--- title: "Anthony Adverse" year: 1936 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/anthony-adverse" fi1m_score: 57 critics_score: 60 critics_reviews: 4 published: "2026-09-19T23:10:41.610411+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T23:10:41.901638+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Anthony Adverse (1936) Directed by Mervyn LeRoy · 2h 21m · MPA NR · Drama, History, Romance **Fi1m score: 57** · Critics 60 (early) from 4 reviews *In a sentence:* Fredric March circles the globe for two and a half hours and Claude Rains steals it from the back of a carriage > Warner Bros. boils a thousand-page bestseller down to 141 minutes and keeps the furniture rather than the story. It is handsomely lit and magnificently scored, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard are a treat, and the man in the title role is the least interesting person in it. ## Synopsis Northern Italy, late in the eighteenth century. Maria (Anita Louise), the young wife of the Marquis Don Luis (Claude Rains), is carrying another man’s child. The man is Denis Moore (Louis Hayward), and Don Luis arranges to meet him with swords. Maria dies giving birth on the road, and the Marquis leaves the baby on the step of a convent in Livorno. The nuns raise the boy (Billy Mauch), then place him with the Scottish merchant John Bonnyfeather (Edmund Gwenn), who names him Anthony Adverse and takes him into the counting house. His housekeeper Faith Paleologus (Gale Sondergaard) watches the new arrival from the doorways. Anthony (Fredric March) grows up and falls for Angela Guiseppe (Olivia de Havilland), the cook’s daughter who wants to sing, and Bonnyfeather sends him to Cuba to collect a debt from Carlo Cibo (Akim Tamiroff). ## Review Hervey Allen’s *Anthony Adverse* was one of the great doorstops of the 1930s, a novel that follows one man from a convent step in Italy through Cuba, Africa and Napoleon’s Paris, and Warner Bros. bought it, hired Mervyn LeRoy and asked Sheridan Gibney to fit it into an evening. The result runs 141 minutes and feels both too long and cut to the bone. Every chapter arrives, delivers its moral, and is gone before we have found our seats. What survives is the production: sets, costumes, Tony Gaudio’s photography and an Erich Wolfgang Korngold score that does most of the feeling the film forgets to do itself. The first forty minutes are the good ones. Claude Rains plays the Marquis Don Luis as a powdered, gouty man who has never once been contradicted, and he is delighted by his own cruelty in a way that never rises above a murmur. Anita Louise and Louis Hayward are the lovers, and Gaudio lights their stolen scenes almost entirely from candles and windows, so the faces float and everything behind them is black. When the story reaches the convent, and the boy climbs a tree to see over the wall, Korngold gives him a theme so open and unguarded that we were moved before anything had happened. It is the one stretch where the music and the pictures and the writing want the same thing. Then the boy becomes Fredric March, and the film has a problem it never solves. March is a fine actor and he is wrong here. Anthony is supposed to be young, hungry and easily led, and March plays him as a man who has already read the ending. He is grave in the counting house, grave in love, grave in the tropics; the script keeps telling us he has changed and his face keeps declining to confirm it. Olivia de Havilland is given a girl who wants to sing and a scene or two to want it in, and she is charming with almost nothing. The supporting cast does the work. Gale Sondergaard’s Faith Paleologus stands very still in doorways and says less than anyone else in the film, and we watched her whenever she was on. Edmund Gwenn is warm and decent as Bonnyfeather, Donald Woods is loyal and sensible as Nolte, and Akim Tamiroff, as the debtor Cibo, is the only person in the Cuban section who seems to be enjoying the climate. The middle hour is where it goes wrong, and we can say plainly what we felt: bored by the Cuban accounts, and then irritated by the African ones. Anthony goes to run a slaving station, and the film treats the trade as scenery for his conscience. Steffi Duna’s Neleta exists to tempt him and Ralph Morgan’s Debrulle to reproach him, and nobody in the frame who is not white is permitted to be a person. It is an ugly thing to watch, and worse for being incidental; the film wants credit for Anthony’s remorse without spending a minute on what he was