Strange Interlude

Eugene O'Neill is acclaimed by some as America's leading playwright, but for things like The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Emperor Jones. Strange Interlude was a piece of experimentation he concocted where the characters on stage, look aside to the audience and say what they really are thinking and then resume conversation. It was a nine hour production with a dinner break on Broadway, so you can safely assume a lot has been sacrificed here.

For the screen the voice over regarding the thoughts is used for all the characters. It probably is a technique better suited to the screen. Sir Laurence Olivier did very well with it in his version of Hamlet. But Bill Shakespeare gave Olivier a lot better story than O'Neill gave his players in this instance.

Players like Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Ralph Morgan, May Robson, etc. are a lot more animated in most of their films than they are in Strange Interlude. The story takes place over a 20 year period. Norma Shearer is a young woman whose intended is killed in World War I. She starts playing around quite a bit, although that part is not shown in this version. She makes the acquaintance of Alexander Kirkland and his friend Clark Gable. She also has as a perennial suitor, Ralph Morgan, a friend of her father's Henry B. Walthall.

She marries Kirkland, but then is warned by his mother May Robson and shown that insanity gallops in that family to quote another literary work. Since Kirkland wants kids and Shearer and Robson think Kirkland's train will slip the track if he doesn't get one, Gable is recruited for breeding purposes. Of course you can see all the complications this can cause and O'Neill explores them all.

Gable is so terribly miscast in an O'Neill production, but he was an up and coming player at MGM and did what they told him. Shearer does what she can to lift a very dreary story, but she seems defeated at the start. Best in the film is possibly Robson who puts some real bite in her dialog.

Strange Interlude ran for 426 showings on Broadway in 1928-1929 and starred Glenn Anders and Lynn Fontanne in the Gable and Shearer parts. Perhaps no one could really have saved the film because two years earlier, Groucho Marx lampooned the stuffings out of it in Animal Crackers. After seeing what he did, I don't think the movie going public took it too seriously.

And since it's not the best of O'Neill, neither could I.

Trying to bring any Eugene O'Neill story to the screen is probably challenging; such is the case with "Strange Interlude" released by MGM in 1932. The actors thoughts are voice-overs, forcing the actors to pause on screen, sometimes with odd looks on their faces. This was probably pretty daring stuff by 1932 standards, with sound films still relatively new. Anyway, Norma Shearer is the lead character, Nina, and she brings out all of her theatrical mannerisms to the role. The story is basically of three men who are in love with Nina. The most compelling is a doctor, played nicely by Clark Gable. The story is complicated, to say the least, with Shearer marrying a man she later realizes she is not in love with, has a baby by Gable, but never tells her husband it is not his baby, and on and on. Pure soap opera for sure. Still, although the story is tough to swallow, I must say in particular I liked Clark Gable in this role. This is easily one of his best early performances. Norma Shearer is always good, even if the story is lacking. It is easy to see why this film flopped in 1932; it was likely too different (or perhaps too sophisticated) for audiences of that era.

Eugene O'Neill's 4 and a half hour 1927 play brought to the screen in less than two hours. The play's combination of symbolic dialogue and gothic melodrama hasn't aged very well and the cast has some difficulty with it, especially Norma Shearer's Nina and Ralph Morgan's Marsden. Clark Gable as Ned Darrell comes off better but mostly because his is a gruff character not given to the philosophical musings of the others which better fits Gable's range. Once the plot settles down to the love quadrangle and the audience adjusts to the voiceover asides the film does become more enjoyable. The technique used here for the asides is another problem. On stage the action froze while the actors spoke their thoughts to the audience. Here they're done as voiceovers. You'd think that would work better but since the action no longer freezes the actors are forced to pause speaking and grimace at the camera to match the emotions in their thoughts. Plus it's difficult for any movie buff to watch this film and not think of Groucho Marx's hilarious parody version in "Animal Crackers." Added to these drawbacks are some cuts made for censorship reasons (Nina's promiscuity is soft-peddled and there is no mention of her getting the abortion that is more central in the play) and a wretched score (uncredited) that sounds like background music to a turn-of-the-century weepie. O'Neill called this film "a dreadful hash of attempted condensation and idiotic censorship," and although "Strange Interlude" is nowhere near as great as his later "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night," it certainly deserved better than this.

It would be all too easy for the immature film goer to dismiss this fascinating film as soap opera, but Eugene O'Neill's mammoth 1928 play (revived on Broadway in 1963 and 85) - his third after BEYOND THE HORIZON (see THE LONG VOYAGE HOME for a film of his "sea plays") and ANNA Christie to win the Pulitzer Prize - sprang from a period when the great American author was experimenting with forms which would become standard in film. In this case it was the interior monologue that Hollywood would use as the voice-over.

For the discerning viewer, recognizing the importance of the play (that the Marx Brothers found it grist for their satirical mill in their contemporary Broadway and film musical ANIMAL CRACKERS is testimony to that importance) and the solid performances of the movie cast, O'Neill delivers. He is examining serious adult issues - not just the form he is experimenting with - as he dissects the obligations people have to those they love.

While O'Neill claimed his play was suggested by an ancient Greek play, this classic love triangle (quadrangle actually, even more when one factors in Nina's chillingly named son) rings remarkably true even with the demands of 1930's Hollywood censorship (Nina's psychologically important abortion is merely hinted at) and the heavy editing (that O'Neill somewhat disingenuously railed at) demanded to bring the film down to an acceptable playing length for the average movie theatre which played more than the theatrically standard 8 performance week.

If Norma Shearer's central Nina can occasionally be accused of overacting, the script demands it; hers is the central emotional roller-coaster. Second billed Clark Gable as Dr. Darrell, who does not arrive for nearly a quarter hour into the film, gives the most naturalistic performance (it was one of the ways he stood out in all his films - in style a generation ahead of his peers), but for the true film connoisseur, Alexander Kirkland's Evans and Ralph Morgan's Marsden are no less impressive, and Robert Young, seven films into a 40 year career is fine as Nina's college age son.

In the 1930's the causes of mental illness OTHER than "bad blood" (a plot driving device here, as in Katharine Hepburn's debut vehicle from the same year - also from Broadway - A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT) were far less understood than today, and the Catholic Church's ban on the rational use of contraception was far more pervasive - both of which may make the context of the film difficult for younger viewers to understand.

If they give the film their attention though, and recognize that the concerns of the characters go beyond these technicalities to the personal relationships that remain troublesome even today, the film - stylistic experiments and all - is ultimately not only important but deeply fulfilling.

Norma Shearer, still carrying torch for handsome Gordon, who died in WW1, marries another guy on the rebound, only to find that insanity runs in his family and she can't have children with him (but how will she ever be the mother of a son as handsome as dear, dead Gordon?), and she can't leave him because the shock would certainly send him over the edge into terminal wacked-out nuttiness. What to do? Gimmick here is that, along with the spoken dialogue, we share the inner thoughts of the characters -- presented as V.O. while the actors stand around mute, making faces as if somebody just broke wind on the set. Did anyone watch this with a straight face in 1932? Film goes on long enough that the sanity of the audience is tested much more severely than that of Shearer's husband, but was reportedly 5 or 6 hours in theatrical production. (Any cries of "Author! Author!" at that premiere came, no doubt, from a lynch mob.) It's an MGM, so of course the cast is first-rate, but is it their fault the act is a louse?