Idiot's Delight

This is perhaps the weirdest Clark Gable film. First, it is an odd anti-war film that came out just BEFORE all the anti-fascist films of the early 40's and it's an amazing contrast to them. Second, it features Gable as a song and dance man!! Why they worked so hard to have him dance, I wouldn't know--the studio could have always rented the services of either Jimmy Cagney or George Raft or anyone of a number of other actors who already knew how to dance. Third, the over the top and bizarre role played by Norma Shearer--it's rather silly and reminiscent of Garbo. So, overall is it a good film? Well, it's decent but not great. Some may find it a little silly, but for those who love the Golden Age of Hollywood, this is a must-see.

This is one of my favorite movies. Norma Shearer is incredible in this film. Norma in those Adrian gowns camping it up to the hilt. Who could ask for more? See it if you get the chance. This movie is right up there with the likes of "Red Dust" and "Cain and Mabel".

This film was released in January 1939, based on a play, eight months before Hitler's Germany would start WWII by invading Poland. From the mid 1920's up to the mid 1930's Hollywood had been making anti war films based on the fact that WWI took so many lives and, in the end, really seemed to be pointless. This was probably the last of that bunch.

So the backdrop to this film is some unnamed country bordering Switzerland, which has always been neutral not because it chooses to be, but because nobody wants to scale all of those mountains and then face a nation in which every household is required to have a gun and the inhabitants are required to know how to use it.

War is about to be declared and so you have a group of unrelated and dissimilar travelers all temporarily trapped at a swanky mountain hotel until their passports can be verified and they can get across the border the following day. Obviously the author's viewpoint for the reason for this war is that of pacifist Quillary (Burgess Meredith), who simply believes he can go out and convince men to stop killing each other, and that whatever people think they are fighting about is just a ruse cooked up by those who profit from the selling of war machines. How quaint. I think Hitler would have remained unconvinced by Quillary's argument up to the point he put a bullet through his brain. Early in the movie the local soldiers arrest him for his speech, or perhaps because they found him as tiresome as I did.

As for the rest of the travelers, there is an owner of munitions plants played by Edward Arnold, his female companion played by Norma Shearer, a perpetually failed vaudeville entertainer (Clark Gable) who has finally got a niche with a half a dozen blonde singers and dancers, and a honeymooning British couple. There is also a soldier (Joseph Schildkraut), who is dressed similarly to a Nazi, but doesn't have that "Nazi way" about him that you see in actual WWII films. Instead he seems somewhat like a bored but polite bureaucrat, just doing his job. He is definitely not Conrad Veidt's interpretation of that kind of role just a couple of years later.

What makes this film worth watching, given that the film is so off base as to what WWII was about? Earlier in the film we see Gable's character and Shearer's character meeting in vaudeville in Nebraska and, as much as the production code would allow, implying they spent a single night together, and then never saw each other again. Until now. Maybe. You see, the munitions magnate's female companion is the spitting image of the girl Gable's character knew back in America ten years before. But this woman says she is a Russian aristocrat, run out of her homeland by the Bolsheviks as a child. She walks around in ridiculous looking fashions that would have made Dietrich gawk and a silly looking blonde wig. She claims to never have known Gable.

It's fun to see Gable give Shearer that same "I've got your number sister" look he gave Harlow, Leigh, and Crawford. And you've got to wonder if Shearer's obviously deliberate over the top performance was inspired by exaggerating Greta Garbo's past performances, and if Garbo punched her in the nose after seeing this obvious parroting of her method. But that would be so un-Garbo. Oh well, if Gable can sing and dance in this film, then I guess Garbo could punch someone in the nose. Enjoy, it is a delight and I'm no idiot.

