Anna Sten

NANA

United Artists, 1934.  Directed by Dorothy Arzner, George Fitzmaurice.  Camera:  Gregg Toland.  With Anna Sten, Lionel Atwill, Richard Bennett, Mae Clarke, Phillips Holmes, Muriel Kirkland, Reginald Owen, Lucille Ball, Charles Middleton.

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In 1868 Paris, Nana, a girl of the streets, buries her mother, vowing that she will never accept her mother's legacy of poverty and powerlessness.  A year later, Nana is at a cafe with her friends, Mimi and Satin, when Lt. Gregory, a drunken soldier, accosts her.  Nana pushes Gregory into a pond, thereby attracting the attention of elderly music hall impresario Gaston Greiner.  Greiner is charmed by Nana, and decides to make her a star, declaring that "he is the potter and she is the clay."

In her first performance, Nana creates a sensation by singing "That's Love" to the Grand Duke Alexis.  The duke, accompanied by his friend, Col. André Muffat, visits Nana backstage and invites her to join them for dinner.  André is disdainful of Nana, however, and resists her charms.  As Nana goes to inform the jealous Greiner of her dinner plans, she runs into Lt. George Muffat, André's brother and Lt. Gregory's friend, who has ventured backstage to settle a bet to determine if Nana was the girl who pushed him into the pond.  George and Nana promise to meet another night and, as Nana leaves the theater with the Duke, she meets Satin and Mimi at the stage door and invites them to dinner.

Although Nana begins to see both the duke and George, she becomes Greiner's mistress, assuaging his jealousy with protestations of innocence.

That summer, when the Muffat family visits their estate in the country, Nana takes up residence in Greiner's nearby country house so that she can continue her affair with George.  When André discovers his brother's affair, George announces that he plans to marry Nana, and André orders him back to Paris to report to his commanding officer.  André then tries to bribe Nana to forsake George, but she refuses and denounces him.

Next, André visits Greiner to inform him of Nana's affair, and Greiner, in a jealous rage, tells Nana she will never perform onstage again.  George is sent to Algeria, but promises to write Nana.

Months pass, and Nana, lonely and unemployed, waits for letters from him, but they never come.  Mimi and Zoe, Greiner's old housekeeper, have been intercepting George's letters and ripping up Nana's to him in the hope of forcing her back to the theater.  One day, André visits Nana and offers to help her return to the stage.  Nana reluctantly accepts and makes a triumphant return to the theater.

André falls in love with her and leaves his wife, Sabine, to make Nana his mistress.  Nana, who still loves George, detests André and, in her misery, turns to drink.

On the night that war is declared between France and Prussia, George returns to Paris and bursts into Nana's apartment, where he confronts her about failing to write him.  When Nana protests that she has written, George calls her a liar but confesses that he still loves her, not realizing that she is now his brother's mistress.  André then returns home and George assumes that he has followed him to the apartment, until André informs him that Nana is his mistress.  As the brothers argue, Nana shoots herself, then reunites them by joining their hands as she dies.

American Film Institute Catalog