Saw Mervyn Leroy's Anthony Adverse tonight, which I hadn't seen in years (a special presentation at the library on campus--the sound was great, always important with a melodrama, especially one scored by Erich Wolfgang Korngold--composer of my favourite film score of all-time, for Kings Row: a possible inspiration for spider-man)... it's a crazy movie! Fredric March (the title character) plays an orphan who muddles his way into slave trading; Olivia de Havilland (less of a prop in this film than she usually was in the Errol Flynn cycle, which was just getting rolling aound this time--although still not given nearly as much to work with as she deserved...) is his beloved, who somehow gets mixed up with Napoleon; Claude Rains essays a vicious, gouty, goateed Spanish nobleman, and delivers what is undoubtedly the most triumphantly operatic three-minute-long villainous cackle in the history of melodrama, before settling down into his more customary brand of suave decadence; Gale Sondergaard (who won the first best supporting actress oscar for this film--the category ddn't exist until 1936) tells us everything we need to know about pure amorality with her eyebrows and her teeth; Edmund Gwenn (best known for his performance as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street) as a sensitive Scottish merchant, is the kind of adoptive father that every Dickens kid wishes they could meet up with; and Akim Tamiroff (Jamo take note!) steals the whole damned movie with his five-minute turn as a sybaritic Cuban with a heart of gold!
The movie ends in a completely unexpected way, which seems to have disatisfied many IMDB commenters, but I think it's great... Leroy really tests our ability to empathize with the protagonist of this latter-day bildungsroman--the battle to "master the desire for mastery" is played out in a crazily literal way!
Article comments