As autumn leaves turn to shopping sprees, ornate DVD packages proliferate, and a few gems are bound to get lost among the munificent boxed sets, with their dazzling restorations and pointlessly elongated director’s cuts. Such a one is Aleksandr Zarkhi’s “Anna Karenina,” a 1967 Soviet film, little-seen in the West, which exceeds expectations despite Kino’s necessarily compromised transfer. For one thing, it is remarkably faithful to Tolstoy, yet dodges the mummification that results from the literalness of the miniseries. Weighing in at a trim 145 minutes, this “Anna Karenina” canters gracefully, occasionally stopping for deluxe set pieces — the ball, the races, the opera, the train — that justify every pretty penny in its epic budget.

While much of the dialogue is drawn from the novel, the film is scrupulously cinematic, elaborating on and adding to Tolstoy’s symbols with an intricate color scheme and labyrinthine tracking shots devised by the photographer Leonid Kalashnikov and the production designers Aleksandr Borisov and Yuri Kladiyenko. The cast, which, if I correctly judge the accompanying interviews, was chosen counterintuitively, is superb, and in the many sequences when talk is supplanted by show, the audio slack is taken up by Rodion Shchedrin’s chilling score, filtering 19th-century grandeur through 20th-century dissonance.

Why is it that popular clichés regarding the great adulteresses of 19th-century fiction reduce Emma Bovary to a slatternly twit and ennoble Anna as a tragic victim? Tolstoy is ambivalent, or willing to consider all sides. According to the Internet Movie Database, Anna has been filmed 25 times between 1910 and 2005 (number 26 is scheduled for 2007), but I doubt if there is a more nuanced portrayal than that of Tatiana Samojlova, often cited as the great Russian actress of her generation (though she has appeared in few films, her one international triumph being “The Cranes Are Flying” in 1957).

Ms. Samojlova’s Anna is an aristocrat who loses her bearings in fits of love and cruelty, never certain of what she wants beyond the slipping devotion of the lover for whom she sacrificed her son and her social standing. In the novel she changes her mind about suicide in the second before she is crushed by a train. In the film, her destruction is fated and absolute.

No less startling is Nikolai Gritsenko’s Karenin. He alters the tempo of the film with his every appearance, signaled by the hollow click-clacking of his shoes on parquet floors. Shoulders slightly hunched, he haunts his own home like Nosferatu, his uncanny voice a petulant wail as cold and sickly as a clammy hand. Karenin’s oblivious blathering at the racetrack is as oppressive as his unmoving stare in the carriage ride when Anna declares her infidelity and contempt for him. His attempts to invite pity fail miserably as he seems incapable of pitying himself.

The storyline centers, predictably enough, on the triangle of Anna, Karenin, and Vronsky (Vasili Lanovoy, by turns dashing, callow, and sadistic), but the parallel plots, which are often minimized or dropped from adaptations, also figure in the mosaic, making for telling edits as the story cuts from one plane to another. These involve Tolstoy’s philosophical stand-in, Levin (Boris Goldayev), and his devotion to his peasants and the fittingly named Kitty (Anastasiya Vertinskaya); and Stiva (an honest cad, played in a wonderfully comic turn by Yuri Yakovlev) and his accepting Dolly (Iya Savvina). Although simplifications were mandated (Anna’s daughter dies in childbirth; she thrives only in the novel), many of the book’s eccentric characters are retained, including Princess Betty (willowy malice in a bird-of-paradise hat, as incarnated by the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya), as well as the fly-catching lawyer, the dithering occultist, and the grotesque gossiping ladies peering through lorgnettes.

The script (by Vasili Katanyan and Zarkhi) is not without ellipses. The writers don’t have much to go on in launching the Anna-Vronsky infatuation, the arbitrary nature of which is part of the point. But the absence of any genuine interaction between Anna and her son until late in the film, when she sneaks home, undermines the development of her maternal desperation. The import of one of the most striking visual sequences — the threshers at twilight, among them Levin, their scythes clinking like crickets as the sun recedes from the field followed by the farmers, singing in unison — is obscure: Levin hasn’t been sufficiently developed at that point.

The virtuoso peak, apparently the work of Kalashnikov, is the horse race, where swirling cameras (reprised at the film’s climax), plunging angles, and fractured editing unify Anna and Frou-Frou, Vronsky’s doomed horse — the casualty of a contest filmed with the teeming elation of an action blockbuster. By contrast, Anna’s finish is played as a claustrophobic dissent into shadows and alleys so narrow that only Ms. Samojlova and Kalashnikov’s hand-held camera could fit into the space where it was shot.

From the first scene, in Stiva’s home, the architectural warrens of massive homes are explored with tracking shots, sometimes comic, more often ominous. The showdown between Karenin and Anna is preceded by his deliberate marching through no less than 10 rooms, one entrance after another, all in one momentous shot — a tiny but impressive harbinger of the 95-minute single take of Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” (2002). When she suggests keeping her son until Vronsky’s child is born, Karenin erupts with a blood-curdling “Nyet.”

The film’s bold use of color to telegraph emotion and delineate character inadvertently emphasizes the trouble with Kino’s widescreen print. The colors lack stability, especially in Part 2; as the print was made available through the Russian Cinema Council, it probably represents the best there is. Yet the shimmering lights and encroaching shadows do not dilute the power of the color design, which is fascinating throughout. The key hues are red, representing vitality, love, sex, and hope, and green, signaling impotence and hatred; in many scenes, they split the screen, so that Anna is suffused in red and Karenin in wan pale-green light, the shade of the wallpaper. There is a moment in the extraordinary confinement scene when Karenin walks over to Vronsky, yet the color distinction abides, separating them in a way that seems at once natural and audacious.

More problematic is the sound, or the way Kino has configured it. The menus require you to choose language (the English dubbing is appallingly amateurish) or subtitles, but the disc does not allow you to toggle between them. As the default English option has more audio presence than the Russian mono, it would be nice to switch during scenes dominated by Mr. Shchedrin’s music. You can’t without starting the disc from scratch.

A second disc is filled with extras, including interviews with cast members and Kalashnikov. A section on Tolstoy includes 11 minutes of him strolling through winter and summer fields, arriving in Moscow, and lying on his deathbed. There is also a 20-minute documentary that emphasizes his later work and its political-philosophical import. The filmographies are rendered almost unreadable by tiny cursive print, but they contain several previews for celebrated Soviet films of the 1950s, and a splendid 10-minute lecture-demonstration on dance by Maya Plisetskaya, who is shown in an excerpt from her 1957 “Swan Lake.”

In all, an illuminating package, and very likely the most resourceful “Anna Karenina” we are likely to see.

Mr. Giddins’s most recent book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.