Anthony Adverse (Warner). When Warner Brothers bought screen rights to Hervey Allen's 1,224-page best-seller of 1933 for about $35,000 readers wondered how those cinemen would succeed in putting the whole story into a single picture. As revealed last week, the answer is extremely simple. Warner Brothers do not succeed in anything of the sort because they do not try. Although the picture is twice as long (2 hr. 19 min.), as an average Hollywood production, it carries Author Allen's celebrated adventurer (Fredric March) through only about two-thirds of his career, leaves its climax to the imagination or to a sequel.
Bastard son of an Irish cavalry officer and the young Scottish wife of a depraved Spanish diplomat (Claude Rains), Anthony spends his boyhood in a Leghorn convent. At 10 he is apprenticed to and given his last name by the Scottish merchant who by a happy chance, though Anthony never finds out, is his maternal grandfather. He marries the cook's daughter (Olivia de Havilland), leaves her to collect a debt in Cuba, goes to Africa to make a fortune in the slave trade, returns to Leghorn to find his Angela gone, his grandfather dead and the family housekeeper misbehaving with a grandee who Anthony does not know was his mother's husband. Having escaped the efforts of this malevolent pair to force his coach off the road into an Alpine pass, Anthony finds Angela getting along nicely in Paris as mistress to Napoleon. Then, accompanied by his small son, he sets off for the U. S. hoping to find the more abundant life.
Presentation of the longest picture ever made by Warner Brothers* in a year in which long pictures are fashionable deserved special ceremonies. Anthony Adverse received them. For its world premiere, Warner Brothers not only invited to Los Angeles' Carthay Circle theatre the biggest audience of screen celebrities ever assembled in one hall, but they also erected a grandstand outside to hold the audience of sightseers who went to see the audience of celebrities. Last week, a full-page advertisement in cinema trade papers expressed the thanks of Director Mervyn LeRoy to 133 actors, script clerks, producers, pressagents et al. for "helping me make Anthony Adverse." Thoughtfully included on the list was the name of Author Allen.
Whether the rubbernecks' grandstand, Director LeRoy's gratitude and even the qualities of the picture itself will cause the LeRoy version of Anthony Adverse to equal the success of the Allen version is exceedingly debatable. As hard-breathing, swashbuckling sword-&-cloak melodrama it is good but not superlative.