Word: shearer
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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With the help of Norma Shearer's much-publicized blonde wig, M.G.M. has produced an acceptable remake of Robert Shorwood's 1936 Broadway success, "Idiot's Delight." As a movie it has a high percentage of entertainment value, but it lacks the intellectual force of the stage production. The elements which made the play such a success on Broadway have been cut out, one by one, to sop rural box office, industrial interests, and Mussolini. With such a great amount of vitality drained from the original play, the movie cast has little substance upon which to build their characterizations. Burgess...
...some of the minor ones. Clark Gable, as the philosophical hoofer, Harry Van, gives one of the best performances of his career, since the part is ideally suited to his happy-go-lucky Americanism. Because she modeled her Russian Countess entirely too much on Lynn Fontanne's characterization, Norma Shearer is not so successful. Her Irene lacks the spontaneity of Gable's Harry Van. Yet with all its short-comings, "Idiot's Delight" is sustained by its immediacy of theme and powerful conflict of points of view. It is far above the average Hollywood production...
...offend, but merely to its intense eagerness to make profits. Author Sherwood, as familiar with the screen as he is with the stage, was well aware that no ideology this side of Heaven is nearly as important to cinema audiences as the spectacle of Clark Gable embracing Norma Shearer for the first time since they both appeared in Strange Interlude (1932). Consequently, he devoted the first three reels of Idiot's Delight to establishing the fact that they had once shared a hotel bedroom in Omaha, Neb., and most of the rest to indicating that they will presently share...
...lives with his trim, pretty wife, Jane, and baby Bix (after Bix Beiderbecke) in a neat house and garden in London's suburban Chiswick. Before he went to England in 1926, Len Lye had worked as a farm laborer, carpenters' mate, quarry laborer, miner, packer, sheep-shearer and scenario writer for an Australian film company. In England he has earned his living as sceneshifter and flyman in a theatre, prop-boy in a film studio, "effect" man with film companies. Last month Poet Laura Riding wrote a pamphlet about him. Said she: "There is a work of purification...
Though it cannot be classed as a truly great picture, nevertheless lavish pageantry, fine acting and powerful emotional drama combine to make "Marie Antoinette," current offering at the University, splendid entertainment. Norma Shearer's characterization of the French queen, whose throne brings her only disillusionment, loneliness, and finally death itself, is touching if over-favorable in its presentation. Unfortunately Tyrone Power, Miss Shearer's leading man, does not give her the support she deserves. His portrayal of Court Fersen is un convincing; in the emotional heights of tender love scenes, he appears stiff and wooden. What the film suffers...