The 1936 Best Picture Oscar nominees included several classics and a number of duds. The Academy nominated 10 films for Best Picture that year, with the top honor going to Robert Z. play by William Powell). The Great Ziegfeld is visually spectacular, but as a melodrama it's kind of slick, serving more as a fond farewell to its subject (who died in 1932) than a legitimately great film.

The legit bangers nominated that year included Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. one of the master director's more notable comedies. Also quite good were William Dieterle's The Lois Pasteur Story starring Paul Mooney, and Jack Conway's wonderful A Lady of Libel with Powell and Myrna Loy. Conway also directed an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, which many readers may have seen in their high school classrooms.

But 1936 also had plenty of stinkers at the Oscars. One would think that a George Cukor directed production of Romeo and Juliet would fare well, but leads Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer were too old to play star-crossed lovers, and the director was a little too fond of Andy Devine ( !) as a random servant named Peter. Henry Koster's Three Smart Girls is okay but hardly outstanding, and the San Francisco disaster epic doesn't really start to come alive until the 1906 earthquake occurs at the end of the film.

At the bottom of the barrel, at least critically, were William Wyler's ultra-dull captain-of-industry drama Dodsworth and Mervyn Leroy's historical epic Anthony Adverse. The latter also has the dubious honor of being the lowest approved Best Picture contender on Rotten Tomatoeswith a rating of only 18%.

Based on Hervey Allen's 1933 novel, Anthony Adverse begins in 1773 when the title character is born. The result of an affair between his married mother and her flamboyant lover, Anthony was raised in a convent after his mother's husband, a Spanish marquis, insisted that the child Anthony be ousted from the family. By sheer coincidence, when Anthony is 10 years old, he begins serving as an apprentice to his biological mother's father, unaware that they are related. Fortunately, Grandpa is sharp enough to collect it all. It's all very Dickensian (a la "David Copperfield").

The bulk of the film follows Anthony as a young man, played by Fredric March. He falls in love with Angela (Olivia de Havilland), the daughter of his grandfather's live-in chef. They are separated for a long time, and she becomes an opera singer. They are briefly reunited a few years later, but circumstances separate them. Anthony has only one recourse... and here's where the movie turns sour: he becomes the manager of the family's slave trading post on the Pongo River in Africa.

"Anthony Adverse" picks up pace from there, with more international travel and the predictable, eventual reunion between Anthony and Angela. More lovers are taken, more children are born and no one is impressed.

There are only 11 reviews for "Anthony Adverse" on Rotten Tomatoes, but most of them are negative. In vintage review from New Republiccritic Otis Ferguson cynically opined that the effort that went into making the film was not balanced by any entertainment value. There was “No life, no story flow. It tries to dramatize as many episodes of the book as possible; but no satisfaction or conviction is shown in the dramatization.'

Critics were harsh, even 88 years ago.

Vintage review from Esquire magazinewritten by Patterson Murphy, agreed with Ferguson's review that "Anthony Adverse" is beautiful to look at, and that the costumes and production are sumptuous, but that the storytelling is dull. "There's an atmosphere at your fingertips, do your best, now you're in a classic atmosphere for acting that's fascinating," Murphy wrote.

Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times was familiar with the original Anthony Adverse novel and was perplexed that the film adaptation changed so much of the source material. However, Nugent was even angrier that the book's tone had been missed. "We found it to be a bulky, rambling and indecisive photoplay," he wrote, "which not only takes liberties with the letter of the original, but also with its spirit."

After seeing "Anthony Adverse" I can chime in with how boring it is. Instead of capturing the thrill of growing up, the struggles of the rich, or even taking any point of view on slavery, Leroy's film simply lay flat, dictating events to the audience rather than telling an intriguing story. It's also a shame that Olivia de Havilland isn't in most of the film, because she has so much more life and energy than any of the other players. Overall, "Anthony" feels like Oscar bait. It's an overlong historical epic, obviously made for a lot of money, based on a hit novel and starring established Hollywood players. You can almost feel the cynicism of the whole affair, knowing that some of the executives at Warner Bros. knew this movie would garner attention at the awards. No one, it seems, had any passion for the material.

Instead, watch “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." Or A Tale of Two Cities. They are better movies.