Customer Reviews

Anthony Adverse [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Engrossing tale of an orphaned boy who grows into manhood, played by Fredric March (Anthony Adverse), without knowing his real origins, and all the adventures he has to go through, before finding "himself", what truly matters in life and what is worth fighting for...one's morals, which cannot be "traded" for power or money...all this he learns thanks to two priests: Father Xavier (Henry O'Neill) who raises him from a baby until he turns 10 years old; Father Francois (Pedro de Córdoba), a clergyman who saves March from "himself" and his sweetheart, Angela (a lovely, beautiful, young, luminous Olivia de Havilland).

Great score by masterful Erich Wolfgang Korngold, great scenarios, clothes, settings (the film spans from 1773, when Louis XV of France was King until the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte). The film is set in France, Spain, the Alps, Northern Italy, Cuba, Africa...and the period detail and the sets are awesome, thanks to master Anton Grot.

An uniformly great cast headed by one of my all time fave actors: Fredric March. Also in it , talented Olivia de Havilland, at the beginning of her career, the great Claude Rains as an evil Marquis, the equally evil Gale Sondergaard (who won the first Supporting Actress Academy Award for her nasty characterization of Gwenn's ambitious housekeeper, kind of roles she would repeat later in such films as Tyrone Power's "The Mark of Zorro"), lovely Anita Louise as our hero's mother "in distress", a young Louis Hayward as the hero's father, Edmund Gwenn as the hero's grandfather, Donald Woods as the hero's pal, Akim Tamiroff as a florid Cuban, Steffi Duna as a sultry native, and O'Neill and de Córdoba as the two "guiding" priests in March's life etc.

One can see that Warner Brothers spent a lot of money in this lavish costume epic, that lasts around 2 hours 15 minutes. Nevertheless, in spite of its length it's highly entertaining and enjoyable.

Although not perfect and certainly not as good as "The Sea Hawk", "Captain Blood" or "The Adventures of Robin Hood"...still on the greatest rousing adventure films of the 1930's, a blockbuster that deserves five stars. The quality of the print is excellent.

A must for adventure films fans!

ANTHONY ADVERSE is a good movie with lots of adventure and romance. It has a strong cast boasting some of the best actors from the pre-World War II era such as Fredric March, Olivia de Haviland, Claude Rains, Louis Hayward and Akim Tamiroff. Much is said about the miscasting of Fredric March but he looks suitable enough to me in the role of Anthony Adverse.

Gale Sondergaard collected an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The film also won Oscars for Cinematography, Score and Editing as well as Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Art Direction and Assistant Director (William Cannon).

Mervyn Leroy directed some classic movies including LITTLE CAESAR and MISTER ROBERTS. Although not quite in that same lofty category, ANTHONY ADVERSE certainly merited all of the awards and recognition it managed to garner in 1936. The main competition for Oscars in that year came from THE GREAT ZIEGFIELD, THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR and MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN.

I had looked forward to seeing this movie being a fan of nearly all of the cast but I was taken aback by some of the goings on here!! First the two leads are badly cast. Fredric March was almost forty and looked it yet he plays a teenager and very young man for much of the picture with a ridiculous blond wig (to "resemble" his mother) on top of everything. Olivia DeHavilland isn't believable at all as a poor Spanish girl. These are both wonderful actors and they try their best but still are wanting. The mentality of this picture is pretty amazing in 2003. One of March's "adventures" includes slave trading (!!) and despite concerned words from his priest friend this stint in his life is pretty much condoned.

The ending is jaw-dropping too (don't read this paragraph if you want to be surprised by the ending) with the villains unpunished and poor Olivia, forced into being a kept woman by her abandonment (kept by Napoleon no less!) turning down the chance to be permanently reunited with Fredric after a brief happy reunion so that Frederic won't have to have a "fallen woman" for a wife and plan that Freddy agrees with surprisingly fast considered how he has supposed to have been pining for her for years.

