Anthony Adverse

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.

Frederic March is "Anthony Adverse" in this 1936 film that also stars Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Anita Louise Gail Sondergaard, Donald Woods, Edmund Gwenn and Louis Hayward.

Anita Louise and Hayward both have small roles as illicit lovers in the beginning of the film - she's married to Marquis de Luis (Claude Rains) and dies giving birth to a son by Denis (Hayward). The evil marquis drops the baby off at a convent, where he lives until he is 10 years old. Then he is adopted by a merchant, Mr. Bonnyfeather (Gwenn), who happens to be his grandfather.

Bonnyfeather sees his daughter in the boy's (Billy Mauch) angelic face. This beautiful little boy grows up to be a blond Frederic March, who has been given the name Anthony Adverse. He's in love with Angela (de Havilland), an aspiring opera singer, but goes to Africa to recover his grandfather's fortune rather than stay with her. There he becomes involved in slave trading. When he returns, things have changed for Angela - and for him.

The film is based on a best-selling book, and I have to agree that both the film and the book seem forgotten today, as is the director, Mervyn Leroy. March is wrong for the role - he doesn't convey enough charisma, for one thing - certainly Brian Aherne or Errol Flynn would have been much more compelling. March was a wonderful actor but he needed a strong director to get him away from being "stagy," and this type of role was never his métier anyway.

The gorgeous ingénue de Havilland gives a lovely performance, but the standouts are the villains - Sondergaard, as Bonnyfeather's housekeeper and Claude Rains as the marquis.

TCM gives this movie very high stars, probably based on the fact that it won four Oscars (one for Sondergaard who doesn't do much but look snide) and that it was nominated for Best Picture in 1936. The pickings must have been slim.

This is a good film, with an exciting carriage chase in the mountains and some brutal scenes of slave trading, but it's hard to keep interested in it. Adverse isn't terribly likable, for one thing. It's the story of a man and how he is molded into a human being by two priests and a woman. It's a lofty idea that doesn't quite make it onto the screen.

Today both Hervey Allen and his novel, Anthony Adverse, are all but forgotten, as is the 1936 Mervyn Leroy adaptation. Allen has never been granted a biography or a critical study( one could also say the same thing about Mervyn Leroy) while both the novel and the film are dismissed as over blown, prolix "white elephants". This is not entirely fair. Allens 1200 page colossus was the greatest best seller of its day, and was only surpassed when Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With The Wind, while Leroys film isn't bad. In fact it is pretty good, in its own way. First of all, Leroy managed to condense Allens erudite, baroque epic into the space of a two -hour, black and white film. In doing so, he managed to retain most of the novels elaborate religious symbolism( Allen seems to have been either a Lapsed, but still affectionate Catholic or an Episcopalian of the "high church " variety with a fascination with Priests, The Virgin Mary, and Crucifixion symbols), all of the colorful characters( Allen seems to have ransacked Tolstoy, Dickens, Dumas, and Balzac for ideas.), and most of the action.( the carriage chase in the Alps is one of the great "scenes" of thirties cinema). The film has also retained the novels plot, or most of it. One would not know, for example, that the hero ends up dying rather UNheroically in Texas sometime in the early eighteen twenties, or that the book has a truly bizarre, ambiguous epilogue in which "white trash" settlers of Texas from Missouri stumble across the statuette of the virgin and the ruins of Adverses estate.The great problem with the book -and with the film- is that Anthony Adverse is NOT a heroic figure. He is played upon, not player, a passive, frequently humiliated victim of adversity. Clearly, Allen wanted to make him a philosophical hero, not a swashbuckler. He is a clerk, for heavens sake. Most of the time, he is engaged in capitalist transactions of some sort, instead of sword-play. ( indeed, the only sword- play in the movie is between the villainous Don Luis and Anthony's father.)The basic action is simple. One Priest gives Anthony a mind,by teaching him. Another gives him a soul, by reminding him that slavery is a sin( Incidentally, the film is a powerful indictment of slavery and racism). Finally, Olivia De Havillands character gives him a heart, by introducing him to the son he never knew he had. March-a very fine actor at his best- seems curiously flat and passive in the role of Adverse. The truly great performances are by Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard as the over the top super-villains. Rains exhudes decadence, arrogance and sadism, while Sondergaard won the first best supporting actress Oscar, simply by grinning satanically for two hours.

Hervey Allen (1889-1949) spun quite an elaborate, sweeping 18th-19th century yarn in the form of a gigantic novel, published in 1933, called "Anthony Adverse." It became a best-seller, and three years later Warner Bros. brought it to the screen, directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

The film was very long, comprehensive, and romanitc, in Allen's quasi-Dumas-Dickens-Tolstoy style.

Heading the cast were four of the screen's finest actors, leading players Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland; and supporting character players Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard.

Providing the musical score was the legendary Eric Wolfgang Korngold (with orchestrations by Hugo Friedhofer) and classic masque and operatic excerpts by Monteverdi and Francetti.

The 141-minute film today seems much longer than it is, as we follow Anthony's detailed "adventures" in Europe, Cuba, and Africa, with America targeted as a final future destination. The whole production, which was considered of blockbuster size in 1933 (and still looks impressive), emerges more like a historic relic that is occasionally pulled from a treasure cabinet, to observe and ponder.

The whole feel of the film now seems dated and out-of-fashion, but then that's what most memorabilia is. It's merely dusted it off, polished, felt for the moment, then replaced along side other treasured pieces from the past.

Fredric March, usually such a fine actor, was unable to give more than a wooden performance in the title role of 'Anthony Adverse'. Warner Bros. would have been better off using their up-and-coming new star, Errol Flynn, for this one--giving us the chance to see him paired once again with Olivia de Havilland. There are no sparks between March and de Havilland--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. Some of the acting styles seem dated, as are the titles that connect the time span. The best-seller was a bulky 1,200 pages from which the scriptwriter trimmed the story down considerably, excluding whole segments of the book and still ending up with a film well over two hours. Strange how the celebrated novel is barely remembered today. The opera scenes with Olivia de Havilland are interesting. She was a radiant young beauty at the time but could have used a better technique in her lip sync to the lyrics. Interesting historical drama of the Napoleonic era with Rains and Sondergaard giving the best performances. I've written articles on both of them for CLASSIC IMAGES, inspired by their performances in this film.