Idiot's Delight

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".

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.

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 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 Sherwood's anti-war play IDIOT'S DELIGHT was one of the great acting vehicles of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine. Set in an alpine resort hotel, it is set really in 1937-39, that period when most people felt that another general European War was going to break out soon. And the threat and reality of war spreads until the final minutes when (in the play) Lunt is pounding out "Onward Christian Soldiers" on the piano while bombers are destroying the hotel all around him. In short, the world will probably destroy itself this time. The play was a triumph for it's stars, and won Sherwood the Pulitzer Prize.

It has dated badly, like so many anti-war pieces in the 1930s. The novel THIS GUN FOR HIRE was also anti-war, in that the villain (of the novel) was killing Europe's leading peace advocate statesman to enable a war to break out. When that novel was turned into a superior film in 1942, the plot was changed into the villains as traitors working for Japan (the original novel was set in England, not America). The changes there save THIS GUN FOR HIRE, but no such changes save IDIOT'S DELIGHT.

Let me be honest here - I have seen enough bloodshed in my lifetime to hate war. Most sane people hate war. But occasionally war is necessary. When it was to destroy the Nazis it certainly was (and that was the war that was threatening in 1937 - 39). It may even be necessary against Osama Ben Laden. But there is a genuine fear created from those antagonists. A war over the ownership of some rocky territory is usually not a decent reason to mobilize for large scale bloodshed. There are legitimate reasons to oppose warfare.

People like Sherwood and Graham Greene (author of THIS GUN FOR HIRE) happened to have latched onto a conspiracy theory regarding World War I that they just felt was true. Both men felt the real villains in 1914 - 1918 was not the various foolish leaders of the nations involved, nor the generals or admirals, or fighting men. It was the munition manufacturers. This stupid theory was given impetus in the U.S. by a special investigation committee into the sales of munitions in World War I that was conducted by North Dakota isolationist Senator Gerald P. Nye. Given the nickname: "The Merchants of Death" investigation, it suggested that an unholy alliance of gun and war machine factory owners and big bankers like J. P. Morgan and Kuhn Loeb & Co. had pushed the U.S. into war so that their profits could go through the roof. In England a similar view was seen in the career of the notorious arms salesman and industrialist Sir Basil Zaharoff. A man from the Balkans, Zaharoff sold arms to all countries (sometimes enemy countries at the same time) and supposedly pushed the governments into the great bloodbath to increase his profits. As Sir Basil was (erroneously) thought to be Jewish, Greene turned him into the villain of his novel (Sir Marcus, the arms manufacturer). Thinking along similar lines, Sherwood creates his version of Zaharoff as Achille Weber, the Edward Arnold role in the play and film.

No doubt munition stock zoomed during the war (except for the companies in the Central Powers who lost), but Zaharoff did not have that much influence. Suspected for being foreign born, he was not likely to be heeded on life and death matters to Great Britain or any of the other countries he dealt with. His importance was as much as anyone who would have offered to sell some new technology in each country - like Rudolf Diesel, the engine inventor, who tried to sell his engine in England.

Sherwood's Weber dates the play. He should have stuck to the problems of nationalism or of economic warfare. The real causes for war were badly ignored - at least in this film. The whole idea of the plot is that everyone in the resort happens to mirror all the countries in Europe, and when the war breaks up they are forced to return home to fight to the death. Typical is Charles Coburn, as a scientist working on a cancer cure. He ends bitterly returning home, to design war weapons with his knowledge of science. That is actually far more effective to get the anti-war message across.

Gable does a fine job as Harry Van (including his delightful song and dance number - which one wishes he had tried to repeat elsewhere), more concerned with trying to guess the identity of Norma Shearer's Irene than the impending war. Is she that phony he met ten years ago or is she actually a Russian princess? Shearer gives one of her best performances, joining Carole Lombard in THE PRINCESS COMES ACROSS in imitating Garbo (albeit as a Russian, not a Swede). Arnold's role is meaty but small, and he is properly untrustworthy - ditching Irene at the hotel under scurvy circumstances. And Laura Hope Crews as the tipsy Madame Zuleika, in Harry/Gable's first acting job, is wonderful as the world's worst mind reader. I give the film a seven - it is entertaining enough to hold your attention, despite your misgivings.