Good movie but grossly overrated

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

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.

Here is a film to rival most 1950s biblical extravaganzas in terms of sheer dullness. Anthony Adverse (1936) is a slow, stately epic with flat characters and trite melodrama. For all its lavishness and beautiful recreation of the late 18th century, it has no depth whatsoever.Top notch actors like Frederic March, Olivia de Havilland, and Claude Rains are unable to give great performances due to being saddled with one dimensional figures whom the audience couldn't really care less about. March seems barely awake during most of his scenes. His character goes through what should have been interesting development, but in the finished product it never comes alive. De Havilland tries to make her character (an ingenue turned opera singer mistress to Napoleon) interesting, but the writing holds her back. Rains' hammy villain is fun, as is Gale Sondergaard's (though how that cartoony performance won an Oscar is beyond me), but they're not enough to save the story from being by-the-numbers dreck.As previously mentioned, the costumes are gorgeous. The sets are large and teeming with detail. You can tell they worked really hard to bring the world of the novel to life, but all that money is for naught when the story is so boring. A definite skip.

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.

Hervey Allen's great blockbuster novel Anthony Adverse, a major seller during the Depression Years provided both its leads, Fredric March and Olivia DeHavilland with some choice roles in their respective careers. The book turned out to be a one hit wonder for its author, but it certainly allowed him to live comfortably. Something like that other blockbuster novel Gone With the Wind did for its author which also gave Olivia DeHavilland an even bigger role in her career.Imagine if you will a Charles Dickens hero like Pip or David Copperfield born in very humble circumstances, but escaping to lead a life of high adventure away from the Dickensian settings of Victorian Great Britain and you've got Anthony Adverse. The supporting characters in the book and film could have also come from Dickens.Young Anthony is the product of an affair between a young officer, Louis Hayward, and the wife of a Spanish diplomat, Anita Louise. Husband Claude Rains kills Hayward in a duel and when his wife dies in childbirth, leaves the infant at a convent. The nuns give him the name of Anthony Adverse as the boy arrives on St. Anthony's Day and is a child of adversity if there ever was one.The grown up Anthony, played by Fredric March is apprenticed to his maternal grandfather Edmund Gwenn who does not know it as doesn't March at first. A sly and cunning housekeeper, Gale Sondergaard in her screen debut, puts the puzzle together, but she's got an agenda of her own which later meshes with the dissipated and dissolute Rains.March also falls for young Olivia DeHavilland who is an aspiring opera singer who also wants some of the finer things in life. Though they marry and have a son, both take different paths on a quest for material security and comfort.Anthony Adverse was a good follow up role for Olivia DeHavilland after Captain Blood. In both she's a crinolined heroine which she was destined to be cast as in her career at Warner Brothers. Still this part has a lot more to it than most of those she was doing at that time in her career.March was 39 when he made Anthony Adverse, still he's a good enough player to gradually age into the part. The story does take place over a long period of years, right into the Napoleonic era from 1773 when Anthony is born.Edmund Gwenn's character is pure Dickens, the Scot's merchant John Bonnyfeather (even the name) could easily have been Fezziwick from A Christmas Carol. Gale Sondergaard as the housekeeper could have been the bloodless Jane Murdstone combined with the vengeful Madame DeFarge.Sondergaard won the first Best Supporting Actress Oscar given out for her performance. It set a pattern of villainous female roles which she played until she got blacklist troubles in the late Forties.The novel was a lengthy one and Warner Brothers should have had something as long as Gone With the Wind in order to be really faithful to the book. Jack Warner didn't want to take a chance, but he did get a product that caught all the main points the author was trying to make.Even today with it's magnificent Erich Wolfgang Korngold score which also won an Oscar and its photography by Tony Gaudio, also a winner Anthony Adverse holds up very well for today's audience. Fans of March and DeHavilland should love it as will others.