Robert E. Sherwood won the coveted Pulitzer Prize for his allegory-like satire Idiot's Delight. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased the film rights to the play, and commissioned Sherwood himself to adapt his play to the screen. The result is this astoundingly poignant classic, which features Norma Shearer and Clark Gable in the third and last of their radiant screen pairings. Harry Van (Gable) is a vaudevillian touring all of Europe with his musical troupe `Les Blondes.' The group is forced to stay in an exclusive Alpine hotel when the European borders are closed due to the possible coming of war. A German doctor (Charles Coburn), a French pacifist (Burgess Meredith), an English honeymoon couple (Peter Willes and Pat Paterson), and an Italian officer (Joseph Schildkraut) are lodging in the hotel as well. And also checking in are munitions manufacturer Achille Weber (Edward Arnold) and a beautiful traveling companion of his named Irene (Shearer). Irene, it seems, reminds Harry of an old girlfriend of his, with whom he had shared a special relationship ten years before in Omaha, Nebraska. But she was a redhead, and spoke with no accent. Irene, however, is a platinum blonde, and has a very clear Russian accent. Still, Harry wonders if it could be the same woman. As Harry pursues Irene, probing her complex web of stories to find out about her past, the war develops rather suddenly. A nearby airfield sends out its bombers, and the garbled radio broadcasts carry the fearful news: war has already been declared. As quickly as the guests assembled, they must depart, as the frontiers are opened for perhaps the last time. But Harry is unwilling to go until he is sure, and Irene is unwilling to divulge… One of the countless films from 1939 to help it earn the nickname of `the greatest year in movie history,' Idiot's Delight is both acerbically funny and tragically distressing. Although the original 1936 play and the film version both predate World War II, the threat of war was a very real fear, a sentiment quite powerfully expressed via the disparate, sundry characters. It is startling and even more meaningful all these years after the war, as one can easily see how many of the unfortunate predictions came to glaring truth.

But aside from dramatic poignancy, the two lead performances catapult this film to first-rate status. Shearer is brilliant, quite plainly. She spoofs her number one rival Greta Garbo mercilessly, and uses her accent to its hilarious apex. When she tells her story to Harry, and he just gazes at her, incredulously staring, hilarity reaches its peak! She has turned in so many fine performances, that it is hard to single out any one as her finest (Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, the title role in Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, her Oscar-winning role in The Divorcée, and Amanda in Private Lives are all strong contenders), but her Irene is certainly amongst the competitors. Gable, in a role that requires quite a lot of singing and dancing, succeeds admirably. He is a perfect Harry Van, complimenting perfectly with Shearer. The two have fantastic chemistry, and this was the last of the three classics they starred in together.

****side note****respected Shearer biographer Gavin Lambert singled this out as his favorite of all of the star's pictures. In one vignette he illustrates in his biography of Norma Shearer, he describes an occasion where the actress herself invited him to a private screening of the film in the 1970s.

The play was stagy and stilted to begin with; on screen it was all so much worse. There is virtually no directing, and of the principals, only Gable has a clue what he's doing. Poor Norma Shearer starts out fine as the ingenue, but with no notion of how to play the fake countess, she hams her way desperately through the rest of the picture like a high school thespian. It's embarrassing to watch. Just when you think nothing could be worse, Burgess Meredith bursts in like a misplaced character from another set, jumping around and shouting at the top of his lungs -- a hammy stage actor who seems not even to have been told there are microphones. The voice in your head keeps screaming "Cut! Cut! Cut!" for the missing director, who's evidently out to lunch.

That said, there ARE real merits in this movie. Gable is disarmingly charming as Harry Van. The play itself is an interesting period piece with a warning about fascism BEFORE we knew the worst. And then, there IS a kind of weird, whacky fascination in watching Norma Shearer taken over by that BIG platinum wig, which is almost a character in the play by itself.

Finally, there are two outstandingly memorable moments which for me make this movie well worth watching. Gable's witty, winking, sexy, song-and-dance version of "Puttin' on the Ritz" is something not to be forgotten -- AND, the man CAN sing and dance! The other sheer delight is watching the !GREAT! Laura Hope Crews in her brief but masterful portrayal of the tipsy Madame Zuleika, whose cheesy vaudeville mind reading act gets more hysterical with every furtive sip from her hip flask. I screamed with laughter, and you will, too. Laura Hope Crews should be declared a national treasure.