Love (1927 American film)

Love
Directed byEdmund Goulding
Written byLorna Moon
Frances Marion
Marian Ainslee
Ruth Cummings
Based onAnna Karenina
1876 novel
by Leo Tolstoy
Produced byEdmund Goulding
StarringJohn Gilbert
Greta Garbo
CinematographyWilliam H. Daniels
Edited byHugh Wynn
Music byArnold Brostoff (1944)
Distributed byMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release dates
Running time
82 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguagesSilent film
Sound film 1928 Release (Synchronized)
English Intertitles
Budget$487,994.88
Box office$1,677,000 (worldwide rentals)

Love is a 1927 American silent melodrama film directed by Edmund Goulding and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A sound version of the film was released in 1928 with a synchronized musical score with sound effects. MGM made the film to capitalize on its winning romantic team of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert who had starred in the 1926 blockbuster Flesh and the Devil.

Taking full advantage of the star power, a drama was scripted based on Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel, Anna Karenina. The result was a failure for the author's purists, but it provided the public with a taste of Gilbert-Garbo eroticism that would never again be matched. The publicity campaign for the film was one of the largest up to that time, and the title was changed from the original, Heat.

Director Dimitri Buchowetzki began work on Love with Garbo and Ricardo Cortez. However, producer Irving Thalberg was unhappy with the early filming, and started over by replacing Buchowetzki with Edmund Goulding, cinematographer Merritt B. Gerstad with William H. Daniels, and Cortez with Gilbert.