Wednesday, March 5 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE
Directed by A. Edward Sutherland • 1933
What if we told you there was a bonkers pre-Code vaudeville/musical ensemble comedy, a kind of low-rent Grand Hotel set in China, starring W. C. Fields as a beer-chugging aviator and Bela Lugosi as a hot-headed Russian general who can’t shoot straight? Well, what if we told you it’s got George Burns and Gracie Allen as a shamelessly schticking doctor/nurse duo, the great Franklin Pangborn as (what else?) a harried hotel manager, and a climactic Cab Calloway performance of “Reefer Man”? Still not enough? Okay — so it also features nine-year-old blues belter Baby Rose Marie doing a number atop two grand pianos, Rudy Vallée crooning a lullaby to his beloved megaphone, a rare appearance from forgotten radio comedy duo Stoopnagle & Budd, and a rubber-limbed, sailor-suited Sterling Holloway ogling a cluster of barely-clad chorines through transparent teacups in a hastily choreographed paean to that famous brew of the Far East. Ready to buy a ticket now? Good! So we don’t even need to mention the slapdash plot (eccentric Chinese scientist, played by non-Chinese actor Edmund Breese, invites global speculators to the titular hotel to bid on his new invention, a form of television that he hasn’t quite perfected). Fields’s talents are on peak display here. As Professor Henry R. Quail, he dominates, landing his autogyro on the hotel’s roof patio and proceeding to drink the place dry while upending all social niceties, offending most of the hotel guests, going hard on the ribald wordplay, and of course flying away with the heroine — noted Jazz Age socialite Peggy Hopkins Joyce, playing herself and lampooning her public image as a gold-digging, underwear-exposing vamp. “Why do you wear a silk hat?” Joyce asks Fields. “Lends dignity, my beauty, lends dignity,” he replies after drunkenly falling out of his airplane. (GW)
68 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “Minnie the Moocher” (Fleischer Studios, 1932) – 7 min – 35mm
Co-presented with “Those Were the Days,” broadcasting vintage radio shows every Saturday from 1 to 5pm on WDCB 90.9 FM
NEXT UP: THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED on Monday, March 10 at Music Box