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IMDbPro

Idiot's Delight

  • 1939
  • A
  • 1h 47m
IMDb RATING
6.5/10
1.9K
YOUR RATING
Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Idiot's Delight (1939)
A group of disparate travelers are caught and thrown together in a posh Alpine hotel when the borders are closed at the beginning of World War II.
Play trailer3:57
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32 Photos
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A group of disparate travelers are caught and thrown together in a posh Alpine hotel when the borders are closed at the beginning of World War II.A group of disparate travelers are caught and thrown together in a posh Alpine hotel when the borders are closed at the beginning of World War II.A group of disparate travelers are caught and thrown together in a posh Alpine hotel when the borders are closed at the beginning of World War II.

  • Director
    • Clarence Brown
  • Writers
    • Vicki Baum
    • Robert E. Sherwood
  • Stars
    • Norma Shearer
    • Clark Gable
    • Edward Arnold
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.5/10
    1.9K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Clarence Brown
    • Writers
      • Vicki Baum
      • Robert E. Sherwood
    • Stars
      • Norma Shearer
      • Clark Gable
      • Edward Arnold
    • 54User reviews
    • 17Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 4 wins total

    Videos1

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    Trailer 3:57
    Official Trailer

    Photos32

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    Top cast55

    Edit
    Norma Shearer
    Norma Shearer
    • Irene
    Clark Gable
    Clark Gable
    • Harry
    Edward Arnold
    Edward Arnold
    • Achille Weber
    Charles Coburn
    Charles Coburn
    • Dr. Waldersee
    Joseph Schildkraut
    Joseph Schildkraut
    • Captain Kirvline
    Burgess Meredith
    Burgess Meredith
    • Quillery
    Laura Hope Crews
    Laura Hope Crews
    • Madame Zuleika
    Richard 'Skeets' Gallagher
    Richard 'Skeets' Gallagher
    • Donald Navadel
    • (as Skeets Gallagher)
    Peter Willes
    Peter Willes
    • Mr. Cherry
    Pat Paterson
    Pat Paterson
    • Mrs. Cherry
    William Edmunds
    • Dumptsy
    Fritz Feld
    Fritz Feld
    • Pittatek
    Virginia Grey
    Virginia Grey
    • Les Blondes - Shirley
    Virginia Dale
    Virginia Dale
    • Les Blondes - Francine
    Paula Stone
    Paula Stone
    • Les Blondes - Beulah
    Bernadene Hayes
    Bernadene Hayes
    • Les Blondes - Edna
    Joan Marsh
    Joan Marsh
    • Les Blondes - Elaine
    Lorraine Krueger
    Lorraine Krueger
    • Les Blondes - Bebe
    • Director
      • Clarence Brown
    • Writers
      • Vicki Baum
      • Robert E. Sherwood
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews54

    6.51.8K
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    Featured reviews

    bowkie

    An idiotic stinkbomb with two gems inside...

    The play was stagy and stilted to begin with; on screen it was all so much worse. There is virtually no directing, and of the principals, only Gable has a clue what he's doing. Poor Norma Shearer starts out fine as the ingenue, but with no notion of how to play the fake countess, she hams her way desperately through the rest of the picture like a high school thespian. It's embarrassing to watch. Just when you think nothing could be worse, Burgess Meredith bursts in like a misplaced character from another set, jumping around and shouting at the top of his lungs -- a hammy stage actor who seems not even to have been told there are microphones. The voice in your head keeps screaming "Cut! Cut! Cut!" for the missing director, who's evidently out to lunch.

    That said, there ARE real merits in this movie. Gable is disarmingly charming as Harry Van. The play itself is an interesting period piece with a warning about fascism BEFORE we knew the worst. And then, there IS a kind of weird, whacky fascination in watching Norma Shearer taken over by that BIG platinum wig, which is almost a character in the play by itself.

