Greta Garbo was ideally suited as the lead. She was beautiful and graceful, about the right age, and she had a foreign accent. She was also a talented actress, and had retained her star status despite the arrival of sound. Also, it was not the first time she had played the role. She was paired with John Gilbert in a silent version, Love (1927).

Lavishly produced by David O. Selznick, the film begins in grand style as the camera slowly pans down an enormous banquet table. The train station is another marvelous set, and the opera house and aristocratic mansions are appropriately luxurious.

And such a cast! Hissable Basil Rathbone deftly turns Anna's husband into a cold villain. Freddie Bartholomew, the leading male child actor of the decade, is only slightly too precious as her beloved son Sergei. Gorgeous and childish Maureen O'Sullivan makes a superlative Kitty. Fredric March, who had won Best Actor a few years before for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ably plays the determined Count Vronsky, whose obsession with Anna gradually (but predictably) leads to her ruin.

Of course, Tolstoy's enormous novel cannot be transformed into a 95 minute film without substantial pruning. Levin (Gyles Isham), the hero of the novel, becomes a minor character, as does his eventual wife Kitty. The focus is on Anna and Vronsky's romance. Still, the spirit of the great novel is intact, and neither the characters nor the plot is Hollywoodized.

Somebody named Count Andrey Tolstoy is credited as a technical advisor. A relative of the Russian writer? His first credit, Andrey Tolstoy subsequently served as an advisor to several other films set in Russia, including the Tony Curtis-Yul Brynner vehicle Taras Bulba (1962).

Despite its production quality, Anna Karenina received few accolades. The New York Film Critics Circle, who gave out their first awards that year, named Garbo as Best Actress. The film also won Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival.