Cheap Anthony Adverse (Video) (Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland) (Mervyn LeRoy, Michael Curtiz) Price

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Customer Reviews 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.

A waste of talent and money
Everytime I cast a glance at an old copy of Hervey Allen's "Anthony Adverse" in my father's library I ask myself: to read or not to read? Now my question has been answered when this film was brodcast. At the start it looks very promising. Claude Rains enjoys himself in the role of a conceited nobleman. The peacock turns into a cuckold. He kills his rival in a duel and puts the fruit of his wife's sin away. Little Anthony Adverse grows up in a convent. Aged 10, the angel-faced boy serves an apprenticeship in his grandfather's household...Sounds like rollicking good fun a la "Tom Jones"? No chance: The boy grows up to become Fredric March. The actor was so annoyed at the habit of his studio to cast him mostly in historic parts that he wears the constant expression of a man so displeased with the dish they served him that he summoned the waiter to complain...We get to see Italy as imagined by a Hollywood art-director: neglected backyards with goats. His grandfather sends him to Havana. No time to marry his sweetheart Angela (Olivia de Havilland), and her farewell-letter is literally "gone with the wind".

Now comes the part of the film others may call "politically incorrect". I call it repellent: Anthony witnesses the whipping of a slave. He saves the priest who tried to prevent it. A "breach of etiquette" in the eyes of his new business-partners: slave-traders. Anthony himself becomes one. I feel it is my duty to warn parents who think that this is just a harmless old history film: the most repugnant scene shows the sale of human flesh - shot by the cameraman, in a flight of fancy, from between the spread legs of one of the victims. Anthony returns to Europe and finds Angela and their son. Angela has become a famous opera-singer and the mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte. Since a man of such impeccable character as Anthony can not marry a woman with a past she renounces her rights to the child who will follow the footsteps of his father...

Such a waste of talent and money! Such expensive sets for scenes that last no longer than one or two minutes...The film runs like a quick thumb through the novel. Needless to say, neither suspense nor empathy can evolve from this story. There is a sheet-anchor: the supporting cast. Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Gale Sondergaard, Edmond Gwenn. But March's monotonous acting crushes the film. I'm glad to have seen it, though. I wasted just two hours of my life. Reading the novel might have cost me two weeks...

Astonishing Mentality in This "Classic"
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.