ANTHONY ADVERSE (1936)

From a forgotten bestseller, a forgotten period whopper you’ve likely forgotten even if you saw it. Quite the prestige item for Warner Brothers, more like some lux, over-padded award-bait from M-G-M, with once spunky Mervyn LeRoy showing the bland corporate style of megging he’d soon bring to Metro. Unusually long at 2'20"*, the story bumps along, foisting one jarring coincidence after another at us as faux foundling Fredric March nobly tiptoes thru a personal landmine of Napoleonic-era woe, almost aware he’s an illegitimate heir: son of villainous Claude Rains’ unfaithful late wife; grandson of wealthy merchant/employer Edmund Gwenn. All he really wants to do is settle down with childhood playmate, now budding opera soprano Olivia de Havilland, but calamitous financial circumstances waylay him with fraught trips: political troubles in Cuba; the slave trade in Africa. Finally returning home, he finds his abandoned little wife now the toast of Paris opera & mistress to Bonaparte! (Hard to believe this was ever taken seriously, but it just might have worked over at M-G-M with, oh, Woody Van Dyke directing Franchot Tone & Jeanette MacDonald.*) March manages to look 20-yr-old babe in the woods in a carefully lit intro shot (thank you, Tony Gaudio!), but elsewhere, you can see he was pushing 40 while de Havilland was just 19; an uncomfortable pairing. Best for Rains & Oscar-winning Gale Sondergaard (whose position in the story is hard to figure out) as joined-at-the-hip villains, but even this evil pair can’t lift the drama past generic also-ran.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *One positive from the extended running time lets composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold fully work out his film-as–opera aesthetic, earning one of the film’s four (out of seven) Oscars® though officially going not to Korngold, but to Warner Music Department Head Leo Forbstein! A rule that would be changed two years later, ironically when Korngold won again, this time for THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD/’38.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Indeed, it did work over at M-G-M in the top-grossing MAYTIME/’37.