Woke friends, I apologize in advance. I’m afraid incorrectness, of pretty much every kind, is going to be pervasive in this piece. Asian-Americans, along with those who disapprove of sexual misconduct and various other forms of impropriety, will probably be among the first objectors. But there is very little I can do to answer their objections. The movie in question, International House, was released by Paramount in 1933, during what we call the “pre-Code” era (the Production Code actually was in effect, but the studios largely ignored it) and any attempt to censor it or otherwise tamper with its content would fly in the face of cultural history’s basic principles. Many other movies of the time contain worse individual instances of objectionable material, but few can claim, as Paramount’s International House can, that the eyebrow-raising passages are balanced with pure genuine hilarity, and with a unifying spirit that turns what is essentially a variety show into a surprisingly cohesive comic work. Did anyone working at Paramount in 1933 expect such a result when International House was being made? Probably not. More likely they just lined up all the talent, set the screenwriters and comedians loose, and hoped for the best. They got it: If you want to know what the phrase “musical comedy” meant to the average urban filmgoer in 1933, this is probably an optimal place to start. A slim but surprisingly sturdy thread of plot ties the picture’s wildly scattered elements together. An elderly Chinese scientist, Dr. Wong (Edmund Breese), has invented a “radioscope” that, in the manner of the era’s shortwave radio sets, can pick up anything being broadcast anywhere in the world. But experiments with television were also the big news in popular science back then, and so Dr. Wong’s invention can pick up the image as well as the sound of what he tunes in on, without benefit of cameras. Like any good scientist in a 1933 musical comedy, Dr. Wong has a pure-hearted reason for creating his invention: He wants to watch the 6-day bicycle race at Madison Square Garden. He apparently has no pecuniary needs and will happily sell his invention to the highest bidder—though naturally (this being a Hollywood film), he would prefer the USA’s “American Electric Company,” which will give his invention the best development and the widest distribution. Dr. Wong’s faith in America is beautiful; maybe that’s why he finds the 6-day bicycle race such an object of fascination.
Dr. Wong and his radioscope reside, as I should probably have warned you much earlier, in a big hotel, the International House, in a fictional but apparently bustling Chinese metropolis named Wu Hu. Yes, nearly every time its name is spoken aloud, there’s a comic reaction of some kind. And no, that isn’t the film’s only politically incorrect joke on Chinese syllables; a swing orchestra on the local radio station is identified as “Ah Phooey and His Manly Mandarins.” If this makes you automatically scratch International House off your wish list, I will understand. But it will be your loss. Just saying.
To get to Wu Hu from Shanghai, as all the magnates bidding on the radioscope need to do, you must apparently cross the Gobi Desert. Because a railway accident has made train travel impossible, Tommy Nash (Stuart Erwin), the American Electric Company’s agent, is compelled to drive the grueling roads across the desert. Falling victim to persuasion, he makes the mistake of taking along with him a blonde adventuress, Peggy Hopkins Joyce (playing herself), in search of her next millionaire husband. Though no longer a household word today, Joyce (1893-1957) would have been instantly recognizable to 1930s moviegoers. A former showgirl who had appeared for Ziegfeld, the Shuberts, and Earl Carroll, she was notorious for the multiple marriages to, and love affairs with, mostly older wealthy men, which she parlayed into a legendary collection of jewels, furs, and other luxury items. She started young and had already shed two millionaire husbands even before making her Ziegfeld Follies debut. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, her on-again off-again romances supplied the tabloids with hot copy, and comedians with surefire laughs. Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Lorenz Hart poked fun at her marital didoes in Broadway lyrics. (Cf. Porter’s 1928 song, “Which?”: “Should I make one man my choice / And regard divorce as treason / Or should I, like Peggy Joyce / Get a new one every season?”)
The screenwriters have invested Joyce, who was no sort of actress but an effective personality, with what is essentially the tabloid version of her real self: frankly out to snag another millionaire husband and unstinting in her professional use of her allure to do so. They allow her one touch of humanity: When Tommy’s fiancee (Sari Maritza) sees them together and inevitably misconstrues the situation, Joyce gets a ‘sympathetic’ moment to explain matters (though most of it takes place offscreen). Skilled in the wisecracking badinage of musical revues, she also gets more than a few bits of double-entendre comedy with W. C. Fields, who plays her millionaire target of choice, the alcoholic professor Henry R. Quail, who has literally landed on the hotel roof—an aviator by hobby who has flown in the wrong direction while attempting to break a speed record from California to Kansas City, in an eerie fictional anticipation of the real-life Douglas “Wrong-Way” Corrigan, whose “mistaken” transatlantic flight didn’t occur till 1938. (And Corrigan’s “mistake” seems in fact to have been intentional.) Taking a shine to Joyce, Fields addresses her, in the classic Fieldsian manner, with eyebrow-raising pet names like “My little Laplander” and “my little fuzzy fuchsia.”
