Parnell (1937)

Parnell is one of those costume dramas that had a good idea, but the execution just didn't work. I'm a huge Gable and Loy fan, but it was hard sitting through this movie. As perfect as Gable would be as Rhett Butler two years later, he was completely wrong for Parnell. Equally, Myrna Loy was tremendous as Nora Charles in the two Thin Man movies prior to this film, but the chemistry between her and Gable in this film is bad, real bad. The love affair felt rushed and poorly scripted and the two actors, who were really good together in Manhattan Melodrama and Wife Vs. Secretary, just didn't seem to connect in this film. It makes me think it was either the writing or the directing.As far as the historical aspects go, this is also poorly handled. The romance between Parnell and the married Katie O'Shea was more sordid and scandalous than depicted in the movie. Parnell fathered three children with Katie which is never mentioned. Parnell also sported a full beard which Gable refused to do. Lastly, Parnell was a more sensitive character while Gable plays him as he does most of his roles, a man's man. This movie also nearly cost us Gable playing Rhett Butler. The reception and box office on this movie was so bad, Gable threatened never to do another historical costume drama and had to be convinced to play Rhett Butler. Whew. Thank god he changed his mind.If you like the actors involved, its a nice companion to some of their other pairings, but its easily the worst films of their careers.

Just not good."Parnell" from 1937 stars two of MGM's greatest, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, in the hopes, I guess, that people would go to see it. I wasn't there so I don't know if they did but I doubt it.As someone here said, the roles would have been better suited to Spencer Tracy and Maureen O'Sullivan.Parnell, who died at the age of 45, was a controversial figure with a complicated political career. And the film does show some of what he went through, including false accusations that he supported the murders of two people in power, the trial, and then suit against the newspaper. Other problems followed, but the film is most concerned with his torrid romance (well, not in this movie) between Parnell and a married woman, Katherine O'Shea. Now, in the movie, they don't get married. In real life, they did. And as far as a torrid affair, I'll say - she had three of his children while she was married. The couple wasn't married very long -- from June of 1891 and he died in October 1891 of stomach cancer. However, he also suffered from kidney failure. He is shown, not very convincingly, as ill in the film.The film is very melodramatic, with Loy relying on the melodrama to get her through her role. Gable could not have been more wrong - he did not have a great range as an actor, and this called for at least more than he had. He was a charismatic, rugged, gorgeous, charming man who radiated a lot of warmth, all of which made him perfect for many roles. Not this one.I spent time during this film dwelling on why mustaches went out of style. I decided Hitler and mens hair requirements during World War II caused them to go out of style. Gable looked great with and without one, and of course, he kept his as it was one of his trademarks.Parnell is not a good movie, and it was hard to concentrate on it.

The character of Parnell has interested me ever since I read James Joyce's Ulysses. I caught this movie by accident when channel surfing and landed on TCM, the source of many old movie nuggets. "Parnell" brings us some first rate actors, from Clark Gable to Myrna Loy, Edmund Gwyn and Donald Crisp. The viewer sees the main outline of the controversy involving Charles Parnell and Kitty O'Shea and its impact on the Irish Free State bill. The movie is dressed up in melodrama with violin music to the strains of Irish ballads. This cloying treatment, not unusual in Hollywood, does not detract from the story of a great man and the overlooked merits of this film. Parnell brought the Irish factions together to achieve a significant breakthrough in his time and might have saved many troubles. Parnell was the stuff of greatness and his story has been enshrined in history and literature. We know that the struggle for Ireland continued beyond his life; still, his story reverberates. This movie gives a sense of the tragedy but the poor sound and grainy film are a bit of an irritation. Also, the choice of Clark Gable, Hollywood's rugged icon of the 1930's, for the role of Parnell, falls flat. This is unfortunate because the movie is far from a disaster. Nevertheless, I would like to see a film with a more complete story, with more character development and background. It would tell the epic tale of Parnell's achievements and the forces that shaped Ireland in the late nineteenth century. The British movie industry does those period movies very well. This movie gives us a taste of that history.

Surely when this movie first appeared in 1937 somebody, (everybody?), involved must have known what a crock, (and I'm not talking gold, here), they were sitting on. "Parnell" is a turkey fat enough to feed a family of forty and like a lot of big, bad movies is, nevertheless, quite enjoyable, if for all the wrong reasons. Historically, I can't vouchsafe for its accuracy but then this isn't a film about Irish history and the struggle for Home Rule but a romantic drama about a real-life historical figure ruined by his love for a married woman and it starred two of the biggest names in movies at the time.When this movie came out Gable had already won an Oscar and Myrna Loy was fresh from playing, superbly, in The Thin Man movies but they are both terrible here. Indeed, this isn't just Gable's worst performance but one of the monumentally bad performances in the history of the movies, (his death-bed sequence is a classic). A sterling supporting cast, (Edna May Oliver, Donald Crisp, Billie Burke, Edmund Gwenn), do offer a few crumbs of comfort but they are far from enough to redeem this sorry mess. John Stahl directed but you would never have guessed it.