Idiot's Delight (Clarence Brown, 1939)

Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Idiot's Delight

Cast: Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Burgess Meredith, Laura Hope Crews, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Peter Willes, Pat Paterson, William Edmunds, Fritz Feld. Screenplay: Robert E. Sherwood, based on his play. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Herbert Stothart.

To make a critic's obvious joke, Idiot's Delight is sometimes idiotic and rarely delightful. It's mostly a rather ill-advised filming of Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 play about a world on the brink of war. The world was even further out on that brink by the time the film was made, and two distinct endings were shot. One, for U.S. audiences, is conventionally neutral (as the United States was at the time) about whether a world war was about to happen. The other, to be shown abroad, takes a more pessimistic view. But the whole film is riddled with a confusion of tone. This is the movie in which Clark Gable, playing a vaudevillian, sings and dances to Irving Berlin's "Puttin' on the Ritz" and is carried offstage by a group of chorus girls -- a sequence revived by its inclusion in the 1974 celebration of MGM musical numbers, That's Entertainment. Gable is game throughout the film, especially when he has to play opposite Norma Shearer at her most arch. The original Broadway version starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; Gable and Shearer are not the Lunts.

The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927)

Norma Shearer, Ramon Novarro, and Jean Hersholt in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg

Prince Karl Heinrich: Ramon Novarro
Kathi: Norma Shearer
Dr. Jüttner: Jean Hersholt
King Karl VII: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Lutz: Edgar Norton
Kellermann: Bobbie Mack
Young Karl Heinrich: Philippe De Lacy
Old Ruder: Otis Harlan

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Hanns Kräly
Based on a book and play by Wilhelm Meyer-Förster
Cinematography: John J. Mescall
Art direction: Richard Day, Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Andrew Marton

Though The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg sometimes seems as overextended as its title, given the slightness of its love-or-duty plot, it gets a good deal of zip from Ernst Lubitsch's direction and from the charm of its leads, Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer. The latter, especially, is seen to good advantage in a role that doesn't call on her to over-emote, a trap she sometimes fell into in many of her sound roles. Lubitsch inserts sly gags here and there to leaven the obviousness of the plot. After perhaps one too many scenes of students quaffing beer, there's a card to remind us that they were at the university to learn, too, followed by a shot of a professor droning away at a lectern to a classroom of a single student. Eventually, the film bogs down a bit when Novarro's Karl Heinrich is called away to princely duties and has to forsake Shearer's lovely barmaid. 

The Women (George Cukor, 1939)

Despite the sad novelty of its all-female cast, George Cukor's film flunks the Bechdel test completely: All the women in The Women talk about is men. They don't talk about their jobs because they don't have them: They circulate in a world of cocktail parties, kaffeeklatsches, spas, and venues for shopping. The one exception is Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford), who to my mind becomes the film's real heroine with her resigned "back to the perfume counter" final speech after she receives her comeuppance. Say what you will about Crystal, and the characters in The Women have plenty to say about her, she has a spine and a pretty solid view that the world is still there for her taking by any means necessary. Of course, the nominal heroine is poor Mary (Mrs. Stephen) Haines (Norma Shearer), who gets the final soft-focus scene as, dewy-eyed, she heads off to reconcile with her husband. I want to be a little more generous to Shearer than some have been: She has been given a thankless role -- generous, self-effacing, motherly to a fault -- and not only a formidable adversary but also a surrounding cast of colorful, wisecracking characters, from Rosalind Russell's bumptious, overdressed gossip to Paulette Goddard's wryly tough chorus girl on the make to Mary Boland's relentless serial divorcee. We are supposed to root for Mary, but why? This is where I think the gimmick, the all-female cast, does Shearer, a disservice. If we actually met Stephen Haines, we might have some clue as to why Mary takes so long to kick him out and then is so delighted to rush to his Crystal-stained arms at the film's end. Shearer is forced to play a role without a motive other than blindly enduring love. That she does it as well as she can gives her some default points, but for most of of the film she has to rely on Shearerisms: chin up, eyes moist, shoulders back. The character comes to life only at the end when Mary decides to fight back by marshaling all the dirty tricks she has been taught, and Shearer is fun to watch as she plays them. Still, her triumph over Crystal is only the product of a tired dramatic formula. It's Crawford who mops the floor with the rest of the cast with her performance and earns our respect for Crystal with her delivery of the famous exit line: "There a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society ... outside of a kennel. So long, ladies!" Everything else is anticlimax. Cukor gives the film great energy, though the adaptation by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin of the Clare Boothe Luce play (with uncredited help from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Donald Ogden Stewart) is so full of would-be zingers that they begin to get a little tiresome. Sadly, the only respite from the non-stop bitchery is to introduce another weepy scene between Mary and her mother (Lucile Watson) or her daughter (Virginia Weidler). At two hours and 13 minutes, The Women seems at least 13 minutes overlong.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner, 1929)

