Click for larger image

Harry Van, a small-time entertainer, returns from the war to find his career on the skids.  While working as an assistant to a tipsy mind reader in Omaha, Harry meets Irene, an acrobat with a fertile imagination, who tries to convince him that they should form their own telepathy act.  After a brief romance, they part at the end of their bookings, separating with a casual goodbye.

Several years later, Harry is touring Europe with his six-girl song and dance team when, en route to Geneva, the border is closed and his troupe is forced to stay over at a hotel near an aviation field.  When Irene, sporting blonde hair and a Russian accent, appears at the hotel as a traveling companion to munitions merchant Achille Weber, Harry dimly recognizes her, but she repels all his efforts to refresh her memory of Omaha.

Amid rumors of war, hysterical pacifist Quillery incites the hotel guests and confronts Captain Kirvline, an army officer who is forced to commit distasteful acts in the line of duty.  When the bombers at the nearby fields stage an air raid, the guests are forced to evacuate the area.  As the airbase awaits retaliation, the borders are reopened for the guests to leave.  However, when Weber leaves Irene behind with a faulty passport, she bids Harry a final farewell and reveals their liaison in Omaha.

After seeing his girls safely off, Harry returns to the hotel, and while bombs burst around them, he and Irene pledge their love.

Notes
The film is based on the play Idiot's Delight by Robert E. Sherwood (New York, March 24, 1936), as produced by the Theatre Guild, Inc.

According to news items in HR, MGM originally decided against producing Robert E. Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning play because Vittorio Mussolini, the head of the Italian Censor Board, refused to approve the script.  As a result, the anti-war angle of the play was toned down and Esperanto (an artificial international language) was used for the foreign dialogue.  MGM paid $135,000 for the screen rights to the play, according to NYT.  The ending of the viewed print was the same as the original U.S. release. A somewhat different ending, with a less isolationist and more anti-war message was shot for European release prints and shown on The Turner Classic Movie channel in 1999.

Music includes:  "How Strange," words and music by Gus Kahn and Sam Messenheimer; and "Puttin' on the Ritz," words and music by Irving Berlin.