International House
69 min. / B&W / 1.33:1 / SDH
Universal BD $21.98
Available from our partner MovieZyng
As it turns out – thanks to a plethora of new releases from Universal and MovieZyng – we have the unprecedented opportunity of hosting a W.C. Fields Marathon in the Balcony, with four new reviews! Poke around, you’ll also find reviews of The Big Broadcast of 1938, Mississippi, and Million Dollar Legs.
Money men from around the world are gathering at the International House, a swank hotel in Wuhu, China, to bid on an old Chinese inventor's astonishing new invention: the first television set! The old coot (Ed Breese) keeps promising to show the Six Day Bicycle Race from New York City, but instead, tunes into video images of radio comedians and singers. Meanwhile, lovely starlet Peggy Hopkins Joyce, George Burns & Gracie Allen, and W.C. Fields drop into the hotel for fun 'n' frolic; Bela Lugosi is trying to get into the hotel to kill Fields for flirting with Miss Joyce, Bela's ex-wife (in real life, Bela Lugosi was nearly the only man in Hollywood who HADN'T been married to her, she was quite the, um, celebrity in her day), and prissy hotel manager Franklin Pangborn battles to sort everything out. Oh, yeah, and Stu Erwin and his girlfriend are around, but we don't care, romance in slapstick comedies generally is extraneous and we’d have cut those scenes for dog food commercials if we’d been local TV station managers in the 1960s. Other performers include Stoopnagle and Budd (who?), Rudy Vallee, and Cab Calloway, who does The Reefer Man, a song about just what you think it’s about. Last but not least, Baby Rose Marie does a great torch song; she’s instantly recognizable as the Adult Rose Marie of The Dick Van Dyke Show, only younger and shorter and much less blonde.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, this writers enjoys all W.C. Fields pictures to one degree or another, but this one is simply of my all-time favorite movies; first saw it with friends on a double-bill with Sons of the Desert at the University of Akron, and the Laurel & Hardy film naturally went over just fine, but THIS one had the college crowd (this was circa 1980-81) in absolute stitches, me included. For once, the critics got it absolutely right: the film is pretty good, and when that fellow Fields is onscreen, well, hold on to your sides, folks. The NY Times: "How W. C. Fields, whose destination is Kansas City, finds his way into this lunatic ménage in a helicopter is something that cannot possibly matter after the picture has started on its unsteady course. With his regal and somewhat beery manner, his precious silk hat, his frozen face and his unlit cigar, he keeps his audiences in perpetual roars. His athletic argument with the hotel clerk, which brings most of the International House thundering about his ears, is the funniest thing in the picture, unless it be his clandestine rendezvous with Miss Joyce in her boudoir."
And this is as good a time as any to mention that, sans nudity, this qualifies in all other respects as a dirty move, with sequences, gags, and quips that most have given censors nightmares.
Million-Dollar International Dialog:
Fields, walking in on Vallee's song: "How long has this dog fight been going on?"
Miss Joyce, uncomfortably: "I'm sitting on something!"
Mr. Fields: "I lost mine in the stock market."
As with Million Dollar Legs, there’s a strong Mack Sennett flavor to the fun; director Edward Sutherland had been a Keystone Cop. The film is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece in its loony way, and what a showcase for Fields, wandering in and out and making inane and hilarious comments, many of which are bawdy enough that you’ll be quoting them for weeks if I know you. International House was a big hit and made him a major Paramount star; he’d soon have lead roles in comedy classics and graduate from "one of many Paramount stars and featured players" on the cast lists.
W.C. Fields deserves the love and attention that Mae West got with a huge Indicator boxed set, but we’re happy to have his films available in new bare-bones Blu-ray editions, even unrestored. They’re not stuffed with bonus material, just laughs. Fields fans will be quite satisfied.
