Anthony Adverse. 1936. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

(4/?/01-4/11/01)

Anthony Adverse is a piece of good old-fashioned moviemaking. It has a baroque sweep to it across time and space. It is a beautiful production to look at and admire and it is enjoyable to sit there in the company of old friends like Claude Rains, Olivia de Havilland, Fredric March, Edmund Gwenn and Gale Sondergaard. I think perhaps that this film is notable as a vehicle on which to hang the production values and performances rather than as a film in itself.

It's an old-fashioned story, something from a nineteenth-century novel. A nobleman's young wife has an illegitimate child and dies. The nobleman leaves the child at a convent and tells the world that the baby died. The child is raised as an apprentice by his grandfather who makes him his heir, except that the second in line for the inheritance, a scheming mistress, attempts to keep him from claiming it. The hero is separated from his beloved on their wedding day and returns to search for her. By the time he finds her she becomes the mistress of a powerful man--Napoleon, no less--and the hero leaves for the new world with his newly-discovered son. In between these events he goes to Africa and gets involved with slave-trading.

That's a hell of a lot for one movie. And, to be honest, it didn't make that deep of an impression, although it is an enjoyable film to sit through. I think it faltered towards the end when Claude Rains attempts to kill March on the road and when Olivia de Havilland becomes Napoleon's mistress. And the ending is a letdown. Anthony Adverse goes through all these ordeals and trials and doesn't even get the girl at the end. The ending does have some truth in it, I suppose, but somehow it just didn't seem to fit the film.

The scenes in Africa seemed a bit much as well, but I could see thatit was Anthony's coming to knowledge of evil, especially of the capacity for evil within himself or shadow side, and he comes back into civilization a more mature person. Perhaps it is even the myth of the "fall of man." So that part seemed appropriate after all to this larger-than-life canvas.

Olivia de Havilland didn't impress me as the aspiring opera singer, especially as her singing was so obviously--perhaps I should say blatantly--dubbed. Fredric March was earnest as Anthony, but didn't really grab my attention. Claude Rains was appropriately nasty as the villain, yet I could understand him as an aging man married to a beautiful young woman who doesn't love him. Gale Sondergaard was nasty and villainous, though I couldn't quite understand kindly Edmund Gwenn succumbing to her wiles. As for Edmund Gwenn, he had the most touching scene in the whole film when he is told that her daughter is dead, although he isn't all that interesting later on.