Fields’s entrance marks a high point in the film’s madcap comedy. In the first place, he arrives while all the guests are assembled in the hotel’s roof-garden nightclub. They’ve just been watching the most lavish of the movie’s several musical numbers, a fable, by Leo Robin (lyrics) and Ralph Rainger (music), called “She Was a China Teacup (and He Was Just a Mug),” sung by an offscreen tenor and danced (extremely well) by Sterling Holloway. Clad in a sailor suit, as the “mug” in question, Holloway is surrounded by chorus girls representing various items of dishware, in mind-boggling cellophane costumes. Even more mind-boggling is a climactic dolly shot in which the camera tracks between the trousered legs of a line of chorus girls. In the melee, you might not notice that Robin’s lyric, actually quite witty, clearly has a historical model: the fable of “The Magnet and the Churn” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.
One hardly has time to recover from this piece of dementia before Fields’s autogyro touches down, causing momentary panic. Its door slides open and a few empty liquor bottles fall out before Fields himself appears, asking drunkenly, “Where am I?” “Wu Hu!” exclaims a pretty chorus girl. Fields waves. “Woo-hoo to you too, sister.” He then asks again, ”Where am I?” Franklin Pangborn, as the inevitably prissy hotel manager, snaps indignantly, “Wu Hu!” Fields, still in the doorway of the aircraft, gazes at him sternly, then slowly removes the white carnation from his own buttonhole and tosses it aside, saying, “Don’t let the posy fool ya.”
The role of the hotel manager represents a kind of apotheosis for Pangborn, giving him many opportunities to expand on the persona he inhabited in countless films, a sissified, officious bureaucrat. Several of his most notable such forays occur in films where he squares off with Fields—for instance, as the nosy auditor who gets Mickey-Finned in The Bank Dick and the perpetually infuriated movie producer in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. In International House, Pangborn not only has epic confrontations with Fields, but gets to show his classic persona in a variety of other contexts, demonstrating both his skill at sheer comic technique and the depth with which he can invest his seemingly stereotype character. In one eerily ritualized scene, he and George Burns, as the hotel doctor, take turns trying to make the doctor’s new nurse—played of course by Burns’s beloved comedy partner, Gracie Allen—say something that makes sense. This hilariously futile endeavor, early in the film, sets the tone for the madness that is fully uncorked after Fields’s arrival. (Fields too gets an encounter with Gracie’s haphazard verbosity. His conclusion: “That wren’s cuckoo.”)
The situations that pile up among the hotel guests include Joyce being stalked by an insanely jealous former husband, played by Bela Lugosi in one of his rare appearances in a comedy; he handles his small role with amusingly fiendish glee, and with no Draculesque mannerisms. While the madness heaps ever higher—a misdiagnosis by Dr. Burns puts the entire hotel under quarantine—Dr. Wong’s repeated attempts to tune in on the 6-day bicycle race provide the excuse for a parade of popular radio entertainers of the day, including Stoopnagle & Budd (whose brief act is the film’s only dud moment), Rudy Vallee, Baby Rose Marie, and Cab Calloway and his “Harlemaniacs.” These last three all deserve some comment. Vallee, clad in a bathrobe, stands by a bed with an apparently sleeping figure in it as he croons “Thank Heaven for You” (by Robin and Rainger). When he turns the bedding down, the sleeping figure is revealed to be… his megaphone. And when Fields, watching the demonstration, jeers at him, Vallee jeers right back (though Fields of course gets the last word). Vallee’s deadpan comic aplomb here prefigures his masterly displays of comedy in Preston Sturges’s Paramount comedies, a decade later.
