Themes: Runaways, Heroic Mission, Righting the Wronged
Main Cast: Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Edmund Gwenn, Claude Rains, Anita Louise
Release Year: 1936
Country: US
Run Time: 141 minutes
Plot
When David O. Selznick produced the film version of the 1000-plus page novel Gone with the Wind, he declared he could not make a film running any less than 222 minutes. When Warner Bros. adapted the even longer Hervey Allen best-seller Anthony Adverse, the studio managed to pack everything--except the most censorable passages, which had made Allen's novel a best-seller in the first place--into 139 minutes. Surprisingly, the film version of Anthony Adverse moves rather smoothly, though it is nowhere near as involving (or as much fun) as Gone with the Wind. Fredric March stars as Anthony Adverse, the illegitimate offspring of Anita Louise, the wife of Spanish nobleman Claude Rains. When Adverse comes of age, he inherits the prosperous business run by his kindly foster father Edmund Gwenn, which he abandons for an aimless trip around the world after his heart is broken by childhood sweetheart Olivia De Havilland. Sinking deeper into the morass of alcohol and degeneracy in the West Indies, Adverse is regenerated when he is reunited with De Havilland, now the mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte. Suddenly enervated, Adverse battles the efforts of Claude Rains and Gwenn's duplicitous former assistant Gale Sondergaard to take over Gwenn's business. Along the way, he learns that Gwenn was actually his grandfather and that De Havilland has born him a son (Scotty Beckett). Instead of dying, as he does in the novel, Anthony Adverse takes his son to America to start life anew. Whew! Though no award winner itself, Anthony Adverse enabled Gale Sondergaard to win the first-ever "best supporting actress" Oscar. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Anton Grot - Art Director, Dwight Franklin - Consultant/advisor, Milo Anderson - Costume Designer, Mervyn LeRoy - Director, Ralph Dawson - Editor, Erich Wolfgang Korngold - Composer (Music Score), Leo F. Forbstein - Musical Direction/Supervision, Perc Westmore - Makeup, Tony Gaudio - Cinematographer, Henry Blanke - Producer, Jack L. Warner - Producer, Fred Jackman, Sr. - Special Effects, Dwight Franklin - Technical Advisor, Sheridan Gibney - Screenwriter, Hervey Allen - Book Author
Anthony Adverse is a 1936 Americandrama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy. The screenplay by Sheridan Gibney is based on the sprawling 1,224-page novel of the same title by Hervey Allen. Neither Michael Curtiz, who assisted with the direction, nor Milton Krims, who contributed to the script, received on-screen credit for their work.
The plot of the epiccostume drama follows the globe-trotting adventures of the title character, the illegitimate offspring of Maria Bonnyfeather, the wife of the cruel and devious middle-aged nobleman Marquis Don Luis, and Denis Moore. When he learns of his wife's affair, Don Luis challenges her lover to a duel. Denis is killed, and shortly thereafter Maria dies in childbirth. Don Luis leaves the infant at a convent, where the nuns christen him Anthony, and lies to wealthy merchant John Bonnyfeather, Maria's father, telling him that the infant is also dead. Ten years later, completely by coincidence, the child is apprenticed to Bonnyfeather, his real grandfather, who discovers his relationship to the boy but keeps it a secret from him. He gives the boy the surname Adverse in acknowledgement of the difficult life he has led.
As an adult, Anthony falls in love with Angela Giuseppe, the cook's daughter, and the couple weds. Soon after the ceremony, Anthony departs for Havana to save Bonnyfeather's fortune. The note Angela leaves Anthony is blown away and he is unaware that she has gone to another city. Instead, assuming he has abandoned her, she pursues a career as an opera singer. Anthony leaves Cuba for Africa, where he becomes corrupted by his involvement with the slave trade. He is redeemed by his friendship with Brother François, and following the friar's death he returns to Italy to find Bonnyfeather has died and his housekeeper, Faith Paleologus (now married to Don Luis), will inherit the man's estate fortune unless Anthony goes to Paris to claim his inheritance.
In Paris, Anthony is reunited with his friend, prominent banker Vincent Nolte, whom he saves from bankruptcy by giving him his fortune. Through the intercession of impressario Debrulle, Anthony finds Angela and discovers she bore him a son. She fails to reveal she is Mlle. Georges, a famous opera star and the mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte. When Anthony learns her secret, he departs for America with his son in search of a better life.
In his review in the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent described the film as "a bulky, rambling and indecisive photoplay which has not merely taken liberties with the letter of the original but with its spirit . . . For all its sprawling length, [the novel] was cohesive and well rounded. Most of its picaresque quality has been lost in the screen version; its philosophy is vague, its characterization blurred and its story so loosely knit and episodic that its telling seems interminable." [1]
Historian Bob Packett recommended this film in January 2008 for its scene in which a smaller vessel defeats a larger one through exploitation of the tactics of war at sea.
In culture
The initial theme of the second movement of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's violin concerto was drawn from the music he composed for this film.
