Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

People loved the book; so they made the movie. It's about rich people in the agony of only having dozens of servants and anything they want. Oh, the horror. It's pretty much done the way you would figure they would do it on Broadway -- lots of costumes (not clothes, but full buffoonish costumes), overacted, overemoted, and plain slow as heck. See this movie if your heart breaks for rich people who only soil their hands when they are beating servants. Miss it if Bowling for Dollars is on a competing channel.

Can't remember ever seeing a picture with as many twists and turns as "Anthony Adverse". In the 60's they would call such a story 'psychedelic', as though the author was influenced by drugs of some sort. So many detours, coincidences, haphazard occurrences, abrupt plot diversions and dead ends. Nevertheless the film is oddly arresting, like a book you can't put down, and here you keep watching and hoping for unification. In a word, it is fascinating without being engrossing.The cast is formidable and uniformly competent - no bad performances in sight. Especially good are March, DeHavilland, Claude Rains (as always), Donald Woods, Edmund Gwenn and the underrated Akim Tamiroff. I was not going to rate it as highly as I did until the graceful and bittersweet ending which redeemed a bizarre novel, the only one Hervey Allen ever wrote.

Everybody expected MGM to release big epic costume dramas, but Warner Brothers, the studio of Bogart, Cagney and EGR? Indeed, the studio who produced "The Petrified Forest" and "Bullets or Ballots" in 1936 also gave movie goers "The Charge of the Light Brigade", " The Story of Louis Pasteur" and a drama with Kay Francis playing Florence Nightingale. Their truly big film was this glorious costume drama that is as luscious looking as any of the big films that both Thalberg and Selznick were producing over at MGM.Almost a Dickens theme, this epic costume drama takes its young hero from being dropped off as a baby at an orphan asylum to Cuba and Africa, working as a slave trader, and finally into the courts of Napoleon. Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland enter the scene 40 minutes into this nearly 2 1/2 film after a long prologue where Anthony's birth is explored as the son born to lovers Anita Louise and Louis Hayward and left to die after Louise's brutish husband, Claude Rains, kills Hayward. Later on, the 10 year old Anthony is made an apprentice in the household of his maternal grandfather and his birth circumstances become a scheme of intrigue involving the deliciously malevolent housekeeper Gale Sondergaard. Telling more would spoil the surprises and give away too many important details. What can be said is that other than a few slow patches (mostly the African scenes), this is a fascinating saga that remind me if the novels by modern epic author John Jakes. This swept the Academy Awards with three technical Oscars and a well deserved Supporting performance for Miss Sondergaard. The cat-like Faith is a n opportunist of the most calculating kind, wisely teamed with the older Rains who gets a laugh in much like the invisible man. March and De Havilland are boring in comparison to these two.Others who offer interesting characterizations include Henry O'Neill, Edmund Gwenn and Eily Malton. Billy Mauch is great as the 10 year old Anthony. Look quickly for Clara Blandick. It might be tempting to fast-forward through the middle section in Africa, but that is important to the story to explain Adverse's genesis as a character.

I rented a tape of Anthony Adverse mainly to see what kind of performance the Academy was looking for in the first-awarded "best supporting actress" category. Gale Sondergaard's time on camera was actually quite brief and her villainous role required a strictly one-dimensional reading. There were no subtleties whatsoever, nor was there any need in the film for them. Ordinarily, it might seem surprising that her part would receive any attention at all, not to mention a prestigious award, but keeping in mind that Oscars in those days were to a large extent self-congratulatory spectacles passed around from studio to studio year by year, it really isn't surprising. The film was long and episodic, as was the novel, and not particularly good at that. There was the glitz we've come to expect of course with the duels and chases thrown in for good measure. I kept wondering if the novel was written with Hollywood in mind. It's hardly readable nowadays. As far as directorial touches are concerned, it's no wonder that Mervyn LeRoy has long disappeared from anyone's pantheon. The kiddie-car version of France must have excited the Depression audiences. The film is very long and very expensive so perhaps there's something to say about that.