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Queen Christina: Snow is like a wide sea. One could go out and be lost in it, and forget the world... and oneself.
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Chancellor: There are rumors that your Majesty is planning a foreign marriage.
Queen Christina: They are baseless.
Chancellor: But your Majesty, you cannot die an old maid.
Queen Christina: I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!
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Queen Christina: [on the street protests about her private life] Evidently my people, who are said to love me, do not wish me to be happy.
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Magnus: I am your destiny, Christina.
Queen Christina: Are you? I long to escape my destiny.
Magnus: You will long to return to it.
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Antonio: It's all a question of climate. You cannot serenade a woman in a snowstorm. All the graces in the art of love - elaborate approches that will make the game amusing - can only be practiced in those countries that quiver in the heat of the sun.
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Queen Christina: I have *imagined* happiness. But happiness you *cannot* imagine. Happiness you must feel! Joy, you must feel!
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Queen Christina: One can feel nostalgia for places one has never seen.
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Queen Christina: I have been memorizing this room. In the future, in my memory, I shall live a great deal in this room.
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Antonio: You are very pretty, Elsa. Are you also good?
Elsa: When I do not like a man, yes.
Queen Christina: That's a true virtue.
Antonio: The basis of all morality in a sentence.
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Queen Christina: Must we live for the dead?
Oxenstierna: For the great dead, yes, Your Majesty.
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Queen Christina: I have quite a collection of royal portraits. My suitors usually come in oil. And I've kept them--because I love a good painting.
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Antonio: There's a mystery in you.
Queen Christina: Is there not in every human being?
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Description
To escape the burdens of rule, Sweden's Queen Christina rides into the countryside disguised as a boy. There she meets and secretly falls for a dashing Spanish envoy on his way to the royal court. Imagine the envoy's delighted surprise when he and the young "nobleman" must share a bed at an overcrowded inn. Greta Garbo gives a luminous performance in this lavish costume drama, starring with her one-time off-screen fiance John Gilbert and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. "It had been so enchanting to be a woman, not a queen. Just a woman in a man's arms," Christina murmurs to her lover when her true identity is revealed. But she knows her people will not accept her marriage to a foreigner. Torn between her duty and her heart, she must make a fateful decision.
Amazon.com essential video
Arguably Greta Garbo's best MGM movie--depending how you feel about Camille and Ninotchka--this tale of the 17th-century Swedish monarch who preferred men's togs to gowns plays the most provocative games with the great star's ambisexual personality. At her request, Rouben Mamoulian directed (all three Garbo's-best-movie candidates were done by the best directors she worked with: Mamoulian, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch). Two sequences are legendary: Christina memorizing the room at a snowbound inn where she has first experienced love; and the long, concluding closeup of a queen become ship's-figurehead--as blank as a tabula rasa, and filled with all the meaning and emotion seven decades of audiences have chosen to see there. Those scenes are anthology pieces, but unlike most Garbo pictures, the whole movie is intelligently scripted and sustained. With Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, and John Gilbert--Garbo's premier silent-era costar--making a tentative comeback as her love interest. --Richard T. Jameson
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