The child star billed as Baby Rose Marie (famous in later life as Rose Marie on TV’s Dick Van Dyke Show) also croons a Robin-Rainger ballad, “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues.” Her eerie mature-child presence—she was 9 at the time—and her already sophisticated way with a song, complete with vocal growls, give the number, to modern eyes, an altogether unnerving quality. Vaudeville children learned early to mimic the postures and inflections of grownups; the unnerving part is the extent to which audiences took her mock adulthood for a form of innocence, hugely popular at the time. Even odder, though perhaps more startling than unnerving, is the song performed by Cab Calloway and his orchestra, “Reefer Man” (lyrics by Andy Razaf, music by J. Russell Robinson), in which bass player Al Morgan pretends to be hopelessly stoned on weed, plucking obsessively on his instrument while Calloway, waving his baton madly at the band, dances up a storm around him. In the hippie decades, the number developed a cult following of its own. Certainly, nothing like it appeared in any other major movie of the studio era.
Edward “Eddie” Sutherland, who directed this bedlamite assemblage, was one of the early-talkie period’s many directors sympathetic to comedians, like his coeval Eddie Cline, Fields’s favorite director. Sutherland, like Cline, had a close friendship with Fields, with whom he had first worked on the 1925 silent It’s the Old Army Game (also featuring Louise Brooks, to whom Sutherland was briefly but unhappily married). He would go on to direct two more of Fields’s Paramount pictures, Mississippi (1935) and Poppy (1936).
The basic approach of Sutherland and the pre-Code era’s other comedy directors essentially continued that of silent-film comedy but with verbal jokes and wisecracks added: Point the camera at the comedians, let them finish the gag, and then get away fast, by means of a cut or a vertical ‘wipe,’ to the next routine. Sutherland, who had begun his film career as a Keystone Cop, knew this technique thoroughly: He had been mentored by Chaplin, and had directed a variety of other major film comedians, including Laurel and Hardy, Jack Oakie, and Fields’s onetime Ziegfeld Follies colleague Eddie Cantor.
In International House, even the “romantic” subplot involving Tommy and his fiancée is set up farcically and handled satirically, with barely more than a moment of serious romance in it. And the whole picture ends, in a manner that must have been highly gratifying to Fields, with one of his favorite sports, a giant slapstick car chase, with his miniature Austin (the smallest car then on the market) raising havoc as it whizzes along hotel corridors and down fire escapes, with Lugosi and a band of hired assassins in hot pedestrian pursuit. A not-quite buried topical joke offers a final nose-thumb at the (then laxly enforced) Production Code: Fields tells Joyce, “This car used to belong to the Postmaster General.” Will Hays, then head of the Production Code office, had been US Postmaster General under Harding; he was noted for his small stature. Whether the line was ad-libbed by Fields or contrived by the screenwriters, Walter DeLeon and Francis Martin, is hard to gauge. DeLeon had turned out books for insignificant 1920s Broadway musicals like Dew Drop Inn (1923) and Rainbow Rose (1926), and spent the’30s turning out comedy screenplays, most of them for similarly non-notable movies, with Martin as his occasional writing partner. Their source material for International House came from even more insignificant hands—a screen story by the otherwise unknown Neil Brant and the barely known Louis E. Heifetz. Paramount was a hectic place in those pre-Code days, with writers coming and going.
Sutherland seems to have had a knack for riding herd on all this potential disorder. The film has an air of being committee-created and yet somehow magically avoids ever seeming like patchwork. Instead it gives off the feeling of a sort of conspiracy of comic talents, happily giving place to one another and striving to see exactly how much they can get away with. Even Fields, notorious for his insistence on having the lion’s share of the comic bits, gives place gallantly to Gracie, and interacts marvelously with Pangborn and with Joyce.
And get away with it they certainly did, just a year before the new, more restrictive Production Code went into effect. As Fields, Joyce, and the young lovers escape in Professor Quail’s autogyro at the end, the final sight gag reveals, also on the plane, a litter of mixed-breed kittens. “I wonder what their parents were,” muses Joyce, to which Fields replies, “Careless, my little nutcake, careless.” The perpetrators of International House were anything but that. If they didn’t know exactly how this particular pot of stew was going to turn out, they knew enough to make sure its hodgepodge of ingredients was well balanced, with care for its overall texture and its zesty flavor. Even if a few bits of it are hard to swallow today, it remains an exemplary tasty dish.
[Note on accessibility: Like most films that feature W. C. Fields, International House is surprisingly limited in its availability for streaming. But like most of them, it continues to be available on DVD, and in that form can be purchased from Amazon or rented from Netflix.]
