IDIOT'S DELIGHT (1939)

After returning from World War I, small-potatoes entertainer Harry Van (Clark Gable) tries to restart his career and eventually gets a gig as an assistant to mind reader Madame Zuleika. One night in Omaha, when Zukeika, a bit soused on gin, messes up the act, acrobat Irene (Norma Shearer) tries to help out by prompting her from offstage but ends up making things worse, and Harry and Zuleika are run from the stage. Later, Irene apologizes to Harry and we discover two things: she makes up most of the details of her life—among other things, she claims to have grown up in Russia despite having no trace of an accent—and she thinks she's destined for greatness. He calls her a "beautiful phony" and the two have a one-night stand before parting for other towns. Ten years later, in 1938 as wartime jitters have taken hold of Europe, Harry, now a traveling song-and-dance man, is stranded at a hotel in the Alps with his band of six young women called Les Blondes. The border into Switzerland has been closed, at least temporarily, and just below the hotel is an air base out of which threatening military maneuvers have been occurring.  Also stranded are a German doctor, an agitated pacifist, and a young and innocent newlywed couple. A little later, who should show up but Irene, now calling herself Irina and sporting platinum blonde hair, a thick Russian accent, and a important lover, the arms dealer Achille Weber (Edward Arnold) who stands to make a lot of money if war breaks out. In addition to the rapidly growing international tensions, the guests get on each other's nerves, and Harry is determined to make Irina admit to him that she is Irene from Omaha.

This is an odd duck of a movie. Despite the straightforward narrative summarized above, it's difficult to say what this movie is about. Its stars, Gable and Shearer, are in romantic comedy mode, and if this had been made a few years later, the pace might have been quickened, turning it into a screwball comedy. But the overwhelming tone is one of pessimism about the state of the world—this was released in January of 1938, before the start of World War II but after the first acts of German aggression—and most of the other characters function more as symbols than as people we come to care about. This is especially true of the pacifist (Burgess Meredith, struggling with his character's lack of, well, character) and the Army officer (Joseph Schildkraut, very good in what ends up being a muddled and unimportant role). It's based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play from 1936 which wound up predicting the European war situation, but the movie, for practical reasons concerning the possibility of getting banned in Europe, is less specific about the who and where—in the play the hotel is in Italy, which would make Italy the attacking country, but here, the hotel is just on a border in the mountains, and the only foreign language we hear is Esperanto.

Despite the general fogginess of the narrative and character motivations, this is quite watchable, due partly to fine acting all around. Norma Shearer seems to having a ball hamming it up in her countess persona, and Gable also has fun with his roguish character. He even gets to sing and dance with Les Blondes to "Puttin' on the Ritz." The first 20 minutes or so, with Gable and Shearer in Omaha, is not in the play, but it certainly helps flesh out the characters and does not feel like an artificial addition. Arnold (in the kind of pompous, posturing role he could do in his sleep,) Meredith and Schildkraut give good support, as do Skeets Gallagher and Charles Coburn. Honestly, however, what I like most about this movie is the fabulous set: the modern hotel lobby with huge windows giving a panoramic view of the mountains. The action is a little stagy in the lobby, but that didn't bother me. The apocalyptic ending of the play, with bombs falling all around the hotel, is tempered a bit too much here, leading to a happy ending (of sorts) that works for the chemistry that Shearer and Gable have concocted, but works against the philosophical themes of the film. "Muddled" is a good word to describe this movie, but it's still fun and interesting to watch. [TCM]