Anthony Adverse (1936)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Simply A Masterpiece

Good movie but grossly overrated

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The novel of Anthony Adverse is 1200 pages; the mere fact that Sheridan Gibney was able to condense it into a screenplay at all is a miracle. Since there's much in the story, I cut the movie slack that it's a little uneven and abrupt at times. It's a pretty famous classic from the 1930s and marked a milestone in the Academy Awards ballots forever after: Gale Sondergaard won the very first Best Supporting Actress Oscar; before 1936, the supporting awards didn't exist!That being said, Gale's performance is a little one-dimensional. She plays a conniving villainess who plots against the hero since before he's born. Fredric March plays the hero, the title character, but a good chunk of the movie is before he's grown up. Billy Mauch plays the adorable hero as a child. Freddie's love interest is Olivia de Havilland, and the huge supporting cast includes Claude Rains, Edmund Gwenn, Anita Louise, Donald Woods, Louis Hayward, and J. Carrol Naish. The story is a vast epic, starting from before Fredric March's birth. His mother has an affair, and when she dies gibing him life, her cuckolded husband drops the baby at a convent, hoping to never see or hear from him again. Obviously, since Claude Rains and Gale Sodergaard are still prominently featured in the movie, a reunion is anticipated. . .Anthony Adverse is two and a half hours, but it easily could be remade into a ten-hour miniseries. Anthony's character travels around the world, and years of his life pass in between scenes sometimes. If you like grand epics, like Les Misérables or Lord Jim, you'll want to check this movie out.

Can't remember ever seeing a picture with as many twists and turns as "Anthony Adverse". In the 60's they would call such a story 'psychedelic', as though the author was influenced by drugs of some sort. So many detours, coincidences, haphazard occurrences, abrupt plot diversions and dead ends. Nevertheless the film is oddly arresting, like a book you can't put down, and here you keep watching and hoping for unification. In a word, it is fascinating without being engrossing.The cast is formidable and uniformly competent - no bad performances in sight. Especially good are March, DeHavilland, Claude Rains (as always), Donald Woods, Edmund Gwenn and the underrated Akim Tamiroff. I was not going to rate it as highly as I did until the graceful and bittersweet ending which redeemed a bizarre novel, the only one Hervey Allen ever wrote.

"Epic" story of an orphan named Anthony Adverse who grows up and makes a series of bad choices that ultimately may cost him the woman he loves. Admittedly, that's an oversimplified summary. I haven't read the novel on which this movie is based. It was a huge best-seller during the Great Depression but has since been largely forgotten. If anyone ever needs proof that just because something is popular today doesn't mean it will stand the test of time, point to Anthony Adverse.On its technical merits, it's a well-made film of its type and era. The score is excellent. The film's strongest asset is a truly exceptional cast. Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland are fine leads with wonderful support from the likes of Edmund Gwenn, Claude Rains, Gale Sondergaard, and many more. This was Sondergaard's film debut and she won the very first Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it. Some of the cast plays to the rafters but if you're a fan of '30s melodramas this probably won't bother you. Others beware. It's an overlong film but I can't say I ever lost interest in it. I do think they could have shortened the first twenty minutes that dealt with Anthony's parents and it wouldn't have hurt the movie any.

I rented a tape of Anthony Adverse mainly to see what kind of performance the Academy was looking for in the first-awarded "best supporting actress" category. Gale Sondergaard's time on camera was actually quite brief and her villainous role required a strictly one-dimensional reading. There were no subtleties whatsoever, nor was there any need in the film for them. Ordinarily, it might seem surprising that her part would receive any attention at all, not to mention a prestigious award, but keeping in mind that Oscars in those days were to a large extent self-congratulatory spectacles passed around from studio to studio year by year, it really isn't surprising. The film was long and episodic, as was the novel, and not particularly good at that. There was the glitz we've come to expect of course with the duels and chases thrown in for good measure. I kept wondering if the novel was written with Hollywood in mind. It's hardly readable nowadays. As far as directorial touches are concerned, it's no wonder that Mervyn LeRoy has long disappeared from anyone's pantheon. The kiddie-car version of France must have excited the Depression audiences. The film is very long and very expensive so perhaps there's something to say about that.