Idiot's Delight (1939)

Actors: Clem Bevans (actor), Edward Arnold (actor), Charles Coburn (actor), Jimmy Conlin (actor), Hobart Cavanaugh (actor), Frank Faylen (actor), Fritz Feld (actor), Clark Gable (actor), Richard 'Skeets' Gallagher (actor), Bud Geary (actor), William Edmunds (actor), Eddie Gribbon (actor), William Irving (actor), Charles Judels (actor), Edward LeSaint (actor),

Plot: When song-and-dance man Harry Van returns from World War I, he finds work hard to come by. His greatest success comes as straight man in a phony vaudeville mind-reading act with the tipsy Madame Zulieka. While on tour in Omaha he meets acrobat Irene Fellara, and they have a brief romance. Twenty years later while Harry is on tour in Europe with a troupe of leggy blonde dancers, his train is stopped at the Swiss border and he finds himself stranded in the Alps in anticipation of World War II hostilities. Harry and his chorines take refuge in an Alpine hotel with a group of disparate travelers who are also marooned there. Among them are an American pacifist, British newlyweds, a cancer researcher, a German munitions manufacturer, and a beautiful blonde expatriate Russian aristocrat who looks suspiciously like the Irene of two decades earlier.

Keywords: acrobat, alps, anti-war, aviation, based-on-play, blonde, bomb, cancer-research, cheap-hotel, chorine
Genres: Comedy, Drama, Musical, Romance,
Taglines: The Biggest Thrill They Ever Gave You! Norma and Clark together in the romance of a "ham" song-and-dance man and a "red-headed liar from Omaha." Imagine! Norma Shearer as a "lady in tights"...who escapes from the honky-tonks into the rich world a Munitions King can give her! Clark Gable, the man in her life, whom she loved and left...and whom she finds again.

Quotes:

Harry Van: [to the waiter] Seems to me everyone would be happier in Europe if they learned how to make a decent cup of coffee.

Harry Van: [to the waiter] Get me a scotch, and, uh, put ice in it. If you haven't got any ice, go out and scoop up some of that beautiful white snow.

Irene Fellara: 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 Fellara: 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] 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, Irena, for such little people, the deadliest weapons are the most merciful.

Irene Fellara: I am so happy for you.::Achille Weber: Happy? Why?::Irene Fellara: All this wonderful death and destruction everywhere. And you promoted it.

Harry Van: The world you live in isn't a world of facts and figures, it's a world of dreams. Maybe that's what I like about you Irene.::Irene Fellara: And maybe you're wrong my darling. Maybe we two cheap people, with our cheap lives, maybe we're the only ones in this crazy world who are real.

Harry Van: [at a train station] Well, we gotta be pulling out now babe.::Irene Fellara: I know, but not together.::Harry Van: No, not together. You go your way and I go mine. But I got a hunch we'll see each other again. Sometime.

Irene Fellara: Oh, 'Kak Stranna!' How strange!

Irene Fellara: I told you then that I wasn't everybody. It's true; I'm nobody. But I learned it was no use telling the truth to people whose life was a whole lie.

Harry Van: It's a pleasure to be entertaining, but you can't get away with it.

Quillary: While you sit here eating and drinking, their planes dropped fifty thousand kilos of bombs on innocent people. Heavens knows how many were killed; how much of life and beauty is forever destroyed. And you sit here eating and drinking with them, the murderers. It was their planes from the very field down there. Assassins!