FROM THE ARCHIVES:The 1937 film of Parnell with Clark Gable as the beardless leader and Myrna Loy as Katharine O'Shea upset the film critic of the day, who went under the initials AEM.
PARNELL WAS almost as many-faceted as truth itself: he was the Wicklow squire, who served in the Militia and played cricket; the landlord who came to support the Land League; the Protestant “loyalist,” who became the leader of a Nationalist party; the icy bachelor, whose love story shattered a nation’s hopes.
Any one of these facets of the great man might have made a film, or a series of films, but always the character of the man must be held rigidly in view.
That has not been done by John M. Stahl in his Parnell, which may be seen at the Capitol Theatre this week. The original playwright (Elsie T. Schauffler) made the mistake of subordinating everything to the romantic love story, and when once that had been done the descent into pathos was easy.
If Parnell had been made into a pathetic lover, the film might still be acceptable under its present title. As the incidents are presented, and as the character of the man is interpreted by Mr. Clark Gable, it is difficult to feel sympathy for one who staked everything upon his love for an unhappily married woman, and who, by so doing, smashed himself and destroyed the work of a generation.
The director of the film admits frankly enough that in directing the film he simply uses the feminine approach, and by this approach he has distorted not only the facts of history and biography, but he has also given undue emphasis to what was a single facet of Parnell’s character. The effect of this false approach is to deprive the film of a hero, and to give instead a couple of heroines.
The central figure in the film is not Parnell – it is Mrs. O’Shea; and she is most ably and suitably seconded by “Aunt Ben”. The whole business is a story such as might have been contrived easily in the days when penny novelettes were fashionable; a story for nursemaids sauntering in the park, or for love-starved old maids in the American Middle West . . .
Neither Clark Gable nor Myrna Loy have been too happily cast: from the start they are obviously ill at ease and more than a little bewildered. When Clark Gable refused to wear the beard of Parnell, his inner shrewdness directed him correctly; with or without a beard he could never have been the Parnell that Ireland and England knew.
He wisely decided to be himself, but it was a shabby thing to give him the label of a great name. It is like offering lemon syrup under the label of an old liqueur whiskey, and the effect is just as nauseating as that would be to a connoisseur . . .
Clark Gable is true to his own talent when he strides from the presidential chair in Committee Room 15 and fells an offending member of the Irish Party with a punch in the jaw: he is untrue to Parnell. That is all that need be said.
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