Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24802 in VHS
• Released on: 1992-12-11
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 109 minutes

Customer Reviews

Innovative Film
I am not a big movie buff, but purchased this film because I am a fan of silent film star Henry B. Walthall. Walthall is only in the film for the first seven minutes and then his character dies. Rather than losing interest in the film, however, I kept watching and found it very enjoyable. It is a very innovative film, based on the Eugene O'Neill play, that includes thoughts of the characters that are audible to the audience. The main character is Nina Leeds (Norma Shearer). Nina is a very obsessive, neurotic woman who controls the hearts of three men while pining away for her dead fiance Gordon, killed in the Great War. Nina continues to control the lives of her three suitors (one of which is played by Ralph Morgan, brother of the Wizard of Oz). She enters a marriage with a man she does not love and, due to a secret curse in his bloodline, cannot bare his child. She decides, as any woman would, to have another man's child and pose it as her husband's. Curiously, she names her son Gordon and, of course, falls in love with the baby's real father (played by Clark Gable). The film covers their lives through old age. It's interesting watching the characters get older. The make-up people did an excellent job. The film is actually quite good once you get used to the audible thoughts and the overall sappiness. It is long (almost 2 hours) but moves very quickly. I recommend Strange Interlude to any classic movie buff or Clark Gable fan.

A NOVEL EARLY TALKIE.
All about the problems of an unfullfilled wife and her lover. What made this picture notable was the novel idea of combining on-screen dialogue with voiced-over thoughts of the characters. After a time, 1932 audiences giggled as the actors adjusted their facial expressions to correspond to their off-screen voices which made the film unusually novel. The O'Neill play originally ran for a full 5 hours. In 1932, this was considered heavy stuff: it looks very dated now, but in its day it was a small milestone in the cinema. All the adult characters age 20 years in the movie, and the process is done quite convincingly. Gable's restrained performance as the he-man-turned-whimp via love is effective and this performance earned him stature in films. The film is not without merit, and although it isn't entirely successful at bringing O' Neill to the screen, it certainly deserves more kudos than some viewers give it: it was a valiant try at using a new and novel technique which would be used far more successfully in smaller doses in later films. Naturally the synopsis is far more complex than what I gave, it's my way of inviting viewers to catch a rare glimpse of young Gable in the film which introduced his trademark moustache!

Strange Interlude is Strangely Dead
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Eugene O'Neil's famous 1930s drama set the theatrical world on it's ear when it arrived on Broadway. A complicated, interesting story of a woman who depends upon a variety of men to meet her various psychological needs, the play was most noted for the fact that the action often came to a screeching halt to permit the various characters to voice their unspoken thoughts unheard by the other players.

It must have seemed a natural for film, for the "spoken thoughts" device could be-- and are-- done via voice-over and therefore create less of an interruption in the action of the film. But there was this one little problem... Hollywood of the 1930s simply was not up the challenge of converting an extremely long play with considerable sexual innuendo into a film.

The play has been chopped down considerably and the sexual issues largely deleted, and the result is a well-crafted but strangely dead film. A lesson in how not to transfer a stage landmark to film. Two stars for an interesting cast and the usual first-rate M.G.M. production values.