Strange Interlude ** (1932, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Alexander Kirkland, May Robson, Ralph Morgan, Robert Young, Maureen O’Sullivan, Henry B Walthall) – Classic Movie Review 8,248

MGM’s curious 1932 drama Strange Interlude stars Norma Shearer and Clark Gable, and is based on a play by Eugene O’Neill, who called it ‘a dreadful hash of attempted condensation and idiotic censorship.’

Director Robert Z Leonard’s curious 1932 MGM drama Strange Interlude [Strange Interval] is based on a play by Eugene O’Neill and stars Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Alexander Kirkland and May Robson. O’Neill called it ‘a dreadful hash of attempted condensation and idiotic censorship.’

Eugene O’Neill’s five-to-six hour experimental play in nine acts with characters speaking asides to the audience is not in the same category or class as his essential classic dramas The Iceman Cometh or Long Day’s Journey into Night and on screen makes a strange interlude in the careers of Gable and Shearer in a film that runs only 109 minutes.

Nevertheless, the play won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is sometimes performed with a dinner break or over two consecutive evenings. Its themes – a woman’s sexual affairs, mental illness, abortion, and deception over paternity – were controversial, and it was censored or banned in many US cities. It was a tough nut for MGM to crack as a movie.

O’Neill follows his obsessions with family insanity in the plot about a woman called Nina Leeds (Shearer), haunted by her obsession with flyer Gordon Shaw (Robert Young), who was shot down and killed in World War One, and finds the relatives of her impotent husband Sam Evans (Alexander Kirkland) thus afflicted with family insanity, especially Mrs Evans (May Robson) – and so seeks a child by Ned Darrell (Gable), who wants her to leave Sam. Instead, she has a love child with the handsome Ned and lets her husband believe the child Gordon (Tad Alexander) is his.

This odd, ambitious movie is gloomy, introverted and hard to take, but there is refuge in the verve of the famous players and director Leonard’s resolve. This time the characters speak what’s on in their mind only in internal monologue voice-over. A title card explains things to an audience MGM must have feared would be puzzled: ‘In order for us fully to understand his characters, Eugene O’Neill allows them to express their thoughts aloud. As in life, these thoughts are quite different from the words that pass their lips.’

Talking about lips, Gable’s trademark moustache appears for the first time in this film.

MGM boss Irving Thalberg wanted the play’s Broadway stars Lynn Fontanne and her husband Alfred Lunt to re-create their roles, but they rejected making movies. So Thalberg cast his wife Shearer and Gable, who understandably felt intimidated by the material.

Astoundingly, the film earned $957,000 in North America and $280,000 elsewhere, against a budget of $654,000, resulting in a profit of $600,000.

The main cast are Norma Shearer as Nina Leeds, Clark Gable as Dr Ned Darrell, Alexander Kirkland as Sam Evans. Ralph Morgan as Charlie Marsden, Robert Young as Gordon Evans as a young man, May Robson as Mrs Evans, Maureen O’Sullivan as Madeline Arnold Henry B Walthall as Professor Leeds, Mary Alden as the Leeds maid Mary, and Tad Alexander as Gordon Evans as a child.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8,248

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