General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Queen Christina

Queen Christina is a 1933 American historical romance film directed by Rouben Mamoulian for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, starring Greta Garbo as Christina, Queen of Sweden, and John Gilbert as the Spanish envoy with whom she falls in love. Produced by Walter Wanger and written by H. M. Harwood and Salka Viertel from a story by Viertel and Margaret P. LeVino, it premiered in New York on 26 December 1933 and opened nationally on 9 February 1934 under the working title Christina.¹ The film is often described as the archetypal biopic and gave Garbo a role shaped around a headstrong woman who refuses to sacrifice her life to her destiny.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Rouben Mamoulian; produced by Walter Wanger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp. (Loew's, Inc.)¹
Writers	Screenplay by H. M. Harwood and Salka Viertel; story by Viertel and Margaret P. LeVino; dialogue by S. N. Behrman¹^•³
Release	New York opening 26 December 1933; US release 9 February 1934; copyright registered 23 January 1934 (LP4439)¹
Principal cast	Greta Garbo (Christina), John Gilbert (Don Antonio de la Prada), Ian Keith (Count Magnus), Lewis Stone (Chancellor Oxenstierna), Elizabeth Young (Countess Ebba), Reginald Owen (Charles Gustavus)¹
Technical credits	Cinematography William Daniels, editing Blanche Sewell, music Herbert Stothart, art direction Alexander Toluboff, gowns by Adrian, sound recording Douglas Shearer¹^•³
Format	Black and white, Western Electric Sound System, 11 reels; duration reported as 96–97 or 103 minutes by the AFI, 100 minutes by the BFI, and 97 minutes by the Spanish Film Archive (ICAA)¹^•⁴^•³
Genre	Romance, historical¹

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens in 1632 with the death of Sweden's warrior king Gustavus Adolphus on the battlefield, after which his young daughter is crowned ruler. Reared by her father as a boy, Christina accepts the crown as the "king" of Sweden and vows to her court, headed by Chancellor Oxenstierna, that Sweden will fight until it wins the war. Years later the adult Christina, who regularly dresses in men's clothing, confers with her council about the still-raging war and declares that, for the good of the country, peace must be negotiated.¹

Pressured by her council to marry her cousin Karl Gustav and produce an heir, the queen slips away incognito and stops at a country inn. Because she is dressed in heavy male clothing, she is not recognized and is treated as a male servant by the coach's prominent passenger, the diplomatic envoy Don Antonio de la Prada. The two fall in love, and Christina spends several days with him at the inn before his identity as the Spanish envoy come to court is revealed.¹^•⁵

Back at the palace, Christina's affair with Antonio stirs public anger; she is accused of "Spanish witchcraft" and followed by a disgruntled mob.⁶ She abdicates in favor of Charles Gustavus and plans to accompany Antonio to Spain, but he is killed in a duel by her former lover, Count Magnus. Christina decides to continue the journey alone, and the film ends with her standing at the bow of a ship gazing toward the horizon as the camera slowly zooms in on Garbo's face until it fills the screen, leaving her future open-ended.⁷

Production

Garbo's return. After the successes of Grand Hotel and Mata Hari in 1932, Swedish-born star Greta Garbo's contract with MGM had expired, and it took eighteen months of intense negotiations before production of Queen Christina could begin.⁷ Just before Garbo was to sail to Stockholm on vacation, the writer Salka Viertel, an expatriate from Nazi Germany and a friend as well as a professional colleague of the star, gave her a biography of Christina and suggested the queen as her next role. Garbo notified producer Irving Thalberg that she would re-sign with the studio if he agreed to make Queen Christina her next starring picture, and Thalberg consented.¹ When the studio proposed Mamoulian, Garbo cabled "Approve Mamoulian", and MGM enlisted him despite an initially unacceptable price.⁸

Casting changes. In August 1932 Clarence Brown was announced as director, but he never worked on the production, and Ernst Lubitsch was reported in the spring of 1933 not to be directing it. After months of delay, Laurence Olivier was selected for Antonio and sailed from Britain in July 1933; in mid-August 1933 John Gilbert was awarded the part over Olivier. Gilbert, whose MGM contract had expired and whose career was foundering, was given an impromptu screen test, and Garbo applied pressure on the reluctant Louis B. Mayer. Franchot Tone, Nils Asther, and Bruce Cabot were also considered or tested for the role.¹ According to the Toronto Film Society's program notes, Olivier was fired after a few days of filming on Garbo's orders and replaced by Gilbert; Leslie Howard had earlier declined the role, judging that he could never outshine Garbo.⁹

