Producer Samuel Goldwyn’s lavish though compromised adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel Nana (1934) is best remembered today as the infamous Hollywood debut of Russian-born starlet Anna Sten. The film is the story of a mercenary streetwalker turned stage singer whose calculating social rise is undone when she falls in love. Sten was to be Goldwyn’s answer to Greta Garbo at MGM and Marlene Dietrich at Paramount, his own exotic leading lady. That she spoke not a word of English when he signed her to a lucrative two-year contract didn’t trouble him in the least. Before she even arrived in America, Goldwyn busied himself building up his starlet’s image as “the passionate princess” and “the Soviet Cinderella,” an exotic fairy-tale princess whose beauty and charisma would capture the public imagination. Or so he hoped.
