Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The costume drama, a genre I struggle with; wealthy, upper-class people with problems and conflicts I just can't summon any interest in. However there is a handful which I do manage to enjoy and Queen Christina is one of them; what is it about Queen Christina which makes it compelling? The craftsmanship of the underappreciated director Rouben Mamoulian is certainly a factor but ultimately I believe it all comes down to the fascinating individual at the center of the film.Queen Christina is the role Greta Garbo was born to play, the androgynous, unconventional Swedish film star as the androgynous, unconventional 17th Century Swedish Queen. Christina is one of the great gender-bending characters in film history, referring to herself in masculine pronouns to having what could be mistaken as the body of a man; just look at those incredibly broad shoulders Garbo possesses when they are exposed. In the opening to Queen Christina her confidant Axel Oxenstierna (Lewis Milestone) speaks of how Christina was brought up as a boy in order to prepare her for the throne. This does raise the question; do positions of power require a sacrifice of feminine virtues? If the role was reversed of a king dressing and living as a woman, just how powerful and noble would such a king come off? Likewise while it is a likely possibility of Christina being bisexual, the girl on girl kiss she shares with Countess Ebba Sparre (Elizabeth Young) never struck me as a particularly romantic kiss and more of a sign of friendship however Christina speaking of the two of them going to the county for three nights would certainly imply otherwise. Yet even if you're the biggest tomboy in the world like Christina, there still exists in her the desire to be a woman with her proclamation to love interest Antonio (John Gilbert) "that it had been so enchanting to be a woman. Not a queen, just a woman in man's arms".The fascinating figure of Queen Christina goes beyond her disregard of social norms. She is a figure of great intellect with her values of personal freedom, the quest for knowledge, self-improvement as well as spending the few spare moments she has reading books ("One can feel nostalgia for places one has never seen" - so true). As a Queen she has a great sense of national pride and has a fierce devotion to the individual citizens of her county; a romanticised depiction of a world leader many of us wish was more of a reality.The one portion of Queen Christina which puts realism to the side is that in which she escapes from her palace to the country in order to get away from the strain of being a ruler. I enjoy the trope of a public figure in power sneaking out disguised as a commoner as seen in films such as Roman Holiday or The Shoes of the Fisherman. What is hard to shallow however is everyone Christina meets on her escapade including future lover Antonio and the alumni of the inn she spends the night mistaking her for a man. I know it was unusual back then for a woman to ride on horseback, carry a sword and pistol and go to a tavern to drink but she still clearly has the face of a woman. Regardless I can overlook this lack of realism as it doesn't impair my enjoyment of the film. John Gilbert shows in Queen Christina that he was an effective presence in talkies (contrary to the popular belief that his failure to make the jump from silent to talkies destroyed his career). I don't find him quite great but he is good enough. After a night of lovemaking with Antonio, Christina compares the experience to how God must have felt when he created the world; yep, she went there. The ending of Queen Christina on the other hand in one which inspires even if everything is not tied up in a neat bow. It is a tragedy in one sense but with one of the greatest uses of close up in film history of Garbo's expressionless face looking out to sea, the viewer gets to write their own ending.

It's the early 1600s and Sweden is embroiled in the Thirty Years War. Queen Christina (Garbo) is consulting with her advisers. Garbo goes over the records of losses and says sternly: "These wars are expensive." The Treasurer replies: "The Parliament clamors for war." Plus ça change...She's pretty enough and she acts about as well as any other mainstream actress of the early thirties. Her delivery tends to be emphatic, with the subtlety of a traffic signal, but so did that of many other actresses of the period, like Mae West. But I've never understood how she was able to hold a generation in thrall. No -- more than a generation. When she went into seclusion, reporters and fans looked for her on the streets of New York for decades. Truman Capote somehow managed to wangle his way into the vestibule of her apartment and was able to make the shocking observation that one of the abstract paintings was hung upside down. The man she falls in love with in this film is John Gilbert. The meme is that Gilbert was a great star of the silver screen when there was no sound other than the theater organ playing. But he was doomed by his high, squeaky voice. That's not the case. His voice is no different from anyone else's in the film. His performance is animated and with his dark hair and pencil mustache he looks rather dashing. Somebody upstairs didn't like him.The dialog is not at all bad. It joins the personal life of the queen and the historical background in a tidy manner. It has a touch of elegance in it, just enough to suggest a time long past. The whole production is studio bound but that's not always a disadvantage. Hollywood set dressers and art designers could make a place look like the essence of what it stood for. An inn with its walls, furniture, and staircases hewn roughly from wood really LOOKS better that the original probably did.The plot? It's a tragedy. Garbo is the queen but to get away from the pressures of the court he disguises herself as a young man and visits an inn. There she meets Gilbert, the Spanish ambassador on his way to the palace in Stockholm. Of course he doesn't recognize her, since he's never met the queen, nor does he recognize her sex. He must be pretty stupid because Garbo is wearing lipstick, eye shadow or whatever it's called, and false eyelashes the size of industrial brooms.It's only when they are forced to share the same room and the same bed that he discovers what she reveals. Neither of them seems particularly displeased. Next morning, he gazes at her while she spends a musical five minutes exploring and memorizing the features of the room -- caressing the spinning wheel, kissing the pillow.However, she's torn between love and duty. We've seen it before. "Roman Holiday," "Mary Queen of Scots," "Elizabeth and Essex." It never ended happily and it doesn't end happily here.

