Movie: Idiot's Delight

A few nights ago, very late at night, I watched an old Clark Gable movie, Idiot's Delight. The movie was released in 1939, the 'golden year' of Hollywood movies. This movie is nowhere near golden. It may almost be so bad that it is 'good'. It certainly is an odd movie.

Clark Gable plays Harry Van, a vaudeville actor with little talent who is going backwards in his career. In the beginning Norma Shearer plays Irene, an acrobat with dreams of love and fame. Then more than ten years later she reappears as Irene, a fake Russian Countess traveling on the arm of a munitions manufacturer.

Clark Gable: "You can call that sentimental, Mrs. Weber, but that is true."

Norma Shearer: "Forgive me, but that is not my name."

Clark Gable: "Oh. I thought -"

Norma Shearer: "I know what you thought. Mr Weber and I are associated in a sort of business way."

Clark Gable: "I see. Um, business is pretty good, isn't it?"

Gable plays a variation of his typical 1930s roles, a charming, rough around the edges, doing it his way, type of guy.

Norma Shearer: "But I have talked too much about myself. What about you my friend?"

Clark Gable: "Oh, I'm not very interesting. I'm just what I seem to be."

Shearer's character as a Russian Countess is so over the top one has to wonder if Shearer is a bad actress hamming it up, the part was poorly written, or a combination of both. Or maybe Shearer's character is based on a real life Russian refuge from the 1917 Russian Revolution?

For the following dialog imagine Norma Shearer wearing a long platinum blond wig, waving a cigarette in a long cigarette holder, talking with a thick Russian accent, and overacting as she talks.

Norma Shearer: "My father was old. The hardships of that terrible journey had broken his body. But his spirit was strong. His spirit that is... Russia.

He lay there in that little boat. And he looked up at me. -- Never can I forget his face. So thin. So white. So beautiful in the starlight.

And he said to me, 'Irena... little daughter'. And then... he died.

For four days I was alone with his body. Sailing through the storms of the Black Sea. I had no food. No water. I was in agony from the violent wounds of the Bolshevikii. I knew I must die.

And then.. an American cruiser rescued me. May Heaven bless those good men!"

Clark Gable: "Ahem. Excuse me Madame. But it seems to me that the last time you told me about your escape it was different."

Norma Shearer: "Well! I made several escapes."

The movie originally was a play and the movie looks and it feels like it. Not a good thing for a movie.

The movie's time line starts at the end of WWI and goes to 1939 and the outbreak of WWII. The first half of the movie, where Gable and Shearer, down on their luck, meet in Omaha, Nebraska during a vaudeville show, has the typical screwball comedy charm of 1930s movies. Their later meeting at a hotel in the European Alps is where things get strange. The movie switches to a pre-WWII anti-war message that today seems odd as we now know the reason for WWII. From my University history classes I recognize that the movie's anti-war message is a reaction to WWI because the movie blames munition manufacturers for wars.

The movie's anti-war message was also harmed by Burgess Meredith's character's strident spouting of his peace message. Meredith's character seemed as if he burst in from another movie. It felt like we were getting a lecture and I was happy when the soldiers hauled him off. It didn't help that I was thinking "The Penguin" from the Batman TV show when I saw Meredith. Even if he was skinny back then, the voice remains the same.

Burgess Meredith: "While you sit here eating and drinking, their planes dropped fifty thousand kilos of bombs on innocent people. Heavens knows how many were killed; how much of life and beauty is forever destroyed. And you sit here eating and drinking with them, the murderers. It was their planes from the very field down there. Assassins!!!"

Also odd was Clark Gable singing and dancing to the song "Putting on the Ritz". He did ok, but his body's proportions, or the suit he was wearing, made him look odd. He looked to have too short of legs for his body.

Norma Shearer: "You are a very bad dancer."

Clark Gable: "Hmmm... in Romania they thought I was pretty good."

The ending - or I should say "endings" - as there was a domestic and international ending - was surreal. By then I had surrendered to incomprehension as to the goal of the movie. Gable and Shearer were shouting and singing and playing piano, declaring their love, and making plans for their future against a phony backdrop of plane after plane outside the large windows dive bombing their hotel and the valley below. And the point was?

Norma Shearer: "Harry, do you realize the whole world has gone to war? The whole world!"

Clark Gable: "I realize it, but don't ask me why. I've stopped trying to figure it out."

