Mon 31 May 2010
Movie Review: IDIOT’S DELIGHT (1939).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[9] Comments
IDIOT’S DELIGHT. MGM, 1939. Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Harry Van’s “Les Blondes”: Virginia Grey, Virginia Dale, Paula Stone, Bernadene Hayes, Joan Marsh, Lorraine Krueger. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his own Pulitzer Prize winning play. Director: Clarence Brown.
Not only was Robert Sherwood hired to write the screenplay, but he expanded on it by creating a long prelude to the play itself.
Some back story for both of the two stars is filled in, detailing their first encounter as vaudevillians Harry Van and Irene Fellara, whose paths cross and meet again some 20 years later, just as rumors of war are rumbling across Europe.
Clark Gable plays Harry Van, of course, and Norma Shearer is Irene. He’s a stooge for a phoney mind-reader when first they meet, and she’s an acrobat who hangs by her teeth in the act before them. They spend one wonderful night together (but not a bed) before their trains take them in opposite directions in the morning.
Irene Fellara: I know, but not together.
Harry Van: No, not together. You go your way and I go mine. But I got a hunch we’ll see each other again. Sometime.
The next time they meet (and of course they do) is in a snowbound lodge somewhere in the Alps.
Unable to cross the border from one country to the next because of international tensions, a large number of passengers from a wide assortment of countries are also stranded.
Harry is now the manager and lead dancer for a troupe of female dancers (Les Blondes). She’s the mistress (we presume) of an important European munitions mogul. She’s also now a blonde and claims to be a refugee Russian countess. His jaw drops.
Harry Van: Are you sure you’ve never been in Omaha, Madame?
In fine overdramatized fashion Irene goes into much detail about her former life:
Harry Van: Ahem. Excuse me Madame. But it seems to me that the last time you told me about your escape it was different.
Irene Fellara: Well! I made several escapes.
There is a lot of comedy in this film, and in fact it is quite remarkable – I wouldn’t have known it until reading about it later on IMDB – that this is the only time Clark Gable did a song and dance routine in a movie: “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
He does it well – but then again everything Clark Gable did in a movie he did well. He was, as far as I am concerned, the quintessential Hollywood actor, with a presence before the cameras that was second to absolutely nobody else.
The movie is itself is a time capsule trapped in amber, as Idiot’s Delight is, and you have to watch this movie as if you were in the theater in 1939. It is in itself a plea for peace, not war; laying the blame for the incipient hostilities on munitions manufacturers, unfortunately, not the plans of national glory of Hitler and others. Hitler himself is not mentioned, I do not believe.
So there is a lot of anxiety hidden behind the long-delayed romance and the songs and quick and easy patter of Harry Van.
Lives are about to be disrupted for many and for good. A honeymooning couple are emblems of loves that are (most likely) going to be torn apart.
Many of the people who have left comments seem to feel that the film is outdated, which it is, and corny, which it is and is not, both at the same time. The movie is entertaining, no doubt about it, but watching it in the present day there is a sense of unease or disconnect between its several components, and all I can do is tell you about it. More than this, I haven’t defined it further, no more than I have.
There are two endings for this film. One is a happier one, shown in the US. The other, shown in Europe, which is the one I’ve just watched, ends on a bright note, but one wrapped up in a solid container of reality.
NOTE: Credit for the dialogue quoted goes to the IMDB website, from which I copied and pasted.
May 31st, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Great musical number, but the politics of the munitions kings and all that belongs more to the twenties than the late thirties. Frankly this was terribly dated in 1939. Though the actors are fine, watching this one is sort of like a train wreck. You can’t turn your head away even when you want to.
Sherwood did much better with PETRIFIED FOREST, though that one is pretty pretentious too.
May 31st, 2010 at 3:56 pm
A train wreck? In a sense, perhaps, but I didn’t think it was that bad. Pretentious? Yes, in part.
I enjoyed watching Clark Gable, a good-hearted goofus trying to make a career out of show business and never quite succeeding, but never (not yet) discouraged, though maybe he is on the inside.
