International House **** (1933, W C Fields, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Rudy Vallee, Stuart Erwin, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Bela Lugosi) – Classic Movie Review 10,452

Director A Edward Sutherland’s hilarious, ramshackle 1933 comedy film International House stars W C Fields, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Rudy Vallee, Stuart Erwin, and George Burns and Gracie Allen, and is released by Paramount Pictures as ‘The Grand Hotel of comedy’ with ‘AS MANY STARS AS THE MILKY WAY In the Year’s Grand Slam of Mirth and Music!’.

International House is an endearing mixture of crazy comedy and offbeat musical acts tied together by a slim, though wildly inventive plotline, in the popular style of Paramount’s Big Broadcast films. Top-billed Peggy Hopkins Joyce (playing herself) was famous as a real-life gold-digger, rather than as an actress, with six marriages to wealthy men and a series of scandalous affairs. The film has much good-natured kidding about her love life and profitable divorces.

Peggy Hopkins Joyce.

With typically brilliant comedic lunacy from W C Fields as Professor Henry R Quail, and good goofy fun from Burns and Allen as the hotel physician and nurse, there is also much risqué pre-Code humour in a raucous film that sets out to showcase popular stage and radio acts of the era.

All this plus Bela Lugosi as General Nicholas Branovsky Petronovich, Lumsden Hare as Sir Mortimer Fortescue, Edmund Breese as Dr Wong, the inventor of a kind of television, Sari Maritza as Carol Fortescue, Franklin Pangborn as the Hotel Manager, popular crooner Rudy Vallée, Rose Marie as precocious child torch singer Baby Rose Marie, bandleader-vocalist Cab Calloway as himself, and comedians Stoopnagle and Budd.

Chinese inventor Dr Wong has invented a ‘radioscope’ television and invites everyone to see it and bid for it at China’s International House Hotel in metropolitan Wuhu, which is quarantined when American electric company representative Tommy Nash (Stuart Erwin) breaks out in a rash. Enter Professor Quail in his auto-gyro (though he intended to land in Kansas City but flew off course).

Lyricist Leo Robin and composer Ralph Rainger wrote three songs for the film: ‘She Was a China Tea-cup and He Was Just a Mug’, ‘Thank Heaven For You’, sung by Rudy Vallee; and ‘My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues’, sung by Baby Rose Marie.

An earthquake that killed 120 people occurred during production on 10 March 1933, and a Paramount newsreel featured footage of cast members on the set as it struck, but Fields and director Sutherland faked the footage for publicity.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,452

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