    Finally, there are two outstandingly memorable moments which for me make this movie well worth watching. Gable's witty, winking, sexy, song-and-dance version of "Puttin' on the Ritz" is something not to be forgotten -- AND, the man CAN sing and dance! The other sheer delight is watching the !GREAT! Laura Hope Crews in her brief but masterful portrayal of the tipsy Madame Zuleika, whose cheesy vaudeville mind reading act gets more hysterical with every furtive sip from her hip flask. I screamed with laughter, and you will, too. Laura Hope Crews should be declared a national treasure.
    7dglink

    A Can of Mixed Nuts

    Clarence Brown's "Idiot's Delight," based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood, is like a can of mixed nuts: a few classy cashews, the rare Brazil nut, and lots of boring peanuts. On the verge of World War II, a motley crew of travelers is stranded at an Alpine hotel in an unnamed country. However, the film is no "Grand Hotel," more a "Chalet of Fools." The highlight is Clark Gable's famous or infamous song-and-dance routine, "Putting on the Ritz," with a bevy of blonde showgirls. Gable's endearingly clumsy dancing is classic and probably best seen as an excerpt in "That's Entertainment." To the amusement of Gable and the audience, Norma Shearer in a blonde wig and a deliberately thick Russian accent camps shamelessly. Obviously enjoying herself, Shearer steals the scenes as a phony playing a phony when Gable is not hoofing.

    However, the fun stops there. Burgess Meredith brings the film to a halt every time he appears to rant anti-war propaganda at the other guests. Charles Coburn muddles around with cages of rats and talks about curing cancer, and a pair of innocent newly weds do nothing but occupy screen time. The blonde showgirls that accompany Gable are standard stereotypes from the Southern belle to the perky pixie, and Joseph Schildkraut is the handsome but stern stereotypical military officer. The girls cavort with the soldiers; the young husband must return to defend his country; the bad guys drop bombs. Too many stale peanuts.

    After the clichés have played out, the film takes a dark turn that dampens, no, actually drowns, any fun that preceded it, and the finale is absolutely ludicrous. About half way into "Idiot's Delight," Sherwood strives to add "meaning" and "significance" to his work and forgot "entertainment." A stellar cast and a few good scenes are generally wasted in a film whose best bits appear in "That's Entertainment."
    6planktonrules

    well worth seeing because it's so ODD!

    This is perhaps the weirdest Clark Gable film. First, it is an odd anti-war film that came out just BEFORE all the anti-fascist films of the early 40's and it's an amazing contrast to them. Second, it features Gable as a song and dance man!! Why they worked so hard to have him dance, I wouldn't know--the studio could have always rented the services of either Jimmy Cagney or George Raft or anyone of a number of other actors who already knew how to dance. Third, the over the top and bizarre role played by Norma Shearer--it's rather silly and reminiscent of Garbo. So, overall is it a good film? Well, it's decent but not great. Some may find it a little silly, but for those who love the Golden Age of Hollywood, this is a must-see.
    7blanche-2

    Odd film about the start of World War II in Europe

    Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, Josef Schildkraut and Edward Arnold star in "Idiot's Delight," a 1939 film based on the play by Robert Sherwood. Sherwood certainly provided fertile ground for Hollywood.

    Not only were his plays, such as this one, "The Petrified Forest," "Waterloo Bridge" and "Tovarich" adapted, but he himself wrote some wonderful screenplays, including "The Bishop's Wife," "Rebecca" and "The Best Years of our Lives." He wrote the screenplay to "Idiot's Delight" as well.

    Not having seen the play, it's a little unclear as to what "Idiot's Delight" was supposed to be - a comedy? A drama? A farce? A vaudevillian and his troop wind up having to stay at an Alpine hotel due to border closing as World War II is about to begin.

    There he meets a woman he swears he has already met - the exotic Irene, a blond Russian, who is traveling with an arms manufacturer (Edward Arnold). Some years before, Gable met this woman, he believes, when she had a different color hair and no accent.