And even though Norma Shearer’s performance as the Russian countess is way over the top, I enjoyed that, too, and I especially enjoyed Harry Van’s troupe of singing and dancing girls, even though they had very little role in the movie other than that.
But as you say, David, what’s off is are the politics of war and war-making. The timing of when the movie came out. The pacifist (Burgess Meredith) among the stranded travelers who’s hustled out when he begins harassing the troops too much, never to be heard of again. There’s an edge there, but the edge is dulled by a romance that’s too long in the making, I’m sorry to say.
May 31st, 2010 at 4:24 pm
I didn’t keep track exactly, but at least a week passed by between when I watched this movie and when I wrote this review.
It was something like a writer’s block, as if I needed to process something in my brain and get it thrashed out upstairs before I could get started at the keyboard and the words could start coming out.
But the best way to beat a blockage like this, at least for me, is to know that when the time comes, all I need to do is sit down and start typing.
And what you see above is essentially the first and only draft, with only some tinkering here and there to cut down my usual tendency to have sentences continue on and on without ever stopping to take a breath, like this one.
May 31st, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Train wreck may be too strong, because I grant the film is fun thanks to the stars, but its one of those projects that are made up of so many disparate elements that don’t really fit together — you have to wonder what the Pulitzer committie was thinking when they gave this one a prize — even if the play was different from the film. Though at the time anti-war sentiments and isolationist feelings were pretty high so that may be the reason.
Ironic this is the same year Warner’s CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY famously ‘declared war,’ on Nazi Germany. Only a year later from the same studio as this one Shearer was helping American Robert Taylor get his German mother Nazimova out from Conrad Veidt’s Nazi Germany, so events left this behind pretty quickly.
But I can’t really call it a good film either. The stars are good, and Gable doing Irving Berlin is worth sitting through the whole film for, but I don’t think if you asked me to recommend a good movie this would come up on any list. There are some good bits of business and dialogue, but if not for Gable and that musical number I might not watch it again.
That whole munitions kings plot was pretty hoary when Jules Verne used it in FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON, though the Krupps certainly played their part in Hitler’s rise. Even in the twenties that plot had whiskers.
August 12th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
I disagree completely. I think this was a fantastic film full of unknown foresight and totally relevant to what has happened even in the last decade. Shearer was supposed to be over the top or it wouldn’t have been any good. They used Esperanto, for crying out loud. This film has been overlooked for too long and should be shown to students of film and history. Plus, I was under the impression that Gable never danced, so seeing him hoof was worth the price of admission…which was, of course, no more than time.
September 24th, 2012 at 10:52 pm
Great Gable and very good Shearer. Not naive as such but a comment on naivete. Gable’s character, strong and resilient, represents unknowing American public, might add print journalists to that, refusing to follow the wised-up lead of President FDR. Gable’s Harry is ready to be led but not quite ready to do anything about it. When he leaves the right thing is unclear to him. When he returns the right thing has come clear even though this good guy doesn’t understand why or what has caused the upheaval. Not all that important. It is enough to stand by your friends and allies. And to save them if possible. With Gable and the U.S., anything is possible. (I could have done without the pacifist.)
September 25th, 2012 at 12:31 am
I’ve watched a number of Clark Gable films over the years, and I’ve found that they’ve stayed with me longer than those of almost any other actor. Even more than Bogart’s? I’m not sure, but in total, perhaps yes.
September 25th, 2012 at 10:45 am
Steve,
In 1965 I was having drinks with Louis at The Sherry Netherland. Always tried to get him talking about the old days and he did a bit. I took this away. His view: There will be plenty of good actors but there will never be another Gable in the culture. Babe Ruth. Ernest Hemingway. Frank Sinatra. Gable.
September 26th, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Further thought:
I think The Falcon, Steve Wilson, The Saint all function as faux private detectives. Add The Lone Wolf and probably others. So, in a broad context, if one is a mystery of sorts, they probably all are. Yes…? It is a great subject, a friend of mine, now gone, Chris Steinbrunner co-authored a collection of this kind of material with Otto Penzler called The Detectionary. Pretty well first on the market with this kind of reference work.