Refugees from the silent screen – they were a mixed bunch. Greta Garbo, sublimely beautiful and supremely confident, her Swedish accent and husky delivery complementing the mysterious persona she had cultivated in the silents, was a natural survivor. John Gilbert, fulfilling a very 1920s ideal of handsomeness, with a voice like a squeezebox in high register, was not faring so well. Still, the kind-hearted Garbo had lobbied for her old friend and silent-era co-star to make an appearance opposite her in Queen Christina, thus providing us with a final chance to see them together, even now their careers had long since diverged.Queen Christina is part of an early-30s wave of historical pictures set in Eastern Europe. When it came to "pre-code" raunchiness the more upmarket studios like MGM and Paramount eschewed the jails and dancehalls of Warner Brothers in favour of frisky period dramas. This picture deals brazenly with the queen's supposed promiscuity as well as hinting at her rumoured bisexuality. In spite of the regal gloss it's actually a rather silly business. At one point we see Garbo casually firing a musket ball into the ceiling to break up a quarrel over how many lovers she's had. Eventually, and against all odds, a trite yet rather touching love story emerges. This gives the story a bit of direction, although perhaps it would have been better had it allowed to simply wander into the truly bizarre (cf. The Scarelt Empress). As one might expect, historical accuracy is only an occasional visitor to the screenplay, but that's hardly the point is it? The director is Hollywood's resident technique geek Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian's extrovert style is just about starting to come together, and yet he still shows a penchant for all things showy. Here he continually bookends his scenes with lengthy and largely superfluous tracking shots, which might be OK if they weren't so wobbly. He's also a lover of theatrical and stylised crowd movements, such as the synchronised manner in which the group of peasants turn their heads to one another after Garbo puts a question to them. Such things are great for musicals, but look silly in dramas. Mamoulian's greatest strength here is really is his eye for the iconic, with such fine compositions as the shot of Garbo and Gilbert's first kiss before the fire.Still, Garbo was an actor who always seemed impervious to bad or indifferent direction. When acting queenly, she shows her usual steely immobility, the occasional flash of an eyebrow adding emphasis. Here and there she is mocking, almost playful, and you feel through her that there was a good atmosphere on the set for this one. And yes, her rapport with Gilbert is alive and well. The washed-up actor still has those deep, deep, silent movie peepers, and his voice doesn't sound quite so froggy as it did with the poor recording of his first few talkies (although there is one bizarre moment later in the movie where he gets in a sleigh, and it sounds like he just sat on a duck). It's a pity this was his penultimate screen appearance, as it's possibly his best. Had he been able to hold on a few more years he could have even made a slightly aged Errol Flynn type. Other players to look out for in Queen Christina are the ever-watchable C. Aubrey Smith and a pre-fame Akim Tamiroff as Pedro, seen weeping with palpable emotion in the final scene.All in all, while not a great talkie, Queen Christina is at least a good reminder of the silent screen's glories. The dialogue is not conspicuously bad, and is even rather nifty in places, but it is of little consequence, never driving things forward. Ultimately it is upon the haunting faces of Garbo and Gilbert that the drama is played out.

How ironic that back to back I saw what I considered to be the weakest Garbo I've seen ("Anna Karenina"), and the best, "Queen Christina." This is truly one of the great Hollywood films and the finest performance Garbo ever gave. She is brilliant as queen of her native Sweden, a role she was meant for. It's got an excellent cast with her finest co-star, John Gilbert, who co-starred in many of her silent films. The studios destroyed Gilbert by spreading the rumor (as they did with Louise Brooks) that his voice recorded badly. This was totally untrue. His voice in this movie is full-bodied and strong. He and Garbo have screen chemistry to burn. There is a love scene where Garbo walks around studying the room at an inn where she and Gilbert fell in love (He: "What are you doing?" She: "I'm remembering") that has got to rank as one of the most romantic and curiously strange of any to come out of the Hollywood dream machine. And ultimately, the film has that justifiably famous final and luminous shot of Garbo on the deck of a ship looking out to sea as she sails off to her destiny without the man she loves. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, it has some of the most beautiful cinematography of the period. There's a single shot (a matte painting) of queen Garbo walking through the corridor of the castle at night that took my breath away. I went back and re-watched it a number of times. Wow! Masterful direction. This is the one Garbo film not to miss. Can't recommend it highly enough.