The supporting cast is excellent and there are two surprises. Warners starlet Anita Louise completely dominates the first 20 minutes of the movie and she is excellent. Anita was usually cast in throwaway second lead parts. And then there is the magnificent character actress Gale Sondergaard. She won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this picture and I really looked forward to seeing her in it. What a shock to see her part is a small bit of no real consequence and in no way a showcase for her talents. She certainly deserved the award for other films but this is hardly one of her best performances.

That ending to the March/DeHavilland match really floored me and I would have liked this picture a lot better had the movie had as much sympathy to Mrs. Adverse's plight as it did to Mr. Adverse.

whenever i watch 'anthony adverse' on television, i wonder why warner brothers sought to film it.

for the many things that are huge advantages in this film, it boasts equally large disavantages.

for its list of advantages, one has to start with olivia de havilland. her part is woefully small, yet knowing it would be a prestige picture (?), bette davis supposedly wanted it. but davis was greedy. if jack warner had bought the rights to 'the hairy ape' she would have wanted the lead in that. no matter--de havilland is gorgeous and dewy. she is everything the role needs. she is matched by anita louise as the tragic maria, mother of the title character who dies in childbirth. and they have male beauty counterparts in louis hayward and donald woods.

for out and out acting, the film has claude rains and gale sondergaard as the scheming lovers that lust for the fortunes of bonnyfeather.

then there is the hyper-romantic score by erich wolfgang korngold, which is an experience in itself. it is helped along by opera sequences, one of which was composed by hugo friedhofer and it's hauntingly beautiful. plus the set design, the camera work and the costumes are lush.

so why in the world did the powers at warners give the lead to fredric march? march, handsome as he was, does not make sense in this role until the end. it wwould have been so much better to borrow tyrone power or coach the performance from errol flynn. flynn definitely could have worked this role out.

and on a minor note, there is a minor character during the cuba sequence that desperately needed to be played by either fredi washington or nina mae mckinney. or even theresa harris--with fear of having a white actor playing scenes of lust with a black actress. tough!!! the actress that plays this role is not good. she's wooden and she's got this middle european accent that is detrimental to the drama at this point.

Surely, the studio that had Errol Flynn under contract could have chosen a more dashing romantic lead for ANTHONY ADVERSE.

As it is, Fredric March, usually such a fine actor, was unable to give more than a leaden performance in the title role. He has never appeared less enthusiastic and does a completely uninspired job as the hero. Sad to say, there are no sparks between March and de Havilland (as Angela)--and furthermore, he seems too old for the role despite clever make-up attempts to make him look suitable.

But aside from the fact that he is miscast, there is a lot to admire about the film itself. For one thing, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard make the most memorable pair of villains ever seen in a 1930s movie. The sequence where they cause a coach and driver to go off a cliff is given an extra punch by their dialog. "He was my favorite coachman," says Rains dryly. "The coach was rather handy too," quips Sondergaard. Giving other outstanding performances are Edmund Gwenn, Louis Hayward, Anita Louise, Donald Woods and Akim Tamiroff. Edmund Gwenn is particularly touching as Mr. Bonnyfeather.

Some of the acting styles seem dated, as are the titles that connect the time span. It must have been quite a job to trim the story down to a little over two hours. The best-seller was a bulky 1,200, forcing the scriptwriter to exclude whole segments of the book. Strange how the celebrated novel by Hervey Allen is barely remembered today.

Olivia de Havilland makes a gorgeous Angela in one of her earliest roles and all of the opera scenes are interesting to watch but she is not quite credible as Napoleon's mistress. The story is a cumbersome one and the pace, under Mervyn LeRoy's direction, is rather slow. Nevertheless, it's an interesting historical drama of the Napoleonic era with Rains and Sondergaard giving the best performances. I've written articles on both Raines and Sondergaard, published in CLASSIC IMAGES, inspired by their work in this film. Sondergaard went on to win Best Supporting Actress for her job as Faith, the cunningly evil housekeeper.