Norma Shearer: "I know why it is. It's just to kill us - you and me. Because we are the little people. And for us, the deadliest weapons are the most merciful."

[Gable grabs her by her shoulders]

Clark Gable: "Easy..."

Norma Shearer: "I've never cared before, but now I want to live."

Clark Gable: "So do I, but if we don't, let's hope we make a fast exit."

Norma Shearer: "Then together."

[An explosion from a large bomb falling nearby. Gable turns and shakes his fist in the air.]

Clark Gable: "Nice try buddy, but you muffed it!"

Later Norma Shearer asked, "Harry, do you know any hymns?" Then they sang a hymn while Clark Gable played a piano while many planes flew in the background and bombs fell all around. The underside of a few planes were seen just outside the large hotel window as the planes dived down to the valley below.

The last line in the international version of the movie was by Norma Shearer,

"Look Harry! They've gone away."

The last line in the domestic version of the movie was by Clark Gable as he played an upbeat tune on a piano that was tilted sideways due to a broken leg,

"Hey, over here boys! Over here! See the big show. See the greatest aggregation of talent in the world."

The movie would have been helped by having a main villain to go against, a human to personify evil, instead of odd characters railing against "events" and faceless evildoers. It was confusing to see the soldiers lambasted by Burgess Meredith one minute and the next minute see the showgirls ("Les Blondes") girlishly fawn all over the soldiers.

The dialog was so over the top at times that I rewound the VCR to write down accurately some of the lines. It was late at night when I watched this movie and I didn't trust if the late hour was making the dialog sound loopy. The late hour wasn't.

Here are a few samples of the dialog. The movie had lots more over-the-top dialog, but if I wrote more down I would have been up all night.

Clark Gable and Norma Shearer are parting at a train station in Omaha, Nebraska. His vaudeville act is falling apart and she is an acrobat who unsuccessfully tried to get him to take her on as a partner in his fake mind-reading act to replace the drunken old lady who is his current partner. He has known Norma Shearer less than 24 hours, and this being a 1939 movie, it is unclear if they spent the night together, though the indications are she stayed in his hotel room at the end of their previous scene together.

Clark Gable: "The world you live in isn't a world of facts and figures; it's a world of dreams. Maybe that's what I like about you Irene. You're so beautifully phony."

Norma Shearer: "And maybe you're wrong my darling. Maybe we two cheap people, with our cheap lives, maybe we're the only ones in this crazy world who are real."

They hug, do a quick "1930s kiss", then hug again.

Clark Gable: "Well, we gotta be pulling out now babe."

Norma Shearer: "I know, but not together."

Clark Gable: "No, not together. You go your way and I go mine. But I got a hunch we'll see each other again. Sometime."

Unfortunately for the movie audience they did meet again.

You know, for such a bad movie, it sure made an impression on me. I think it is because of Clark Gable's charm. I also enjoyed the banter between Gable and Norma Shearer. When they meet again in Europe she pretends not to know him and he spends a lot of time trying to get her to admit they had met in Omaha.

Norma Shearer: "The temple of your memory must be so crowded."

Clark Gable: "Are you sure you've never been in Omaha, Madame?"

Norma Shearer: "Here we are, on a mountain peak in bedlam. Tonight war is breaking over the world. And all you worry about is whether I am a girl you once casually met in Oma - ha-ha-ha."

Clark Gable: "Ha-ha-ha. Did I say it was casual?"

Clark Gable: "Somehow or other I couldn't help feeling touched, that of all the sordid hotels you've been in, that you should have remembered that one. "

Norma Shearer: "The age of chivalry still lives!"

While I didn't care much for the part of the movie set in the Alps, I did enjoy the mountain scenery shown in the background. Beautiful!

Lastly, reviewing what I have written, and having watched modern movies since then, I realize another reason why I am growing fond of this movie. It may be because - as goofy as some of the dialog was - at least there was dialog. Today's movies are weak on dialog, and often the dialog these days is just an attempt for a character to toss off a one liner between action sequences.

"I told you then that I wasn't everybody. It's true; I'm nobody. But I learned it was no use telling the truth to people whose life was a whole lie." -- Norma Shearer as Irene

"It's a pleasure to be entertaining, but you can't get away with it." -- Clark Gable as Harry Van

"Oh, 'Kak Stranna!' How strange!" -- Norma Shearer as Irene