Designed to show off the novelty of sound -- and, in two sequences, the coming novelty of Technicolor -- The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was enthusiastically received by critics and audiences, though it lost the best picture Oscar to The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929). Today, both movies are creaky antiques, despite the effort that MGM put into producing them. In fact, The Hollywood Revue often seems like an attempt to promote The Broadway Melody, which had opened three and a half months earlier, since it gives prominent spots to that film's stars, Charles King, Bessie Love, and Anita Page. The rest of it feels a lot like amateur night at MGM, as the studio's stars are trotted out for songs and skits that often feel tired and incoherent. In a few years, MGM would be boasting that it had more stars than there are in heaven, but many of the stars showcased in the Revue are forgotten today -- like King, Love, and Page -- or were on the wane -- like John Gilbert, Marion Davies, and Buster Keaton. The ones that remained stars, like Jack Benny and Joan Crawford, did so by reinventing themselves. The Revue, which modeled itself on theatrical conventions like the minstrel show and vaudeville, both of which were on the outs, failed to break ground for the Hollywood musical: It would take a few years for Warner Bros. to do that, with 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and the unfettered imagination of Busby Berkeley taking the backstage musical formula of The Broadway Melody and some of Sammy Lee's choreographic tricks from the Revue -- including overhead kaleidoscope shots -- and improving on them. The Revue has a few highlights even today: Joan Crawford trying a little too hard to sparkle as she sings (passably) and dances (clunkily); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their first sound film, doing a magic act with Jack Benny's intervention; Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters doing "Singin' in the Rain," which gets a Technicolor reprise with most of the company at the film's end; Keaton acrobatically clowning his way (silently) through an "underwater" drag routine; and Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in Technicolor performing a bit of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, first as Shakespeare wrote it and then in 1929's slang. To get to them, however, you have to sit through a lot of dud routines and dated songs like Charles King's paean to maternity, "Your Mother and Mine," which must have been aimed right at the mushy heart of Louis B. Mayer.  

Marie Antoinette (W.S. Van Dyke, 1938)

Robert Morley and Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette: Norma Shearer
Count Axel de Fersen: Tyrone Power
King Louis XV: John Barrymore
King Louis XVI: Robert Morley
Princesse de Lamballe: Anita Louise
Duke d'Orléans; Joseph Schildkraut
Mme du Barry: Gladys George
Count de Mercey: Henry Stephenson

Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Screenplay: Claudine West, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ernest Vajda
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Robert Kern
Costume design: Adrian, Gile Steele
Music: Herbert Stothart

Hollywood historical hokum, W.S. Van Dyke's Marie Antoinette was a vehicle for Norma Shearer that had been planned for her by her husband, Irving G. Thalberg, who died in 1936. MGM stuck with it because as Thalberg's heir, Shearer had control of a large chunk of stock. It also gave her a part that ran the gamut from the fresh and bubbly teenage Austrian archduchess thrilled at the arranged marriage to the future Louis XVI, to the drab, worn figure riding in a tumbril to the guillotine. Considering that it takes place in one of the most interesting periods in history, it could have been a true epic if screenwriters Claudine West, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Ernest Vajda (with uncredited help from several other hands, including F. Scott Fitzgerald) hadn't been pressured to turn it into a love story between Marie and the Swedish Count Axel Fersen. But the portrayal of their affair was stifled by the Production Code's squeamishness about sex, and the long period in which Marie and Louis fail to consummate their marriage lurks unexplained in the background. MGM threw lots of money at the film to compensate: Shearer sashays around in Adrian gowns with panniers out to here, with wigs up to there, and on sets designed and decorated by Cedric Gibbons and Henry Grace that make the real Versailles look puny. The problem is that nothing like a genuine human emotion appears on the screen, and the perceived necessity of glamorizing the aristocrats turns the French Revolution on its head. The cast of thousands includes John Barrymore as Louis XV, Gladys George as Madame du Barry, and Joseph Schildkraut (with what looks like Jean Harlow's eyebrows and Joan Crawford's lipstick) as the foppish Duke of Orléans. The best performance in the movie comes from Morley, who took the role after the first choice, Charles Laughton, proved unavailable; Morley earned a supporting actor Oscar nomination for his film debut. With the exception of The Women (George Cukor, 1939), in which she is upstaged by her old rival Joan Crawford, this is Shearer's last film of consequence. When she turned 40 in 1942, she retired from the movies and lived in increasing seclusion until her death, 41 years later. It says something about Shearer's status in Hollywood that Greta Garbo, who retired at about the same time, and who also sought to be left alone, was the more legendary figure and was more ardently pursued by gossips and paparazzi.

Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936)

If Shakespeare's Juliet could be played, as it was in its first performances, by a boy, then why shouldn't she be played by 34-year-old Norma Shearer? Truth be told, I don't find Shearer's performance that bad: She lightens her voice effectively and her girlish manner never gets too coy. It also helps that William H. Daniels photographs her through filters that soften the signs of aging: She looks maybe five years younger than her actual age, if not the 20 years younger that the play's Juliet is supposed to be. I'm more bothered by the balding 43-year-old Leslie Howard as her Romeo, though he had the theatrical training that makes the verse sound convincing in his delivery. And then there's the 54-year-old John Barrymore as Mercutio, who could be Romeo's fey uncle but not his contemporary. In fact, Barrymore's over-the-top performance almost makes this version of the play a must-see -- we miss him more than we do most Mercutios after his death. Edna May Oliver's turn as Juliet's Nurse is enjoyable, if a bit of a surprise: She usually played eccentric spinsters like Aunt Betsy Trotwood in David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935) or sour dowagers like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940). In the play, the Nurse rarely speaks without risqué double-entendres, but most of them have been cut in Talbot Jennings's adaptation, thus avoiding the ridiculous spectacle of Shakespeare being subjected to the Production Code censors. (Somehow the studio managed to slip in Mercutio's line, "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.") Some of the other pleasures of the film are camp ones, such as Agnes deMille's choreography for the ball, along with the costume designs by Oliver Messel and Adrian, which evoke early 20th-century illustrators like Walter Crane or Maxfield Parrish. No, this Romeo and Juliet won't do, except as a representation of how Shakespeare's play was seen at a particular time and place: a Hollywood film studio in the heyday of the star system. In that respect, it's invaluable.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934)

This is Norma Shearer as queen of the MGM lot, taking on a role that had been associated with Katherine Cornell, who played Elizabeth Barrett in the 1931 Broadway production of Rudolf Besier's play and then toured the country with it. Irving Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, offered the role in the film version to Cornell, but she turned it down -- as she did all film offers. (Cornell reportedly was afraid of having her performances recorded on film because she feared they would grow dated and ludicrous, as so many performances from the silent era had become.) The logical choice for the movie then became Shearer, Thalberg's wife, who was entering a new phase in her career: Having turned 30 in 1932, she was beginning to outgrow the more lively persona that she displayed in her earlier movies. Unfortunately for her reputation today, most of the films she began to make have effaced the earlier image: She seems distantly "respectable" in them. The Barretts of Wimpole Street was one of her more popular vehicles, and although the film as a whole is stodgy, Shearer makes a credible transition from the oppressed invalid of the early part of the film to the defiant woman who elopes with her lover, Robert Browning (Fredric March), at the end. It helps that Charles Laughton hams it up wonderfully as Edward Moulton-Barrett, Elizabeth's father, who is determined to keep any of his eight children from marrying as long as he is alive. Although the Production Code forbade any explicit mention of either incest or sexual obsession, Laughton's performance makes it clear in the climactic scene not only that he is disturbed by his own sexuality and may have forced himself on his late wife, but also that he has incestuous feelings for Elizabeth. Her horror at this revelation precipitates her elopement with Browning.

