Idiot's Delight

Idiot's Delight is a 1939 MGM comedy drama with a screenplay adapted by Robert E. Sherwood from his 1936 Pulitzer-Prize-winning play of the same name. The production reunited director Clarence Brown, Clark Gable and Norma Shearer eight years after they worked together on A Free Soul. The play takes place in a hotel in the Italian Alps during 24 hours at the beginning of a world war. The film begins with the backstory of the two leads and transfers the later action to a fictitious Alpine country rather than Italy, which was the setting for the play. In fact, Europe was on the brink of World War II. (The studio's attempts to make the film palatable for the totalitarian states—including the hazy geographical location and the scrupulous use of Esperanto in speech and signage—were a waste of time. They banned it anyway.) Although not a musical, it is notable as the only film in which Gable sings and dances, performing Irving Berlin's "Puttin' On the Ritz" with a sextette of chorus girls. Plot Harry Van, an American World War I veteran, tries to reenter show business and ends up in a faltering mentalist show with Madame Zuleika, an inept, aging alcoholic. While performing in Omaha, Nebraska, he is wooed by Irene, a trapeze artist who claims to be a refugee from the Russian Revolution and hopes to replace Harry's drunken partner in the show and as his lover. They have a romantic night, but he is suspicious of Irene's flights of fancy. The next day, Harry and Zuleika and Irene and her troupe board trains going in opposite directions. Twenty years later, after a number of jobs, Harry is the impresario for and lead performer with Les Blondes, a troupe of six women traveling through Europe. While taking a train from Romania to Switzerland, they are stranded at an Alpine hotel in an unnamed country, whose borders are suddenly closed as war becomes imminent. The passengers watch through the hotel lounge's huge windows as dozens of bombers take off from an air field at the bottom of the valley and fly away in formation. Among the passengers in the lounge, Harry observes Irene, a glamorous platinum blonde with an exaggerated Russian accent, who is the mistress of a wealthy armaments manufacturer, Achille Weber. Although she claims never to have been to Omaha, Harry's innuendoes show he is convinced that she is the brunette acrobat he knew there. He believes that she recognizes him, too.