How do you conjure the image of people making love missionary style in a mainstream movie in 1933? It's easy. You have W.C. Fields peep through a keyhole at a hotel room and quip, "What won't they think of next?"
Fields plays Professor Quail, who is as important to the plot of International House as any of the other characters. The story of a quarantine being imposed on a hotel in the Chinese city of Wu-hu is an outrageous skeleton used by the many stars of the film (George Burns and Gracie Allen, Cab Calloway, Baby Rose Marie, and Bela Lugosi) to flex their own celebrity muscle. It's a Vaudevillean romp run amok--with performances aimed at nobody quite knows who for no reasons that anyone can specify.
In my opinion, the real star of the show is A. Edward Sutherland's direction. Sutherland attempts (often clumsily) to translate the things that work on stage to the silver screen. Three-dimensional tea cups that figure as part of the set of a stage number suddenly become two-dimensional jigsaw puzzles before the eye of the camera. The stage performers play simultaneously to the audience in front of their stage and to those of us who watch their antics on screen. The camera plunges into the action on the stage, making our cinematic experience of the performance both more and less intimate than that of the people in the theater watching the show. Then, for the finale, we get an overhead view of the dancers, who conclude their show by putting together a cardboard mosaic over their heads. The people in the theater can't see the finale. Only we, the film viewers, can see it. It's quite a fascinating attempt to explore one audience's ability to forget about or neglect another audience that is right there in plain sight.
Sutherland also uses Dr. Wong's radioscope as an excuse to explore other ways in which stagey performances can be captured on film. We get to see Cab Calloway and his orchestra perform an amusing song called "Reefer Man." We also get to see ten-year-old Baby Rose Marie (the little girl who grew up to play Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show) perform a song that is bound to have the Jon-Benet Ramsay look-alikes of this world eating their hearts out.
Dr. Wong really wants to see the six day bicycle race, but always picks up a signal for something far more interesting to the people checking out his radioscope (and to us, the members of the film audience). One of the concluding gags of the film is that by the time he finally picks up the race on his radioscope, it's over. Does that mean there's something wrong with his radioscope?
Perhaps, but we're distracted from that story by the antics of Professor Quail, who drives a miniature car into his helicopter in order to escape a hotel manager who is a bit miffed at him for having driven around the interior of his hotel. Why does Quail store a car in his helicopter? Partly out of a desire to make sidetrips, but mainly because the he could never get the cigarette lighter in the helicopter to work.
One of the little vignettes that Dr. Wong picks up on his radioscope begins with a written credit to Dr. Stoopnagle, followed by a message that reads "Stoopnocracy is peachy," which also turns out to be the concluding line of the vignette. This seeming tribute to radio's Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle is simply the incorporation of one more entertainment medium in the film. Why do different things work so differently on radio and on the stage and on the screen? Sutherland doesn't really theorize about the possibilities of mixing media in this film. He just tries stuff. The only way to find out what will work is to try. So he tries. He tries whatever pops into his head and allows the actors to try whatever pops into theirs. Lots of their efforts come up short, but there's an exuberance to the failed scenes in the film that is even more charming than the scenes that work. I would call this one essential viewing for anyone who is curious about the kinds of decisions that directors have learned to make.
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