IDIOT'S DELIGHT (1939)

While probably too topical for revival, playwright Robert E. Sherwood and The Lunts had a big Pulitzer Prize winning hit camouflaging this 1936 political stress test for Europe behind a wickedly funny opposites-attract romance involving Lynn Fontanne’s decidedly inauthentic stateless Russian & Alfred Lunt’s third-rate vaudevillian stuck between borders somewhere in The Alps.  With them, an assortment of unwilling guests hoping to split before war breaks out and the bombs start falling.  (And so much more political stress in ‘39, when the film was made, than ‘36.)  The gang's all here (in personified form): Radical Left-Wing Pacifist; Munitions Tycoon; Research Scientist; Honeymoon Couple confronting war service; each at the mercy of the government's ambivalent Master of Visas, controlling destinations & destinies.  Nodding at G.B. Shaw dialectics (MISALLIANCE; MAJOR BARBARA), it’s the showmanship factor of Lunt’s song-and-dance act, plus his putative past (make that pass) with Fontanne’s character before the applied accent, that really sold this.  Yet the film (it’s Sherwood’s own adaptation) wastes the first third on the post-WWI stage career of Clark Gable (charismatically charming in the Lunt role) and the vaudeville circuit meet-up with the pre-Russian Norma Shearer (aping Ms. Fontanne, unbecoming blonde wig & all, minus sophisticated comedy technique*).  Worse, the prologue removes any surprise factor, and gives director Clarence Brown little time for more than a sketch of the other voices.  Peacenik Burgess Meredith suffers most.  But with Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn (taking over from Sydney Greenstreet on B’way), Laura Hope Crews & Joseph Schildkraut, the film certainly has turns worth watching.  None topping Gable & Gals stomping thru Irving Berlin’s ‘Puttin On the Ritz.’  He’s not exactly bad, but hilarious because he’s trying so hard.  If only his other 1939 film weren’t GONE WITH THE WIND, this might get more attention.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: No doubt, Alan Jay Lerner (of MY FAIR LADY fame) picked up on the Shavian tone when he musicalized this as DANCE A LITTLE CLOSER, his one-night flop which at least has some nice things in his songs with composer Charles Strouse.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Telling that in her major scene with Edward Arnold in their hotel suite, director Brown often leaves the camera on Arnold’s impassive face during Shearer’s big speeches.