(The studio's attempts to make the film palatable for the totalitarian states—including the hazy geographical location and the scrupulous use of Esperanto in speech and signage—were a waste of time.

[3]) Although not a musical, it is notable as the only film in which Gable sings and dances, performing Irving Berlin's "Puttin' On the Ritz" with a sextette of chorus girls.

While performing in Omaha, Nebraska, he is wooed by Irene, a trapeze artist who claims to be a refugee from the Russian Revolution and hopes to replace Harry's drunken partner in the show and as his lover.

While taking a train from Romania to Switzerland, they are stranded at an Alpine hotel in an unnamed country, whose borders are suddenly closed as war becomes imminent.

The passengers watch through the hotel lounge's huge windows as dozens of bombers take off from an air field at the bottom of the valley and fly away in formation.

Among the passengers in the lounge, Harry observes Irene, a glamorous platinum blonde with an exaggerated Russian accent, who is the mistress of a wealthy armaments manufacturer, Achille Weber.

An agitated pacifist rants to his fellow travelers about Weber's guns, which he says are behind the war that just started, and describes for them how the planes they saw disappear over the spectacular mountains will be killing thousands of people in other countries.

The pacifist is hauled away and shot by the border police, commanded by the friendly and impeccable Captain Kirvline, who mingles with the travelers while they wait at the hotel.

She blames him for the likely deaths of untold numbers of people in the war, whose victims might include the newlywed English couple, the Cherrys, they met at the hotel, all killed with the weapons that Weber sells.

As everyone rushes to leave, Irene finds out that Weber has decided to dump her: He refuses to vouch for her flimsy League of Nations passport to Capt.

In the play, the curtain goes down on Harry and Irene as they sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" while bombs explode outside, leaving their survival an open question.

In an effort to make the play, staged entirely in the hotel lounge, less wordy and more attractive to watch on the screen, Sherwood wrote the script for MGM with 167 scenes on 42 sets.

A December 31, 1938, review in Variety praised author Robert Sherwood, saying he "deftly added an entertaining prolog establishing the early meeting and a one-night affair between Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Omaha as small time vaudeville performers.

As a profoundly bitter preview—profound because its bitterness wears the mask of comedy—of the trivial circumstances which will undoubtedly attend the beginning of the next World War, "Idiot's Delight," at the Capitol, is as timely as tomorrow's front page… by the very nature of its theme, (it) exposes the essential idiocy and pointlessness of militarism, … the suicidal greed, the monstrous complacency toward death and destruction which are not racial, but universal; not individual, but mass phenomena, as ugly and as international as hate.

… we are ready to suppose that the present American ending, on what can only be described as a note of defiant hooferism, with Gable pounding on the piano and Miss Shearer ecstatically "trucking" as the walls collapse, was the best that was cinematically available.

Even that effect of the conventional movie fadeout, as the bombers recede, we can accept.” Recalling the play's ending, he observed: “No doubt the fine irony of Mr. Sherwood's conclusion that feeling, as the "two cheap people" burst hysterically into "Onward Christian Soldiers."