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.
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.