A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Anthony Adverse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936)

Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland in Anthony Adverse
Cast: Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Woods, Anita Louise, Edmund Gwenn, Claude Rains, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Hayward, Steffi Duna, Akim Tamiroff, Ralph Morgan, Fritz Leiber, Luis Alberni, Billy Mauch, Henry O'Neill, Pedro de Cordoba, Scotty Beckett. Screenplay: Sheridan Gibney, based on a novel by Hervey Allen. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. 

This lead-footed, tin-eared attempt at an epic runs for almost two and a half hours, but it seems longer. Warner Bros. threw a lot of resources into it, including some top-flight actors, and earned Oscars for Gale Sondergaard (the first ever supporting actress award), cinematography, film editing, and score (an award that at the time went to the head of the studio music department, Leo Forbstein, and not to the one who deserved it, Erich Wolfgang Korngold). In fact, Korngold's score is the liveliest thing about the film, which is hamstrung by Fredric March's lack of charisma in the title role. March was a fine actor, but he seems miscast and a little too old (he was in his late 30s) in a role that calls on him to be dashing and occasionally reckless. The script, drawn from the first volume of Hervey Allen's doorstop bestseller, is full of contrivances and coincidences, made worse by some cliché-clotted dialogue and characters. The villains, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard, are as deep-dyed as you could want. Scheming and sneering at virtue, Rains produces one of the most memorable of villainous cackles when he laughs triumphantly, and Sondergaard narrows her eyes and flashes her teeth with snakelike relish. There's also an unfortunate episode in which Anthony goes to the Warners backlot version of Africa and becomes a slave trader, taking as a mistress a vixen named Neleta, played by the Viennese actress Steffi Duna, who does a hoochy-koochy dance that's surely not African. The problem with any summary of the movie is that it makes it sound like more fun than it is. 

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