remorseful about. Ralph Dawson’s editing does not help. Each episode is cut to the same shape, arrival, lesson, departure, and by the time we reach Paris the film is summarising itself. Milo Anderson’s costumes are the other thing worth staying for. The Marquis’s coats are stiff and pale and slightly too tight, Angela’s dresses simple until they are not, and the Paris finale is a parade of court dress under chandeliers that Gaudio lets shine while the story stalls beneath it. Against the other Warner costume pictures of the period this one is the odd fit. [*Captain Blood*](https://film.one/film/captain-blood) (1935) took a fat novel and threw away everything that was not a fight or a kiss, and was honest about it. *Anthony Adverse* keeps the moral education and throws away the time it would take to earn it, so we are told a man has grown wiser and shown only that he has grown older. Watch it for the first act, for Rains and Sondergaard, and for Korngold, who scored a better film than the one in front of him. If you stay past Cuba, be prepared to keep your own map. *Fi1m score 57, published 19 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (4) - **The New Yorker**, John C. Mosher (70/100, inferred): The film offers the usual interest of a lively costume picture, sustained by its energy and crowd scenes despite skimming the source novel. Strong supporting turns by Gale Sondergaard and Claude Rains stand out amid the hokum. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1936/08/29/1936-08-29-054-tny-cards-000020981) - **The New York Times** (70/100, inferred): The film version of the Hervey Allen novel opens at the Strand, condensing much of the sprawling story for the screen with Fredric March in the title role. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1936/08/27/archives/the-film-version-of-anthony-adverse-opens-at-the-strand-to-mary.html) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): The adaptation of the long bestseller manages a straightforward if choppy and long-winded story by focusing on the title character. Fredric March leads a strong cast in the lead role. [Read](https://variety.com/1935/film/reviews/anthony-adverse-1200411261/) - **Time Out**, TCh (30/100, inferred): The film is an early but dated Warner Bros. swashbuckler that has not aged well. It meanders through contrived adventures across continents with little structure or discrimination, and Fredric March lacks the necessary dash as the lead. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/anthony-adverse) ## Details - **Director:** Mervyn LeRoy - **Director:** Mervyn LeRoy - **Screenplay:** Sheridan Gibney - **Novel:** Hervey Allen - **Cinematography:** Tony Gaudio - **Editor:** Ralph Dawson - **Music:** Erich Wolfgang Korngold - **Costume design:** Milo Anderson - **Cast:** Fredric March as Anthony Adverse; Olivia de Havilland as Angela Guiseppe; Donald Woods as Vincent Nolte; Anita Louise as Maria; Edmund Gwenn as John Bonnyfeather; Claude Rains as Marquis Don Luis; Louis Hayward as Denis Moore; Gale Sondergaard as Faith Paleologus - **Runtime:** 2h 21m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 29 August 1936 - **Genres:** Drama, History, Romance - **Budget:** $1 million - **Box office:** $3 million ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1937: Best Picture (nominated); Best Production Design (nominated); Best Cinematography (won); Best Film Editing (won); Best Score, Adaptation or Treatment (won); Best Supporting Actress (won) ## If you liked this - *Captain Blood* (1935), Fi1m 80: The Warner costume machine working properly, with Korngold again and Errol Flynn instead of gravity. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/captain-blood.md) - *Barry Lyndon* (1975), Fi1m 85: Another rogue’s progress through the eighteenth century, this time with the patience the story needs. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/barry-lyndon.md) - *Great Expectations* (1946), Fi1m 84: How to compress a huge novel and keep its shape; Lean shows Gibney how it is done. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/great-expectations.md) - *Les Misérables* (1935), Fi1m 74: Fredric March in another long journey of conscience, and far better suited to it. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/les-miserables-1935.md) - *The Leopard* (1963): Italy at the end of an aristocracy, with a ballroom that earns every minute of its length. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/anthony-adverse