Shooting. Production ran from 7 August to 25 October 1933, with possible additional scenes completed in mid-December 1933. A January 1933 news item stated that MGM planned to send a production unit to Sweden, but no other indication that scenes were made on location has been found. Sword-fight staging was by Fred Cavens.¹ Speaking in a subsequent interview, Mamoulian remembered that when he wanted Garbo to laugh during one scene, he told Gilbert, Akim Tamiroff, and two more performers to pull silly faces at her while hidden from the camera; as he had hoped, her laughter came spontaneously on film, said to be the first of her career.¹

Censorship

Queen Christina was shot in the pre-Production Code period, before the Motion Picture Production Code guidelines imposed in 1934 were strictly enforced, and its sexual content pushed against censorship boundaries.¹⁰^•¹¹ On 8 January 1934 Joseph I. Breen, director of Studio Relations of the AMPP, objected strenuously to the bedroom scene and suggested many deletions, feeling that "sex immorality" was presented as "attractive and beautiful and made to appear 'right and permissible,'" a violation of the Code. Breen and several state censors also objected to Garbo's line, "This is how the Lord must have felt when he first beheld the finished world." However, after watching the film, a panel made up of Universal's Carl Laemmle, Jr., Paramount's Jesse Lasky, and RKO's B. B. Kahane judged it acceptable.¹

The film's cross-dressing, an explicit bedroom scene, comic gender confusion, and subtle lesbian allusions caused many problems with the censors responsible for enforcing the Code.¹² It is often held up as an example of lesbian representation under the constraints of the Production Code, not only for the full-mouth kiss Garbo plants on her lady-in-waiting Countess Ebba Sparre (Elizabeth Young) but for the swagger Garbo injects into the trouser role (a male character role performed by a woman).¹³

Reception

Tickets for the New York run cost two dollars. In spite of generally favorable reviews, the film did not do well at the American box office and failed to revive Gilbert's career, which was near its end; he made only The Captain Hates the Sea (1934) afterward and died at the beginning of 1936.¹^•⁹ It was the fourth and final film Garbo and Gilbert, her former paramour, made together, after Flesh and the Devil (1927), Love (1927), and A Woman of Affairs (1929).⁹ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 81% Tomatometer rating from 26 reviews and an 84% audience score from more than 2,500 ratings.⁵

Garbo's own opinion was cooler than that of most critics: "I tried to be Swedish, but it's difficult in Hollywood to be allowed to try anything. It's all a terrible compromise. There is no time for art. All that matters is what they call box office."⁹

History and the film

The film incorporates real historical elements: the names of characters at court, the backdrop of the Thirty Years' War, and characteristics of the historical Queen Kristina, who was raised as a boy, was an intellectual, and liked to wear men's clothes.⁷ As confirmed by modern biographical sources, from 1632, when she was crowned queen of Sweden, until 1644 Christina ruled under the regency of five crown officers headed by Axel Oxenstierna, and on obtaining her majority she opposed him, especially over Sweden's participation in the Thirty Years' War. She engineered a peace settlement with Germany but failed to overcome the financial problems brought on by years of war. Known as the "Minerva of the North," she was an avid reader and supporter of the arts, and Descartes taught her philosophy.¹

The central love affair and narrative arc lack historical accuracy. The romance with the Spanish envoy Antonio Pimentel de Prado was fabricated for the film, and the historical Kristina's conversion to Roman Catholicism is notably omitted.⁷^•¹⁴ In reality, Christina abdicated in 1654 to her cousin Charles; although she cited poor health, her real motivation was her secret conversion to Roman Catholicism, which was outlawed in Sweden, and her aversion to marriage. She left Sweden immediately afterward, later attempted to gain the thrones of Naples and Poland, and never married.¹ The Guardian's Reel History column judged the film a surprisingly credible nod toward 17th-century Swedish history despite the invented heterosexual romance, noting for example that the Swedish government did have peasant representation from 1527, while observing that the real Christina had nearly bankrupted the country and her government was relieved to be rid of her.⁶

Legacy

When Garbo chose to play Christina in the puritan climate of the 1930s, she shocked audiences used to seeing her in vulnerable roles; the performance was a personal statement that tainted her career at the time yet turned her into a new archetype of femininity with far-reaching influence on filmmakers.¹⁵ A 2025 scholarly analysis argues that through Garbo's star persona the film merges seventeenth-century mythologies with twentieth-century cultural ideals to create a modern, regal, gender-transgressive Swedish femininity, and that it became a key site where historical myth, Hollywood star iconography, and 1930s cultural politics converge to reshape the cultural imagination of Swedishness.¹⁶

The film's afterlife extends through later retellings of Christina's life. Mika Kaurismäki's The Girl King (2015) offers an audacious representation of the young queen that goes where Mamoulian's film did not venture, partly because of the strict morals of its time, and portrays Christina's love for art and literature and her determination to lead her people to peace after the Thirty Years' War.¹⁷^•¹⁴ The BFI includes Queen Christina in its list of great films about queens and empresses and in its list of great American lesbian films.⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1940s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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