Anthony Adverse (1936)

A young girl (Anita Louise) married to a much older man (Claude Rains) has a child from an illicit affair with her lover (Louis Hayward). After the birth of the male child, the husband gives the baby to an orphanage to be raised by nuns. The child grows up to be Anthony Adverse (Fredric March), the hero of our story. Based on the novel by Hervey Allen and directed by Mervyn LeRoy (QUO VADIS). The sprawling novel was over 1,200 pages so the film uses just the first half of the novel from Anthony's birth to his eventual sailing to America and eliminates his days as a plantation owner in New Orleans and his imprisonment and death in Mexico. I suspect the novel might be a more enjoyable read than the resulting film adaptation. I'm partial to historical epics but this one is only fitfully successful and feels choppy in its execution as if sections were left out. A miscast Fredric March probably doomed the project from the start (wasn't Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks Jr. available?). He just doesn't have the panache of a swashbuckling hero and it doesn't help that for a good portion of the film, he's a slave trader which doesn't endear him to us. All in all, it might work better as a PBS mini series. With Olivia De Havilland, Edmund Gwenn, Akim Tamiroff, Gale Sondergaard (in an Oscar winning performance), Donald Woods and Scotty Beckett.