Their Own Desire (E. Mason Hopper, 1929)

Two years before A Free Soul, Norma Shearer made this rather thin talkie, which shows clearly her evolution from silence into sound. She hasn't yet found her voice level: It was only her third talking picture and she still sounds a bit thin, and her laugh is a little shrill. It probably helped that her brother, Douglas Shearer, was the head of MGM's sound department, and could help her get the right pitch, because her next film, The Divorcee (Robert Z. Leonard, 1930), won her the best actress Oscar. (In fact, the Oscar ballot listed her nomination as for both The Divorcee and Their Own Desire, but the official citation showed her as a winner for only the former. Academy record-keeping was primitive at the time, so no one today knows if the voters indicated a preference for the one film over the other -- as they should have, since her performance in The Divorcee is indeed the better one.) In Their Own Desire, Shearer is playing a post-flapper "new woman," lively and athletic: She plays polo, taking a spill from a horse with no ill effects, and gets the attention of men by doing high dives into the country club pool. The man she attracts is played by Robert Montgomery, who was two years younger than 27-year-old Shearer, and both are convincingly coltish in their infatuation. The plot, from a novel by Sarita Fuller adapted by Frances Marion, is pleasantly nonsensical: Shearer and Montgomery fall in love, not knowing that he is the son of the woman (Helene Millard) whom her father (Lewis Stone) has divorced her mother (Belle Bennett) to live with. (The movie was made, obviously, before the institution of the Prohibition Code's proscription on such goings-on.) It's complicated, as they say. MGM made the most of its entry into sound, including two musical numbers: the songs "Blue Is the Night," played during a dance at the country club, and "The Boyfriend Blues," sung to Shearer by a harmonizing quartet. Director Hopper had been making movies since 1911, but he retired from the business in 1935, leaving an oeuvre of no particular distinction though he lived on till 1967.

A Free Soul (Clarence Brown, 1931)

Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in A Free Soul

Jan Ashe: Norma Shearer
Dwight Winthrop: Leslie Howard
Stephen Ashe: Lionel Barrymore
Ace Wilfong: Clark Gable
Eddie: James Gleason

Director: Clarence Brown
Screenplay: John Meehan, Becky Gardiner
Based on a novel by Adela Rogers St. Johns and a play by Willard Mack
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Art director: Cedric Gibbons
Costume design: Adrian

Norma Shearer made the transition to talkies easily: She had a well-placed voice and, when the role called for it, a natural way of handling dialogue. Unfortunately, A Free Soul doesn't call for much in the way of "natural" for Shearer, and it's one of the films that suggest why, of the major female stars of the 1930s (Garbo, Crawford, Loy, Harlow, Stanwyck, Dietrich, Hepburn, Colbert), she is the least remembered. She works hard at her role as the free-spirited daughter of an alcoholic defense attorney, but too often her work is undone by a tendency, perhaps carried over from silent films, to strike mannered poses: typically, hands on hips, shoulders back, chin high. She looks great, however, in the barely-there gowns designed for her by Adrian, which seem to be held in place by will power (or double-sided tape). The plot calls on her to try to dry out her drunken father by wagering that if he can sober up, she'll give up her relationship with the sexy gangster her father managed to save from a murder rap. That gangster is played by Clark Gable, who got fifth billing (after James Gleason!), a sign of his status at the time. Gable had been making movies, usually in bit parts, since 1923, but this was the film that catapulted him, at age 30, into stardom. He still stands out in the movie as a natural, unaffected presence amid the mannered Shearer, hammy Lionel Barrymore, and pasty-looking Leslie Howard. It doesn't even hurt Gable that he's cast as a heel named Ace Wilfong, which brings to mind the insurance salesman in It's a Gift (Norman Z. McLeod, 1934) who annoys W.C. Fields with his search for Carl LaFong, "Capital L, small a, capital F, small o, small n, small g. LaFong. Carl LaFong." The improbable story comes from a novel by Adela Rogers St. Johns that had been adapted into a play by Willard Mack. (Incidentally, the play had been directed on Broadway in 1928 by George Cukor and starred Melvyn Douglas as Ace Wilfong.) Barrymore won the best actor Oscar on the strength of the courtroom speech he gives at the film's end. Barrymore claimed that he did it in one take with the help of multiple cameras, but the logistics of lighting for that many cameras makes his story hard to credit.