    Other people at the hotel are a doctor (Coburn), a pacifist (Meredith), honeymooners (Peter Willes and Pat Paterson) and an Italian officer (Joseph Schildkraut). War does break out, the borders re-open quickly - but Harry wants an answer to his question - is Irene the same woman?

    This film possibly was intended to be a high-class version of "The Petrified Forest" with people of different beliefs all stuck in the same place, but with Gable dancing and Shearer doing an imitation of Garbo, the balance is thrown off a bit. Nevertheless, despite some comments on this board, they're both very funny.

    Someone suggested Gene Kelly, had he been around, would have been good as the vaudevillian, missing the point that Harry isn't particularly talented, he's just glib. No one would have seriously cast Clark Gable as a musical comedy performer unless it was intended he be bad.

    Shearer goes all out as a black-gowned, platinum blond Russian holding a cigarette in a long holder. As Gable tries to pierce her identity, she regales him with wild stories.

    So we have Gable dancing and Shearer speaking with a Russian accent on one side, and Burgess Meredith on the other, screaming his guts out about the coming war.

    In the middle is the medical scientist played by Coburn and the cold manufacturer of Edward Arnold, who doesn't seem to care if Irene has passport problems or not.

    TCM showed two endings of this film - one for Europe and one for the U. S., the U. S. one totally ignoring the war. Watching both was fascinating.

    Despite the comedy, the film has very serious undertones, but I wonder if they didn't get somewhat lost due to the power of the two stars. They both give first-rate performances, but one wonders if they were doing the same movie as Meredith et al. Nevertheless, well worth seeing.
    7AlsExGal

    Right message, wrong war

    This film was released in January 1939, based on a play, eight months before Hitler's Germany would start WWII by invading Poland. From the mid 1920's up to the mid 1930's Hollywood had been making anti war films based on the fact that WWI took so many lives and, in the end, really seemed to be pointless. This was probably the last of that bunch.

    So the backdrop to this film is some unnamed country bordering Switzerland, which has always been neutral not because it chooses to be, but because nobody wants to scale all of those mountains and then face a nation in which every household is required to have a gun and the inhabitants are required to know how to use it.

    War is about to be declared and so you have a group of unrelated and dissimilar travelers all temporarily trapped at a swanky mountain hotel until their passports can be verified and they can get across the border the following day. Obviously the author's viewpoint for the reason for this war is that of pacifist Quillary (Burgess Meredith), who simply believes he can go out and convince men to stop killing each other, and that whatever people think they are fighting about is just a ruse cooked up by those who profit from the selling of war machines. How quaint. I think Hitler would have remained unconvinced by Quillary's argument up to the point he put a bullet through his brain. Early in the movie the local soldiers arrest him for his speech, or perhaps because they found him as tiresome as I did.

    As for the rest of the travelers, there is an owner of munitions plants played by Edward Arnold, his female companion played by Norma Shearer, a perpetually failed vaudeville entertainer (Clark Gable) who has finally got a niche with a half a dozen blonde singers and dancers, and a honeymooning British couple. There is also a soldier (Joseph Schildkraut), who is dressed similarly to a Nazi, but doesn't have that "Nazi way" about him that you see in actual WWII films. Instead he seems somewhat like a bored but polite bureaucrat, just doing his job. He is definitely not Conrad Veidt's interpretation of that kind of role just a couple of years later.

    What makes this film worth watching, given that the film is so off base as to what WWII was about? Earlier in the film we see Gable's character and Shearer's character meeting in vaudeville in Nebraska and, as much as the production code would allow, implying they spent a single night together, and then never saw each other again. Until now. Maybe. You see, the munitions magnate's female companion is the spitting image of the girl Gable's character knew back in America ten years before. But this woman says she is a Russian aristocrat, run out of her homeland by the Bolsheviks as a child. She walks around in ridiculous looking fashions that would have made Dietrich gawk and a silly looking blonde wig. She claims to never have known Gable.

