Anthony Adverse is a 1200 page novel squeezed into just over two hours, and my how it shows. The source material is all but forgotten today, but apparently it was the biggest literary bestseller up to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. The film cuts out a lot of the novel, including a protracted ending in Texas. As it is, there's still too much going on. There is enough going on in this film for two films, and what happens is so quickly treated that viewers are left adrift, wondering exactly how we got from point A to point B, and why. Parts of the film are rousing and fun, but too much of it is obvious attempts to shoehorn the novel into the constraints of what viewers were willing to sit through. It was nominated for Best Picture because it's the kind of sprawling adventure audiences love, but it certainly doesn't hold up very well for modern viewers.

It all starts in 1773. Claude Rains plays Don Luis, a Spanish nobleman who starts out bad and gets so much worse during the film that his little beard becomes pointier and pointier as the film progresses. He is married to Maria (Anita Louise), the daughter of a merchant who is in love with Denis (Louis Hayward), who wants to take her away from the cruel Luis. Luis rapes his wife and kills Denis in a duel; however, Maria is pregnant with Denis's child, and when she dies in childbirth, Luis takes the baby and drops it in the mail slot at the local convent. The boy is raised by the kindly Father Vincent until the age of ten, when he is apprenticed to... (cue dramatic music)... his own grandfather, Maria's father, Lord Bonnyfeather (Edmund Gwenn), who immediately recognizes that the boy is his blood relation but won't admit it because it would involve telling the world that his daughter was unfaithful. So he takes the boy on as his favorite apprentice and christens him Anthony Adverse, because of all the adversity he has had to face and will face in the future. Let me catch my breath. This all happens in the first half-hour of the film.

The 18-year-old Anthony is played by 39-year-old Fredric March. He's in love with Angela, a cook's daughter played by Olivia de Havilland. His role model, boss, and friend Lord Bonnyfeather attempts to convince the young man to get out more, see the world, and most of all not love a cook's daughter. Bonnyfeather (I love typing that) wants to leave his considerable holdings to Anthony when he dies, but first he decides to send the young man to Havana to collect on a debt. Anthony and Angela are secretly married, but circumstances make it so they are separated. It's off to Cuba for Anthony. Well, Cuba, then Africa, then a stint as a power-mad slave trader with a dusky mistress and a drinking problem. I could summarize all day. Let me cut it short by saying that Anthony returns to find that Bonnyfeather is dead, his devious servant Faith (Gale Sondergaard) has claimed the estate, Napoleon has taken Angela for a mistress, there's a child (try to figure out how that happened), and Don Luis wants Anthony dead. Whew.

It's hard to see a guy who spends a lot of the film as a ruthless slave trader as a hero, and in fact, March doesn't seem very heroic. He seems bored with the part. Perhaps he was sick of playing people half his age. He's completely unconvincing in the role, a combination of his age and his lack of enthusiasm. Aside from that, Anthony isn't much of a heroic figure anyway. He doesn't do things; things happen to him. He's put upon, and he shows very little drive of his own. There wasn't a frame of the film where he seemed really interested in what was going on. Many of the performers were like that. Claude Rains, who is usually good for some quiet menace in a part like this, is merely adequate. He excelled at a sort of arch villainy, but he doesn't get much chance to show it here. Olivia de Havilland doesn't show enough fire either; she seemed stricken by whatever was bothering March. Gale Sondergaard, in her screen debut, won the first-ever Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance here, which consisted of her grinning evilly throughout the film. The only actors to show any real enthusiasm were bad guys: the corrupt Cuban Signore de Bruille, played by Akim Tamiroff, genuinely enjoys being sleazy, and the swarthy and mysterious Neleta, played by Hungarian actress Steffi Duna, is suitably intense as Anthony's mistress in Africa.

Which brings me to one of those 1930s things that really bug me even though it shouldn't. People saw things differently back then, and I shouldn't bring my modern morality into it. Sometimes I successfully avoid being presentist. I failed here. Anthony abandons his wife, is gone for around ten years without a word, becomes an evil slave trader, and has a mistress. Angela, whose husband abandons her and disappears for ten years without a word, becomes a famous opera singer and the mistress of Napoleon. Because she is morally impure—you know, because she shacked up with the Emperor of most of Europe when her husband disappeared for ten years—she is not fit to be a parent to their child, while Anthony—the slave trader with the mistress—is fit. Am I the only one who thinks that's a bit messed up?

The film was nominated for seven Oscars and won four: Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Editing, and Score. It lost Picture, Assistant Director (yep, they had an award for that), and Art Direction. Of the ten Best Picture nominees in 1936, I rank this at #7; I have not seen the winner, The Great Ziegfeld.