all her beauty, Garbo had a curious androgyny, and carried with her an invisible sign that said "Look, but don't touch." Leigh was unmistakably feminine, but she also seemed distant, as if she were covered by glass, like any other priceless work of art. Pagett, by contrast, is both sensuous and voluptuous, a creature of fire and earth. Her face is marked, as Tolstoy said of Anna, by a "persistent animation." Compared with her predecessors, her features are less than ideal: her eyes have a slight goldfish bulge, her lips are too full, and her cheekbones are uncommonly high. But in one of those wonderful accidents of nature, the mistakes cancel one another out and the result is a face of strange beauty.

If the actress who plays Anna is right, Anna Karenina can scarcely fail, and this production rides, like a Moscow sleigh, on Pagett's splendor and charm. Like many other Masterpiece Theater series, it is slow in starting, and Scriptwriter Donald Wilson has created inexcusable confusions in the first three episodes. A viewer will even be hard pressed to tell when and where Anna and her lover,

Count Vronsky, actually begin their liaison. Once under way, however, with the characters in place, the series proceeds with magisterial confidence to Anna's final rendezvous with an onrushing train.

Eric Porter, who was Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, re-creates another cuckold as Karenin, Anna's husband.

Both face and soul seem as brittle and sere as the last leaf of autumn, and when he greets Anna, who has been in Mos cow, at the St. Petersburg railroad station, his only comment is: "It's good to have you home again. It's quite irksome without you." Vronsky, who has been on the train with Anna, is the opposite.

Played with appropriate panache by Stuart Wilson, he is a handsome figure of dash and romance, the highest flier of a high-living crowd. "I feel like a starving man when someone gives him food," is the way Anna describes her feelings to ward him.

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

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