Movie of the Week: Strange Interlude (1932)

This week, everyone, including Clark Gable, is in love with Norma Shearer and sharing their thoughts about it in Strange Interlude (1932).

Clark Gable is Dr. Ned Darrell, who has fallen in love with Nina Leeds (Shearer), a free-spirited young woman who is mourning the loss of her love in World War I. Also in love with her are family friend Charlie (Ralph Morgan) and Sam (Alexander Kirkland), a friend of her deceased boyfriend. Sam proposes to Nina and even though she is still heartbroken, she accepts and decides to move on with her life. Right after their marriage, Sam’s mother (May Robson) tells Nina that she and Sam must never have a child because insanity runs rampant in Sam’s father’s side of the family. She recommends that Nina give Sam a child fathered by another man to keep him happy and never let him know the truth. Devastated by the news, Nina turns to Ned for advice and Ned agrees that she must give Sam a child to make him happy. Ned volunteers to sire the child and soon they are in a passionate affair behind Sam’s back. A boy is born to Nina and Sam never suspects that the child is not his. Jealous Charlie watches this all unfold, pining for Nina all the while. Years pass and Nina and Ned constantly struggle with their love for each other and whether or not to tell Sam the truth.

This film is so melodramatic it is nauseating. From the first scene, the “thoughts” interjected into the conversations are distracting and downright laughable. Everyone pauses so that the “thoughts” can be projected. An adaptation of a successful (FOUR HOUR!) Eugene O’Neill play that won a Pulitzer Prize, in the play, the actors would step out of the scene and have a brief aside under a spotlight, which I imagine worked well on a stage. But in a film it is really ridiculous. In real life, when you have thoughts, you don’t stand there with a dumb look on your face and people you are talking to are silent and staring at you while you think them! It makes the pacing of the film very dull.

Clark looks especially silly when Ralph accuses him of being in love with Norma. “Oh really?” he says. “Maybe I do!” his thoughts interject.

This was perhaps a great melodramatic play but as a movie it is ridiculous. The script is just trying so hard.”He’s gone, my father who began me…he’s ended,” Norma declares after her father dies. LORDY. The lines just go on and on and make many scenes seem endless as everyone broods and broods. This film is the antidote to exhilaration.

It’s so ridiculous how every single man in this film is madly in love with Norma. Her dead fiancé who she never got to marry, Ralph who pines and pines after her, Clark who gets to have an affair with her but never marry her, Alexander who marries her but never gets her whole heart…even her own father loves her so much he confesses to driving her fiancé away because he didn’t want her to get married and leave him!

The entire plot does not age well. Scared that “hereditary insanity” (back then, pretty much all mental illness was labeled as “insanity,” from depression to bipolar disorder to schizophrenia) runs in her husband’s family would be passed on to her baby, Norma agrees that the honorable thing to do is to sleep with another man, have his baby and pass it off as her husband’s!

Her husband’s mother dragging Norma upstairs to reveal his insane, cackling aunt who can never leave the attic is so silly. Norma threatens to leave her husband because she wants children—“Oh my baby, my poor baby I cannot have…” Norma’s thoughts lament–but his mother says if she leaves him he’ll surely go insane, so the only thing to do is to stay with him and find a “strong healthy male” to sire a child so Sam will be happy and not go insane. What the heck.

So Norma has Clark’s baby and then everyone is miserable. Because of this lie, Clark can never get married and have a full life, Norma is forever tortured and leads an unhappy life, her husband lives obliviously in a web of lies and is seemingly sexually frustrated because his wife never sleeps with him, their pal Ralph is miserable because of his unrequited love of Norma. Everyone’s unhappy, THE END!

Clark doesn’t have a lot to do other than pine for Norma and look like a wounded puppy. He is wearing far too much makeup right from the beginning and as the story goes on, he is supposed to age. This is indicated at first by the presence of a pencil thin mustache–the very first mustache Clark had onscreen, although it was a fake one!–and then later as he is made up to look like Colonel Sanders with fluffy white eyebrows and drawn-on wrinkles. Clark didn’t really age well, but at least he didn’t age like that!

Read the full review here

Nutshell review is here

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