And last, but not least, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's rich background score adds dimension to every aspect of the story, fully justifying the Oscar for Best Original Score of 1936.

Summing up: Some weaknesses, but still an important film from the Golden Age of movies.

This is generally a mediocre movie based, I presume, on a mediocre book. At first I thought that it seemed a lot like an Alexander Dumas type of plot but it got too side-tracked by a series of scenes in Havana and Africa. I suspect the book may have laid out those events in a more meaningful manner but the movie certainly compressed into irrelevence. Better to have jetisonned the segment in Africa. After all, a voyage to the New World and back after taking care of business would have been enough time to facilitate the purpose in the plot. The ending of the movie made a weak statement and was not the ending that should have been. Too much was left unexplained but, by then we lost patience with the film anyway.

I rated this movie a notch higher than I would have because of one scene that greatly impressed me. The scene in which our hero, Anthony Adverse, was born was a classic. The subtle yet brilliant statement that this superbly directed scene made was so excellent that I played it over and over. I don't know if Mervyn Leroy or Michael Curtiz gets the credit for this one but it was worth watching the movie. The rest was downhill.

"Anthony Adverse" is a blockbuster 1936 film that looks more like a 1950s blockbuster. The film takes us from Italy to Cuba to Africa and to France with a stunning cast of first class actors and a remarkably talented production crew. Love, adultery, betrayal, death, slavery, beatings, sex, God, duels, and Napoleon Bonaparte all go to make a costume drama that is clearly ahead of its time.

The film is based on the 1200 page 1933 novel of the same name by Hervey Allen (1889-1949). It was adapted for the screen by Sheridan Gibney (1903-88) who won 2 Oscars for his work on "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936).

The great Fredric March (1897-1975) stars as Anthony. March won an Oscar for "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931) and "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), and earned three more nominations. He won the Golden Globe for "Death of a Salesman" (1951) and earned two more nominations. He won two Tonys ("Years Ago" and "Long Days Journey Into Night"). He appeared in more than 50 films between 1921 and 1973. Personally I think his best performance was as Matthew Brady in "Inherit the Wind" (1960).

March manages to play the youthful Anthony and right before our eyes he ages and matures. It's a great bit of makeup and acting. Of course, bear in mind, March made a similar transformation in "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" just a few years earlier. But March is not alone. Olivia deHavilland and Claude Rains also age convincingly in the film.

Edmund Gwenn (1877-1959) plays Anthony's benefactor (and unknown to him, his blood grandfather). Gwenn will forever be everyone's Santa Claus from his Oscar winning performance in "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947), but this was only one of nearly 100 films he made, including "Mister 880" (1950), "Les Miserables" (1952), "Them" (1954), Sylvia Scarlett" (1935), and "A Yank at Oxford" (1938). Gwenn belongs to that small group of fat unattractive men who became stars. He does a wonderful job as an elderly man questioning what his life's work will account for.

Claude Rains was one of the greatest actors of the 20th century and a personal favorite of his often co-star, Bette Davis. He appeared in only a few dozen films, but was nominated 4 times for an Oscar ("Notorious" in 1946, "Mr. Skeffington" in 1944, "Casablanca" in 1942, and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in 1939) although many people remember him best for "The Invisible Man" (1933) or "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938). Rains is his usual villainous self, and we can only wish he had more screen time.

Olivia deHavilland (1916) plays Anthony's love interest. She is young and radiant. For her work in "The Snake Pit" she won Best Actress by the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics, and the Venice Film festival. She was remarkable in so many films - "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938), "GWTW" (1939), and "The Heiress" (1949), for which she won her second academy award (her first was in 1947 for "To Each How Own"). While she made 9 films with Errol Flynn between 1938 and 1943, it's her work outside Flynn for which she received the most accolades.

Gale Sondergaard (1899-1985) plays Gwenn's maid and eventually Rain's wife. For her debut in this film she won the very first "Supporting Actress" Oscar and would be nominated again in 1946 for "Anna and the King of Siam". Her film career was ruined in the HUAC witch hunt because of the suspected involvement of her husband, but she transitioned to TV in the late 60s.

