Anthony Adverse
Gale Sondergaard made her film debut in "Anthony Adverse" and won an Academy Award in the brand-new category of Best Supporting Actress.,During the duel between Don Luis and Denis Moore, the sword wielded by Moore was "unbated", i.e. his fencing foil was blunted with a protective guard on the tip.,[first title card]
Title Card: Those who are destined to live during times of war and social upheaval are victims of cruel fate ~~ unable to find comfort in the past or peace in the present. They are the spiritual orphans of the world.,Featured in The Making of a Great Motion Picture (1936),I'll Wait For You My Love (Angela's Song)
(uncredited)
Composer: Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Lyrics by Howard Koch (uncredited)
Sung by Carol Ellis (uncredited),"Anthony Adverse" is the kind of long costume drama and epic romance that Academy voters love (with four, it won the most awards for films of 1936, and tied for the most nominations with seven) and studios seem to believe (or rationalize) lend them prestige, especially when their box office doesn't otherwise justify their costs. Technically--classical continuity editing, glossy cinematography with a deep depth of field, large sets, a dramatic score and glamorous costumes--it's the crème de la crème of Hollywood filmmaking at the time. While there's plenty to like about that, the style is so mercantile but lacking the adventurousness suitable to a narrative spanning half a lifetime and three continents, preceding the Declaration of Independence and ending during the Napoleonic Wars. It tends to be prosaic, as is the story adapted from prose--swollen with episodic diversions, contrivances and lurid melodrama, which is ultimately over-long and trite--a spiritless adaptation of a novel, reportedly, concerning a spiritual journey.

Besides some bad rear-projection and the obviousness of some other special effects, this is a pretty picture. I love the "Goodbye, Anthony" shots of Angela (Olivia de Havilland) turning away teary eyed and Anthony (Fredric March) walking down the corridor at the opera. Throughout, camera movement is limited mostly to brief tracking shots, but they flow well. Some shots exploit depth of field well by being framed through windows--look at all those shots where characters stand by such frames--and by focusing on the background but partially blocking it with foreground characters or objects. Although burdened by its convoluted plot and story, the pacing is an adequate average shot length of about 8.7 seconds according to my count. Classical continuity editing is adhered to with plentiful crosscutting, eyeline matches and shot/reverse shots, and the musical score helps, including leitmotifs, which I especially enjoyed for Don Luis (Claude Rains) sword fighting in the film's first love-triangle episode. Music is essentially constant, operatic and even a dominant force in this one, with the film's climax appropriately occurring at the theatre--opera within opera.

Then, there's the episodic, crisscrossing-continents plot that spends nearly two-and-a-half hours following a protagonist from his conception to his being en route to America with his own son and still doesn't resolve everything, including his spiritual restoration. Anthony, indeed, faces much adversity--born of adultery, committing it himself, orphaned, traded from merchant to church to merchant, Cuban outlaw, African slave trader, lost wife, unknown relatives, conniving cartoony enemies trying to thwart him at every turn--but he's still a greedy colonialist in the end, not a man of God like the Catholic priests he befriends. He's an unlikable hero. The reliance on title cards for the passage of time, although they nicely overlay imagery, also contribute to the plodding plot, and there are far too many contrivances where Anthony repeatedly comes in contact conveniently with the right person needed to advance the narrative. Although Rains, cackling and chewing scenery, and Oscar-winner Gale Sondergaard, intermittently seething and grimacing as though preparing to hiss, are somewhat more entertaining than the leads and supposedly-good characters, as they revel in their misdeeds, but they're over-the-top, one-dimensional characterizations. Ultimately, this is also just another hackneyed, morally hypocritical melodrama, marginalizing its servants and slaves, concerning itself with the problems of wealthy people, self-serving in its glamorization of a businessman who, like many of the studio heads of Hollywood, left Europe for America in the pursuit of fortune.

(Note: Among the film's mirror shots, one of the title cards overlays young Anthony's reflection in water, and a pivotal scene turns on slave-trader Anthony being disgusted seeing himself in a mirror. By contrast, an earlier composite shot where Denis sees Don Luis reflected in his wine glass is rather poorly done.),