stevielanding People loved the book; so they made the movie. It's about rich people in the agony of only having dozens of servants and anything they want. Oh, the horror. It's pretty much done the way you would figure they would do it on Broadway -- lots of costumes (not clothes, but full buffoonish costumes), overacted, overemoted, and plain slow as heck. See this movie if your heart breaks for rich people who only soil their hands when they are beating servants. Miss it if Bowling for Dollars is on a competing channel.

OldFilmLover I just watched the Warner Archive DVD-R of this movie last night. I want to say that it is a good movie and much underrated by the IMDb score of 6.6. It deserves at least a 7.6; I give it an 8.It is beautifully filmed, the sets are gorgeous, and the cast of actors is stellar and does a good job with the material. Even the players with smaller roles are well-known actors, and they deliver their short moments with just the right emphasis. If you're an old film fan, you can't watch the movie without seeing a score of faces that you know and love.The two main complaints I see here are that Fredric March is too old to play a convincing lover for De Havilland, and that the movie is somewhat pedestrian and dragging.On the first point, yes, in some scenes the age difference in visible, but in others, March is made up to look younger than his biological age, and is convincing as a younger man. But the key thing is that March is *good* in the role. If you overlook the physical signs of his age, and concentrate on his characterization, delivery, etc., you can see he is acting thoughtfully, trying to do justice to his complex character. I think it's an excellent performance.Pedestrian and dragged-out? Well, the film is long, as these epic-type films tend to be. Yet I did not find that my interest flagged. The film deals with years of the lives of these characters, and it needs to be long to get in all the complex background of European history and the changes in the lives of the characters (not to mention the important back-story of Anthony's birth).One more thing: some commenters thought that Gale Sondergaard did little to earn her Oscar for this one. I thought she was very good. Normally she plays the sinister villainess in a very broad manner that telegraphs how evil and sinister she is; in fact, she was often hired because she was so good at that kind of thing (see her many Universal horror and mystery films). Here, she shows a bit of that sinister character, but underplays it greatly, to very good effect. She would never have earned an Oscar had she played the role in her heavy Universal style. I think it's the subtlest performance I've seen her give.The sound on the Archives DVD-R is at first a tiny bit harsh, especially the booming orchestra with the grand Korngold score; this I noticed especially near the beginning of the film, and was worried it would spoil the film for me. However, the sound seemed to become a bit gentler about 10 or 15 minutes into the movie -- or maybe I just got used to it. But the volume of characters's speeches was definitely a bit uneven in the first few minutes. That happens, with movies this old. Perfect prints are rare, and DVDs reflect the imperfections. Overall, however, the DVD was quite watchable and the audio was clear and adequate.I recommend this as a historical epic. Not one the greatest epics, to be sure, but quite a good one, and admirably executed. Maybe not a must-see, but certainly nothing you will regret seeing. I will watch it more than once, I think.

MissSimonetta Here is a film to rival most 1950s biblical extravaganzas in terms of sheer dullness. Anthony Adverse (1936) is a slow, stately epic with flat characters and trite melodrama. For all its lavishness and beautiful recreation of the late 18th century, it has no depth whatsoever.Top notch actors like Frederic March, Olivia de Havilland, and Claude Rains are unable to give great performances due to being saddled with one dimensional figures whom the audience couldn't really care less about. March seems barely awake during most of his scenes. His character goes through what should have been interesting development, but in the finished product it never comes alive. De Havilland tries to make her character (an ingenue turned opera singer mistress to Napoleon) interesting, but the writing holds her back. Rains' hammy villain is fun, as is Gale Sondergaard's (though how that cartoony performance won an Oscar is beyond me), but they're not enough to save the story from being by-the-numbers dreck.As previously mentioned, the costumes are gorgeous. The sets are large and teeming with detail. You can tell they worked really hard to bring the world of the novel to life, but all that money is for naught when the story is so boring. A definite skip.

kyle_furr The movie is 2 and a half hours long and it went by pretty quick. I was surprised at all the negative reviews because i thought it was pretty good. The only part that is pretty bad was the first scene with the two lovers, because they were pretty bad actors and it was pretty funny to see Claude Rains saying he's one of the world's greatest swords man and then watch him actually in a sword fight. In the first scene Rains kills his wife's lover and takes his baby and drops it off at an convent. It shows him growing up and falling in love with Olivia De Havilland. The was one part that didn't quite make sense, in which March goes to Africa to become a slave trader and i couldn't understand the reasoning behind the character.