Alicia I love this movie so much

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

mrturk182 It's been roughly over 80 years now, and anyone who really likes to keep up with the entire history of film is still wondering how the heck did this dud ever came about. It has a lot of promising elements. It has Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, both phenomenal actors, and John M. Stahl, who's done pretty good films before. But for some reason, they weren't bringing their best to this biopic about the Irish politician Parnell. For brilliant actors, both Gable and Loy are uninvested, and their chemistry is unconvincing. If something like that's going to happen, it would have to come down to the direction of Stahl. He had no idea how to properly interpret this real-life story, which got padded down by too much fluff, inaccuracy, and a running time that leaves you bored out of your mind. And whoever did the makeup job on Gable should've been fired. Yeah, there's some cinematic intergrity to be found here, but for the most part, it was an off day for the talented people at the forefront of this movie. Eh, it happens.Score: 27/100

calvinnme I watched Parnell and waited for the awfulness. It never happened. What may have thrown off audiences in 1937 is that this is a period piece with absolutely no action and lots of speechifying. I thought Clark Gable was good and believable in his role as Charles Stewart Parnell, Anglo Irish politician and champion of Irish home rule, but this was not what people expected when they went to the movies to see a Clark Gable film. I guess it would have been like seeing Johnny Weismuller on a marquee in the 1930's, buying a ticket, and finding out he is portraying Abraham Lincoln instead of Tarzan or a Tarzan like figure. Thus many people say this film was a case of miscasting in the star role. I think it was more a case of unexpected casting. The film keeps moving with Parnell dealing with one problem after another. There's even a murder trial thrown in at the middle of the movie! Then there is the married Kitty O'Shea (Myrna Loy) as Parnell's love interest.I thought the romance built slowly and credibly, and the charisma between Gable and Loy is electric. Kitty is unhappily married to Willy O'Shea, who is a complete weasel with high political aspirations. How many husbands are so unpleasant that their wives would rather pay their expensive bills to keep them away from home? That's what Willy kept threatening - pay this or that bill or I'll simply have to move back in with you. It does make you wonder why they married in the first place. One strange thing that the film did was have Billie Burke, who was 53 at the time, playing Clara, Kitty's rather flaky sister, when she was old enough to be Myrna Loy's mother and only one year younger than Edna May Oliver who plays Clara and Kitty's aunt Ben. Billie Burke had been playing matronly characters with grown children for some time, so making her up and dressing her up to be somebody in her 20's who didn't have a real place in the plot other than being Oliver's comic foil just seemed a little weird. As usual with biopics, this film got some facts about Parnell wrong. He actually toured the American south with his brother in the 1870's, not places associated with the Irish Americans in the 19th century such as Boston and New York. His affair with Kitty O'Shea was not that innocent. He actually fathered three of her four children while she was still married to her first husband. I can see how for the sake of dramatic license and the production code MGM would just make them guilty of holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes for years and years.Great performances all around, good production values, a plot that kept my interest, and great supporting characters who often starred in MGM's lesser films of the time - thus I'd say this film is probably a 6.5/10, but I had to give a whole number rating so I rounded up to 7. It certainly held my interest and made me curious enough to want to learn more about this part of Irish history of which I know so little, thus I consider it a success, not a failure.