    It's fun to see Gable give Shearer that same "I've got your number sister" look he gave Harlow, Leigh, and Crawford. And you've got to wonder if Shearer's obviously deliberate over the top performance was inspired by exaggerating Greta Garbo's past performances, and if Garbo punched her in the nose after seeing this obvious parroting of her method. But that would be so un-Garbo. Oh well, if Gable can sing and dance in this film, then I guess Garbo could punch someone in the nose. Enjoy, it is a delight and I'm no idiot.

    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      This was the only film in which Clark Gable performed a dance number. He spent 6 weeks rehearsing the steps with the dance director, George King, and practicing at home with his wife, Carole Lombard. Because of his fear of messing it up during a take, the set was closed during the filming of this sequence.
    • Goofs
      In the middle of the "Puttin' on the Ritz" performance, the Les Blondes dancer second from the viewer's left is barely in step and not doing any arm movements because she is holding her costume's right-shoulder strap which has broken. The strap is no longer broken when it cuts back to the performers after a reaction shot of Irene (Norma Shearer).
    • Quotes

      Irene: Did I ever tell you of my escape from the Soviets?

      Achille Weber: You've told me about it at least eleven times, and every time it was different.

      Irene: Well, I made several escapes. I am always making escapes, Achille. When I worry about you and your career, I have to run away from the terror of my own thoughts. So I amuse myself by studying the faces of the people I see. Just ordinary, casual, dull people. That little English couple for instance - I was watching them during dinner, sitting there close together, holding hands. And I saw him in his nice, smart British uniform shooting a little pistol at a huge tank. And the tank rolls over him. And his fine, strong body that was so full of the capacity for ecstasy... is a mass of mashed flesh and bones. A smear of purple blood, like a stepped-on snail. But before the moment of death, he consoles himself by thinking, "thank God she is safe. She is bearing the child I gave her. And he will live to see a better world." But I know where she is. She is under a house that has been racked by an air raid. She is as dead as he is. But he, he died in action against the enemy gloriously. But she died in a cellar, not so very gloriously. There will be many who will die this way in this war, won't there Achille?

      [he does not respond]

      Irene: You don't say anything! Probably you are bored. But I like to think about these things, Achille. And it makes me so proud to think that I am so close to you, who makes all this possible.

      Achille Weber: That's all very interesting, my dear. But before you waste too much sympathy on these little people like your English friends, just ask yourself this: why shouldn't they die? And who are the greater criminals - those who sell the instruments of death or those who buy them and use them? It is they who make war seem noble and heroic, and what does it all amount to? Mistrust of the motives of everyone else! A dog-in-the-manger defence of all they've got, greed for the other fellow's possessions! Oh, I assure you, Irene, for such little people, the deadliest weapons are the most merciful.

    • Crazy credits
      The six actresses who play Les Blondes are not credited with individual character names. Instead, they are credited using the group character name "Harry Van's Les Blondes" followed by a list of the six actresses names. This appears on a separate title card after the cast list of the other credited roles.
    • Alternate versions
      MGM filmed two endings for this film: one for American audiences and another, more spiritual and optimistic ending for International audiences because of the war clouds that were gathering in Europe.
    • Connections
      Featured in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Big Parade of Hits for 1940 (1940)
    • Soundtracks
      Over There
      (uncredited)

      Written by George M. Cohan

      Incorporated into the score in the opening scenes

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    FAQ17

    • How long is Idiot's Delight?Powered by Alexa

    Details

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    • Release date
      • January 27, 1939 (United States)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Languages
      • English
      • Russian
      • Esperanto
    • Also known as
      • Idiotovo zadovoljstvo
    • Filming locations
      • Clarence Brown Ranch - Las Virgenes Road, Calabasas, California, USA
    • Production company
      • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    • Budget
      • $1,519,000 (estimated)
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      1 hour 47 minutes
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

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