Other members of the cast include Louis Hayward and Anita Louise as Anthony's parents, Akim Tamiroff and Donald Woods.

Mervyn LeRoy (1900-87) directs. He started out directing with "Little Caesar" (1931) and went on to achieve an Oscar nomination for "Random Harvest" (1942) and DGA nominations for "Quo Vadis" (1951), "Mister Roberts" (1955) and "A Majority of One" (1961) and a Golden Globe nomination for "Gypsy" (1962). Among the nearly 80 films he directed were "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932), "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944).

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) composed. Korngold made more than 20 films, was nominated 3 times for an Oscar and won once ("Robin Hood" in 1938). He did most of Errol Flynn's swashbucklers.

In 1936 Jean Harlow had 3 films in the top 20 - "Libeled Lady" Spencer Tracy, William Powell, and Myrna Loy), "Wife vs. Secretary" (Gable and Loy), and "Suzy" (Cary Grant). The other big money winners were "San Francisco" (Gable), "The Great Ziegfeld" (Powell and Loy), "Modern Times" (Chaplin), and "Charge of the Light Brigade" (Flynn and de Havilland). The big Oscar winner was "The Great Ziegfeld" (Picture, Best Actress). Other notable films from that year were "The Petrified Forest" (Bogart), "Romeo and Juliette" (Shearer and Howard), "Dodsworth" (Walter Huston) and Fritz Lang's "Fury".

The film won 4 Oscars (Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Music) and was nominated for 3 more (Picture, Art Direction, Asst. Director). But the NY Times found it "a bulky, rambling and indecisive photoplay" and said "its philosophy is vague, its characterization blurred and its story so loosely knit and episodic that its telling seems interminable." They praised deHavilland ("winsome") and Rains ("played to perfection") but disliked March ("spiritless"). Pauline Kael in The New Yorker was of a similar mind.

But don't let these critics dissuade you from a marvelous film. The philosophy, rather than being "vague" is in your face - there are more important things than power and money, and a man can arise above "adversity" to achieve his goals if he is true to his heart. And while it is long at 2+ hours, it is based on a 1200 page novel, so one has to expect some degree of length. But the length is a gift. We get to see the slave trade in Cuba and Africa, travel to the South of France and watch a stagecoach tumble off a mountain on the road to Paris, opera houses and African huts, etc. It's a true travel logue.

Bottom line - If you like spectacle and great production values in a 1930s film, along with fine acting and a script with a valuable message, this one is for you.

"Anthony Adverse" is a lot more convoluted a film than I was given to understand. The other reviewer has given a very explicit account of the plot, so I needn't do that. What I'll concentrate on then are the actual performances of the players. Best in show: Claude Rains as the foppish Don Luis. Now, we're supposed to think him evil, but I beg to differ. After all, how would you feel if your young bride went and got pregnant before you could even consumate the marriage? No, I think he was entirely justified in being angry and in wanting to exact revenge on the lover. Fredric March is Anthony himself, and he does seem a little too settled to be the fellow he purports to be. I think he spends far too much of the picture in Africa doing his slave trading, and I was at something of a loss to understand why he was supposed to remain a sympathetic character after all that. Gale Sondergaard looks surprisingly pretty, even though we're supposed to dislike her since she's evil. However, I could understand her motives too, although she's not as justified as Claude Rains. I must observe, though, that there's not really one proper role model for women in this whole picture. All of them are deceitful: Anthony's mother is making a cuckcold of Claude Rains, Olivia de Havilland cares more about her opera career than making sure she unites with her new husband and then deceives him years later; Gale Sondergaard has been fooling old Edmund Gwenn for years and hiding Anthony's whereabouts from him. So I guess the message is, Women are bad news and you can't trust them, at least if you're a man. Kind of bloviated, but okay escapism for a while.