Eight years before they played Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes in GWTW, Clark Gable and Leslie Howard squared off against each other over the affections of Norma Shearer in A Free Soul. Directed by the legendary Clarence Brown, A Free Soul is yet another MGM melodrama that plays like the more glamorous cousin to the typical working class Warner Brothers’ picture of the era.
Norma Shearer stars, along with Lionel Barrymore. She’s a gorgeously gowned society darling and he’s her father, a once prominent attorney lost in drink. Howard plays her steadfast fiancé and a pre-mustachioed Gable plays (what else?) a ridiculously virile gangster named Ace, the man her father successfully defends on a murder charge. 65 years before the O.J. Simpson trial Barrymore uses a similar courtroom trick. He has Gable try on a hat that has been introduced as evidence by the prosecution. It's much too small and sits perched ridiculously on top of his head, eliciting guffaws from the spectators.
Shearer falls for bad boy Gable, scandalizing her family. She makes a deal with her father. She won’t see Gable again if he will quit drinking. They take an extended camping trip in the mountains. She to forget her gangster lover and he to get over his love affair with the bottle. Upon returning to civilization things don’t exactly go as planned. All of which leads to a melodramatic climax in a courtroom.
This climactic scene, where Lionel Barrymore gives an impassioned plea to the jury, was done in one take. At fourteen minutes it is credited by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest take ever in a commercial film. They had to use more than one camera as a reel of film is only about 10 to 12 minutes long.
There are several distinguishing pre-Code elements to A Free Soul. For starters it is made explicitly clear that the unmarried Shearer and Gable are sleeping together. She is his sexual playmate for several months. The most suggestive moment occurs when Shearer lies down seductively on Gable’s bed, gives him a come hither stare and asks him to put his arms around her. The censors wanted this scene cut but MGM wisely ignored them and - this being before strict Production Code enforcement - they got away with it.
An example of pre-Code dialogue is spoken by Barrymore in one of the camping scenes. He tells his daughter that Gable runs everything from “Opium to White Slavery.”
Norma Shearer, at the peak of her popularity, and Clark Gable, at the beginning of his illustrious career, create sparks together in this well-made early talkie courtroom drama. Lionel Barrymore won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance; Leslie Howard is good in his small but pivotal role and character actor James Gleason is along for comic relief. But A Free Soul belongs, body and soul, to Norma Shearer and – to a lesser extent – future King of Hollywood, Clark Gable.
