Eugene O'Neill's nine-act theatrical experiment created quite a stir in 1928, so it was inevitable that Hollywood would snap it up. The play's novelty was that the characters spoke their thoughts aloud in the manner of asides. On the stage, some of these speeches went on for quite some time while the other actors in the scene froze in place; on film they are reduced in length and pre-recorded so that while we hear the words we see the appropriate facial expressions on both the speaking and the listening actors. Nothing about these spoken thoughts expands our understanding of the thinkers in ways that good acting or deft direction couldn't have done just as well. The story, actually a saga, concerns a woman (Norma Shearer) unhinged by the death of her dashing aviator fiancé in the World War; she sets out to salvage her connection to this lost ideal man by marrying a lesser specimen, bearing his male child and naming it after the deceased. Along the way she learns from her mother-in-law (May Robson) that insanity runs in the husband's family. Convinced that this undesirable genetic trait will show up in her offspring, she aborts the child she is carrying and mates with a virile doctor friend (Clark Gable, who else?) to produce a healthy son which she then passes off as the husband's. Hard to believe? You bet. But it worked fascinatingly on the page, and perhaps even on the stage, but not on screen where it becomes just a series of mostly attractive talking heads. It is dramatically effective only in spots. Shearer is by turns compelling and strained. Clark Gable handles the material well until he encounters some overwrought plot contrivances near the end whereupon he is further hobbled by unconvincing old age makeup.
