Strange Interlude ** (1932, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Alexander Kirkland, May Robson, Ralph Morgan, Robert Young, Maureen O’Sullivan, Henry B Walthall) – Classic Movie Review 8248

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-hour play 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.

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.’

Gable’s trademark moustache appears for the first time in this film.

The main cast are Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, May Robson, Alexander Kirkland, Ralph Morgan, Robert Young, Maureen O’Sullivan, Henry B Walthall, Mary Alden and Tad Alexander.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8248

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