Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Cineanalyst "Anthony Adverse" is the kind of long costume drama and epic romance that Academy voters love (with four, it won the most awards for films of 1936, and tied for the most nominations with seven) and studios seem to believe (or rationalize) lend them prestige, especially when their box office doesn't otherwise justify their costs. Technically--classical continuity editing, glossy cinematography with a deep depth of field, large sets, a dramatic score and glamorous costumes--it's the crème de la crème of Hollywood filmmaking at the time. While there's plenty to like about that, the style is so mercantile but lacking the adventurousness suitable to a narrative spanning half a lifetime and three continents, preceding the Declaration of Independence and ending during the Napoleonic Wars. It tends to be prosaic, as is the story adapted from prose--swollen with episodic diversions, contrivances and lurid melodrama, which is ultimately over-long and trite--a spiritless adaptation of a novel, reportedly, concerning a spiritual journey.Besides some bad rear-projection and the obviousness of some other special effects, this is a pretty picture. I love the "Goodbye, Anthony" shots of Angela (Olivia de Havilland) turning away teary eyed and Anthony (Fredric March) walking down the corridor at the opera. Throughout, camera movement is limited mostly to brief tracking shots, but they flow well. Some shots exploit depth of field well by being framed through windows--look at all those shots where characters stand by such frames--and by focusing on the background but partially blocking it with foreground characters or objects. Although burdened by its convoluted plot and story, the pacing is an adequate average shot length of about 8.7 seconds according to my count. Classical continuity editing is adhered to with plentiful crosscutting, eyeline matches and shot/reverse shots, and the musical score helps, including leitmotifs, which I especially enjoyed for Don Luis (Claude Rains) sword fighting in the film's first love-triangle episode. Music is essentially constant, operatic and even a dominant force in this one, with the film's climax appropriately occurring at the theatre--opera within opera.Then, there's the episodic, crisscrossing-continents plot that spends nearly two-and-a-half hours following a protagonist from his conception to his being en route to America with his own son and still doesn't resolve everything, including his spiritual restoration. Anthony, indeed, faces much adversity--born of adultery, committing it himself, orphaned, traded from merchant to church to merchant, Cuban outlaw, African slave trader, lost wife, unknown relatives, conniving cartoony enemies trying to thwart him at every turn--but he's still a greedy colonialist in the end, not a man of God like the Catholic priests he befriends. He's an unlikable hero. The reliance on title cards for the passage of time, although they nicely overlay imagery, also contribute to the plodding plot, and there are far too many contrivances where Anthony repeatedly comes in contact conveniently with the right person needed to advance the narrative. Although Rains, cackling and chewing scenery, and Oscar-winner Gale Sondergaard, intermittently seething and grimacing as though preparing to hiss, are somewhat more entertaining than the leads and supposedly-good characters, as they revel in their misdeeds, but they're over-the-top, one-dimensional characterizations. Ultimately, this is also just another hackneyed, morally hypocritical melodrama, marginalizing its servants and slaves, concerning itself with the problems of wealthy people, self-serving in its glamorization of a businessman who, like many of the studio heads of Hollywood, left Europe for America in the pursuit of fortune.(Note: Among the film's mirror shots, one of the title cards overlays young Anthony's reflection in water, and a pivotal scene turns on slave-trader Anthony being disgusted seeing himself in a mirror. By contrast, an earlier composite shot where Denis sees Don Luis reflected in his wine glass is rather poorly done.)

GManfred 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.

Robert J. Maxwell This jumbo story of a man's ups and downs in Napoleonic Europe -- and Cuba and Africa -- appeared as a novel in the depths of the Great Depression, when people must have had a lot of time to read. I doubt that it's much read today because its appeal is for such a limited audience. The film adapted from it is more than two hours long and pretty dull.It was directed by a seasoned pro but you wouldn't know it. The casting and editing are clumsy, and everyone except Anthony Adverse (Frederick March) overacts. You expect a bit of ham from performers like J. Carrol Naish but not from the delicate and beautiful Olivia De Havilland. (Wardrobe has at least given her some daring necklines, which didn't happen often.) The plot? An illegitimate boy starts out with nothing, grows up, gains power and wealth, realizes it doesn't mean much, and takes off with his son to start a new life in a New World.Casting got the two leads right. March and De Havilland look right for their parts. But the rest of the cast -- well. As is usual in these epics, there are good people and bad people. Aside from a few harmless comics. You know how you can tell the good from the bad here? The good look good; the bad look ugly. Take the greedy housekeeper in the millionaire's estate, Gail Sondergaard. Her every smile is an evil sneer. Those teeth could gnaw their way through an anchor chain in no time. She does her best to cheat March out of his inheritance and, failing that, she marries a Spanish Count by means of extortion.A bonus point for the score. When you get tired of watching Frederick March wrestling with his conscience, or the supporting players conniving to screw up his life, you can listen to Eric Wolfgang Korngold's magnificent music.

blanche-2 Frederic March is "Anthony Adverse" in this 1936 film that also stars Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Anita Louise Gail Sondergaard, Donald Woods, Edmund Gwenn and Louis Hayward. Anita Louise and Hayward both have small roles as illicit lovers in the beginning of the film - she's married to Marquis de Luis (Claude Rains) and dies giving birth to a son by Denis (Hayward). The evil marquis drops the baby off at a convent, where he lives until he is 10 years old. Then he is adopted by a merchant, Mr. Bonnyfeather (Gwenn), who happens to be his grandfather. Bonnyfeather sees his daughter in the boy's (Billy Mauch) angelic face. This beautiful little boy grows up to be a blond Frederic March, who has been given the name Anthony Adverse. He's in love with Angela (de Havilland), an aspiring opera singer, but goes to Africa to recover his grandfather's fortune rather than stay with her. There he becomes involved in slave trading. When he returns, things have changed for Angela - and for him.The film is based on a best-selling book, and I have to agree that both the film and the book seem forgotten today, as is the director, Mervyn Leroy. March is wrong for the role - he doesn't convey enough charisma, for one thing - certainly Brian Aherne or Errol Flynn would have been much more compelling. March was a wonderful actor but he needed a strong director to get him away from being "stagy," and this type of role was never his métier anyway. The gorgeous ingénue de Havilland gives a lovely performance, but the standouts are the villains - Sondergaard, as Bonnyfeather's housekeeper and Claude Rains as the marquis.TCM gives this movie very high stars, probably based on the fact that it won four Oscars (one for Sondergaard who doesn't do much but look snide) and that it was nominated for Best Picture in 1936. The pickings must have been slim. This is a good film, with an exciting carriage chase in the mountains and some brutal scenes of slave trading, but it's hard to keep interested in it. Adverse isn't terribly likable, for one thing. It's the story of a man and how he is molded into a human being by two priests and a woman. It's a lofty idea that doesn't quite make it onto the screen.