Two Norma Shearer Silent Films

Norma Shearer meets Norma Shearer in Lady of the Night

Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, 1925)
Molly Helmer/Florence Banning: Norma Shearer
David Page: Malcolm McGregor
Miss Carr: Dale Fuller
"Chunky" Dunn: George K. Arthur
Judge Banning: Fred Esmelton
Chris Helmer: Lew Harvey

Director: Monta Bell
Screenplay: Alice D.G. Miller
Based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns
Cinematography: André Barlatier

Norma Shearer and Johnny Mack Brown in A Lady of Chance

A Lady of Chance (Robert Z. Leonard, 1928)
Dolly Morgan: Norma Shearer
Steve Crandall: Johnny Mack Brown
Bradley: Lowell Sherman
Gwen: Gwen Lee
Mrs. Crandall: Eugenie Besserer

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Screenplay: Edmund Goulding, Andrew Percival Younger, Ralph Spence
Based on a story by Leroy Scott
Cinematography: J. Peverell Marley, William H. Daniels

I confessed in an earlier post that I really like the young Norma Shearer, especially in her silent films. But I can see from these two movies what led her astray in her later films: She loves the camera too much -- more than she does her leading men. Granted that neither Malcolm McGregor (Lady of the Night) nor Johnny Mack Brown (A Lady of Chance) is much more than a handsome presence on the screen -- not quite enough to act with when you've got Shearer's talent -- she still seems to hog these pictures, especially when she's playing tough girl. In Night she has a double role: the hard-bitten Molly Helmer and the sweet rich girl Florence Banning. She's surprisingly good as Molly -- and totally unbelievable as Florence, who decides to sacrifice her chance at marriage with inventor David Page (McGregor) because Molly had him first. But the incredible part is built into the story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, who churned out this sort of stuff for movies on a regular basis. In A Lady of Chance, Shearer has a role that would later be perfected by Barbara Stanwyck: the tough grifter with a soft heart. The story is nonsense again: She falls for her mark, a Southerner she thinks is a rich man, even after he takes her home to Alabama and she learns that she has jumped to the wrong conclusion. Stanwyck does it better in Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) and The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), but Stanwyck also had better directors than the prolific but undistinguished Robert Z. Leonard. He allows, or perhaps encourages, Shearer to mug and pose endlessly; at first she's delightful, but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way. A Lady of Chance also contains an embarrassing heap of period racism, when Shearer and Brown are being wheeled along the Atlantic City boardwalk by a singing black man, and Brown remarks that it reminds him of "the darkies singing on the plantation back home."

A Lon Chaney Double Feature

He Who Gets Slapped, Victor Sjöström, 1924
The more I see of the young Norma Shearer, the more I like her. I recently watched The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (Ernst Lubitsch, 1927), in which she's paired with Ramon Novarro, and was struck by how fresh and natural she was as an actress, and the same holds true in He Who Gets Slapped, where her love interest is John Gilbert. Both movies are silents, of course. It was only after the advent of sound that her husband, MGM's creative director Irving G. Thalberg, decided to make her into a great lady, the cinematic equivalent of Katharine Cornell, putting her into remakes of Broadway hits like The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934), which had starred Cornell, or Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which had featured another theatrical diva, Lynn Fontanne. She was also miscast as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor, 1936), a role that, at 34, she was much too old to play. She is barely in her 20s in He Who Gets Slapped, however, and she's delightful. This is not a film for coulrophobes (people with a fear of clowns), however. It's crawling with them, performing antics that are supposed to be, to judge from the hilarity they induce in the audiences shown in the film, side-splittingly funny. The film is based on the highly dubious premise that watching someone get slapped repeatedly is one of the funniest things ever. There may be people who think so -- to judge from the perennial popularity of the Three Stooges -- but I'm not one of them. The whole movie is an artificial concoction, anyway, and only the brilliance of Lon Chaney gives it some grounding in real-life feeling. It was one of the films that launched the MGM studios on the road to Hollywood dominance, and the first one to feature Leo the Lion in the credits.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Herbert Brenon, 1928
This is a grand showcase for Chaney, whose reputation as the man of a thousand faces was somewhat misleading. Chaney had one well-worn face that, no matter how much he distorted or disguised it, shone through. Here he's given an opportunity to perform without disguise through much of the film, and the range of expressions available to him is astonishing. The leading lady is 14-year-old Loretta Young. That she often looks her age is one of the more disturbing things about the film, in which she's supposed to be in love with both Chaney, who was 45, and the improbably pretty Nils Asther, who was 31. The cinematography is by James Wong Howe. Laugh, Clown, Laugh was eligible for Oscar nominations in the first year of the Academy Awards, and Chaney should have received one. The closest the film came to an award was the one that Joseph Farnham received for title writing (the one and only time the award was presented). But Farnham's award was for the body of his work over the nomination period, and not for a particular film.