A four-and-a-half-hour O'Neill play gets boiled down to a little under two, and much of that running time is devoted to actors with frozen expressions on their faces as they read their characters' thoughts in voice-over. It can work onstage, but it looks hilariously stilted in this soap-opera adaptation, which soft-peddles its heroine's bad behavior and never explains why she has so captivated so many men. Norma Shearer and Alexander Kirkland, overacting ludicrously, are outclassed by a naturalistic Clark Gable--he's the only one who makes the frozen-face technique work. It gets even funnier when Shearer's and Gable's son, a surly moppet, does the frozen-face shtick. There are also Frank Morgan's brother Ralph as an unsuccessful suitor, given to soliloquizing "poor Charlie!" over and over again, and a young Robert Young and Maureen O'Sullivan. By the time they show up, the voice-overs have largely been abandoned, and it plays as a ripe soap, with a sentimental fadeout that actually plays "Silver Threads Among the Gold" as background music. Robert Leonard's direction is stodgy and he shows little facility for reining in hyperactive actors. It's certainly entertaining--there's nothing else like it, unless you count Groucho's satirical parody in "Animal Crackers," or an old Mad Magazine satire that rendered Shirley Booth's sitcom "Hazel" a la "Strange Interlude". But it isn't good.
Review of Strange Interlude
