When Hollywood decides to dump a whole mess of stars into one comedy, it's usually pretty spotty and over-baked, but INTERNATIONAL HOUSE gets it half-baked, which is just right, with sugarless spice and fiery pre-code convection. I love it so much if I had only one film for a desert island, it would be this. It's my safety net, my life preserver. The love story began when I was a 15-year old monster junkie, scouring the TV Guide for things to tape and watch obsessively to fill the hours of a lonesome adolescence. I taped INTERNATIONAL HOUSE because Lenny gives it ***1/2, and it had Bela Lugosi in the credits. And of course I fell instantly in love with W.C. Fields, Cab Calloway, and the whole pre-code saucy comedy genre in one collective cupid arrow burst. A few years later, I brought my VHS tape of it to college and my drummer Max and I watched it nightly while pounding bourbon and 3 foot Graffix bong hits. Decades later and we still have long conversations set to the Vaudeville rhythm of Burns and Allen ("You had a raffle for poor old woman!? And he won.") And of course there's W.C. Fields at his most insane; to drink along with him in this movie is to know a rare anarchic joy, and then to pass out.
A lot of the early Fields pictures can get exasperating, even IT'S A GIFT, because he insists on playing the henpecked suburban husband who reacts kindly to all sorts of shrill impositions and the old-fashioned Americana hokum he's mocking has long since vanished from pop culture. As Professor Quail in INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, perhaps due to not having to carry the film by himself, he finally lets go completely. The mighty Quail is, among other things, a drunken autogyro pilot who lands on the roofdeck of the Wu Hu, China Grand hotel, sneaks into gold digger supreme Peggy Hopkins Joyce's boudoir, scrounges everyone's leftover table service bottles and trashes the front desk. Everyone loves him, except the hissy-fit throwing Franklin Pangborn (stereotype or not, he's brilliant) and Bela Lugosi as the Soviet ambassador, one of the more recent former husbands of Joyce, who winds up shut out of the bidding for Dr. Wong's radioscope (an early form of television that miraculously gets all sorts of channels before TV signals existed).
Professor Wong wants only to find "The Six Day Bicycle Race" on the radioscope, but he gets Cab Calloway singing "Reefer Man" replete with zombified bassman: "Why look at that cat, he looks like he done lost his mind," notes Cab. "He's high!" shouts the band. "What do you mean he's high?"/ "Full of weed!" / "Full of weed?" and Baby Rose Marie, a little girl belting the down and dirty blues with the voice of a 50-year old smoker on her fifth whiskey, and dancing in a dirty frock who is undoubtedly the inspiration for the dancing moppet singing the "Reefer Song" in Day of the Locust. Hell yeah, West saw this movie!
As per most 1930s movies, the harder drugs are done under the table, but there's plenty of drinking above board, with Professor Quail dropping his empty Muerto Blanco beer bottles onto people's heads and there's wry gay references ("don't let the posey fool ya") and Fields' bravado is heartening: "Is this Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri?" When Pangborn tells him he's lost, Fields decrees: "Kansas City is lost. I am here!" This reminds me of what the Sufi mystic Bahauddin once wrote: "A candle has been lit inside me / for which the sun is a moth." It's small wonder that Firesign Theater dubbed their satire of the 1960s counterculture "W.C. Fields Forever."
Like the Paramount Marx Brothers movies, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE is especially good for acid, since the behavior of every character is so "off" - there's no one to bring you down with bad vibes, except maybe American representative Tommy Nash (mealy Stu Erwin). There's even exotic fan dancers in faux-Busby music number, "The China Tea Cup and the American Mug," with Sterling Holloway as the mug, bouncing around on a wire after Lona Andre (top) in full exotica headdress.
On psychedelics, many socially accepted forms of interaction become suddenly absurd and even frightening--like registering at a hotel-- while the spontaneous "outside the box" actions of free-spirit surrealists--such as boldly walking along the registration desk and kicking over the mail slots, are a breath of "normal" fresh air... it's the difference between seeing sleeping souls shambling through habitual rituals and living, breathing, laughing trickster spirits. Such is the effect in INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, which has just enough normal dull "Grand Hotel" style characters to keep the more hysterical ones looking even cooler. And casting Peggy Hopkins Joyce seals the deal - she's like Margaret Dumont and Thelma Todd rolled into one, the Paris Hilton or Zsa Zsa Gabor or Charro of her day.
One of my favorite moments: After getting kicked out of Joyce's bed, Fields winds up sleeping with Dr. Wong, who's mistaken him for the American representative to whom he hopes to sell his radioscope invention. "I feel like the whole Chinese army's been marching across my tongue with muddy feet," Fields laments. The houseboy asks: "Shall I get you some water?" Fields replies "A little on the side." That's how I roll with INTERNATIONAL HOUSE. I want to steal the whole bottle and throw chaser to the wind. There's never been another like it, alas, but it's a neverending bottle.
I've always wondered why more people don't discuss this wonderful movie, one of the most blissfully deranged products of classical Hollywood, so thank you for doing so. Some of the gags are on the level with Harpo's tattoo in Duck Soup, like Fields shooting at the television and sinking an onscreen ship. I second your occasional exasperation with Fields as family man--I much prefer him as a sloshed lord of misrule, whizzing around in autogyros or leaping out of airplanes after dropped flasks.
ReplyDeleteWhat a terrific, unsung movie. And a really great site. I'm adding you to my blogroll on filmicability.blogspot.com. And congrats for being included in the FILM COMMENT online roundup!
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