International House

International House
May 27, 1933
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
B-

Uneven sort-of-parody of Grand Hotel (1932), this has a large cast gathering in Wu-Hu, China, a town so named only so that it can constantly be punned on in dialogue and sound effects.  (I think Paramount recycled this sound in Duck Soup.)  At one point, the "sissy" hotel manager played by Franklin Pangborn yells "Wu-Hu!" at W. C. Fields, who says, "Don't let the posy [in his boutonniere] fool you."  This is a very Pre-Code movie, with Fields's lines in particular impossible to imagine a year or two later.  "Nuts" was specifically mentioned in the Code, yet Fields repeats it at least a half dozen times, meaning "nuts and bolts," and even if "pussy" wasn't officially banned, he refers to a cat as such with great relish.  Peggy Hopkins Joyce (as her then infamous millionaire-marrying self) sits on the cat but doesn't know what she's sitting on.  When she tells Fields she's sitting on something, he replies, "I lost mine in the Stock Market."

And earlier, Gracie Allen sits on a stethoscope and listens to her "heartbeat."  She and George Burns are probably the best thing about this movie, even if they are doing old vaudeville routines, like the one about her father bringing home the wrong baby carriage.  The movie also has Cab Calloway singing "Reefer Man"!  And a bluesy Baby Rose Marie belting one out.  (She was then 9 and is still alive at 90.  Yes, Dick Van Dyke's Rose Marie.)  And Rudy Vallee singing a love song to his megaphone.  And Sterling Holloway dancing.  And Bela Lugosi, a couple years after Dracula, as Joyce's ex-husband.  Plus many people you've never heard of, although I'm tagging Edmund Breese, who plays Dr. Wong, the inventor of a "television device," because he has a small role in Duck Soup.

While I wouldn't describe the movie as non-racist, it is for its time refreshingly not-very-racist, with the Chinese actually coming off better than the Americans and Europeans.  I think the setting was only chosen to lead to that "Wu-Hu" pun.  And, yes, the movie is of scientific interest, with not only a television that can transmit from anywhere in the world, but also Fields's autogyro.

I'm not a big Fields fan, although I do like how he wreaks more havoc in this hotel in his first five minutes than Harpo and Chico did in an hour of The Cocoanuts.  I ended up buying a very cheap DVD package of ten Fields movies, just so I could own this oddity of a film.  So, although in general I'm going to be blogging about movies I've seen at least a few times, I won't swear to it that I'll have seen all of the other nine Fields films before.  But I do own them, so why not blog?