sol1218 Epic motion picture about the life times and loves of the immortal Irish patriot Charles Stewart Parnell, Clark Gable, who fought for Irish independence and home rule from the hated and oppressive British Empire. In the end Parnell succumb not to British power bullets or gallows or even his fellow Irishmens infighting but to the woman that he loved Mrs. Katie O'Shea, Myrna Loy. It was Katie's social climbing husband Captain Willie, Alan Marshal, who exposed his love affair with his wife Katie in order to get back at him.Parnell was a man who never turned away from a good fight and his career in Irish/British politics was filled with battles that he both fought and won against almost unbelievable odds. Yet when it came to defend himself in the divorce trial of his love Katie O'Shea he just refused to stand up and fight like a man for her and his honor. Katie's husband Willie never loved her and just kept her around, not giving her the divorce that she begged him for, for only political reasons and nothing else.Coming back to his beloved Ireland after visiting his mother in the United States Parnell is quickly caught up in the vicious and cold-hearted attempt by the British to drive tens of thousands of Irish families out of their homes and farms in a major land-grab on their part. Being himself arrested for inciting violence, which was a bald-faced lie on the part of the British government, Parnell in fact called on his fellow Irishmen to refrain from violence and fight their brutal British overlords with the power of the vote instead.Being framed for the infamous May 6, 1882 Dublin Phoenix Park murders of British foreign secretary Fredrick Cavendish and his aid T.H Burke, Parnell stood on trial for his life and forced the issue when he got the Irish editor Richard Piggot,Neil Fitzgerald, to admit that he forged the letters supposedly written by the Innocent Parnell taking credit for the two British diplomats murders. Exposed on the stand as both a liar and a fraud a shaken Piggot asks to be excused so he can go outside the courtroom for some air and then proceeds to blow his brains out.Parnell now on the verge of his greatest and most sought after political victory, Irish autonomy and independence,is back-stabbed by his lovers, Kate O'Shea's, scheming husband Willie who exposes his affair with his wife by suing Katie for divorce. Refusing to defend himself feeling that his, and Katie's, personal life is nobody's business Parnell is then about to be thrown out of the newly formed Irish Parliament that he, more then anyone else, was responsible from being brought into existence in the first place.With a lifetime of battles under his belt Parnell's decision to turn away from this one the nasty and publicized O'Shea divorce lead him, by the vicious attacks on Katie and himself in the press, to suffer an emotional and physical collapses. In the end Parnell died from pneumonia on October 6, 1891 at the very young age of 45; Parnell was married to Katie some six months at the time of his death.Nowhere as bad as it's critics said it was back in 1937 "Parnell" gives a very accurate description of one of Ireland's most beloved sons and charismatic statesman and Clark Gable is very good in the role as the fiery but tragic Charles Stewart Parnell. The only thing that was bit too overdone in the film was Parnell's long and drawn out illness which could have been at least cut in half so the movie wouldn't have turned out to be a boring TV soap opera. Besides that "Parnell" is one of the best biographies to come out of Hollywood back then in the 1930's.

bkoganbing If one were to see the movie Captain Boycott and see Robert Donat in a brief cameo as Charles Stewart Parnell making a speech you would be seeing a far closer portrayal to the real Parnell then Clark Gable gave in this film. Myrna Loy wasn't too much better as Kitty O'Shea, both the leads looked like they had something else on their minds.The real Charles Stewart Parnell was a great Irish patriot who by force of intellect and oratory rose to the head of the Irish party in the House of Commons. During the 1880s the members for Ireland in Parliament under Parnell's leadership held the balance of power between the Conservatives and Liberals. If the whole business with his affair with Mrs. O'Shea had not come to light, Ireland might very well have gotten it's own parliament and essentially home rule which was Parnell's goal. He accomplished this all the while clinging to his Protestant faith. The fact that Parnell was a Protestant was not mentioned at all in this film.Also, the key to Parnell's downfall was his haughtiness. He was not an easy guy to like. He was a great Irish patriot, but he was also haughty and arrogant. When he was brought down by a back street affair come to light, even a lot of his allies weren't unhappy at his political demise.Before the affair came to light, his enemies tried another gambit with some forged letters that purported to show Parnell's complicity in the assassinations of Lord Fredrick Cavendish and his secretary in Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1881. The trial scenes were the best in the film and it might have been a good film had they stuck to that of course with someone else playing Parnell. The best performance in the film is that of George Zucco who was Parnell's attorney, Sir Charles Russell. Running a close second in acting is Alan Marshal who plays Myrna Loy's husband, Captain O'Shea who thinks by pimping his wife to Parnell he can advance his own career. Gable took ribbing for this film the rest of his life and even he admitted it laid an ostrich egg.