November 23rd 2020

International House Is Precode's Address

The sort of loose-limbed comedy Paramount did well when it seemed every nut had gathered on their lot. The Marx Bros. would have made congenial tenants at this International House, called the "Grand Hotel of Comedy" by Para merchants. In fact, MGM's all-star assemblage was spoofed to powder by (envious?) others who lacked Leo's marquee firepower. Paramount could boast of "stars" housed here, the term elastic for where celebrity among these was forged, to wit radio and what was left of vaudeville. At least their trailer was frank about it: "Stars Of The Stage, Radio, and Boudoir," which was tip-off too of racy content advertising made no secret of. Paramount, in fact, generously gave of much suggestive dialogue from International House to its trailer, with graphic-spelled promise of "Bridal Suites and Bridal Sweeties." Stricter Code enforcement may have been just around a following year's corner, but Paramountwould make bawdy hay while it could.

Had vaudeville become racy as this by the early 30's? Maybe so as it struggled vainly to survive. Radio we know to have been sanitary, but mainly after skittish sponsors took over programming, and that had not happened so soon as when International House on-air talent made their mark. So what was a less monitored depression-era radio like? Little of recordings survive to tell us one way or another. If we are to rank "blue" content among mass entertaining of the time, would movies sit atop a heap over radio and vaud? International House has W.C. Fields engaged in still-shocking wordplay, terms of endearment he would give up soon and forever thereafter. To Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Paramount-hired for notorious real-life sexploits, Fields blows verbal kisses, or gropes, as follows: My little tit-mouse, My little Scanty-Panty, and these on heels of excited discovery that she's sitting on a "pussy" (naturally ... a cat). I don't know of another occasion, before or after, other than parts of short subject The Dentist, when Fields embraced humor as censor-baiting.

International House is much taken with mediums other than movies, one that competed with Hollywood then (radio), another that would, devastatingly so, later (television). For now (1933), TV was a crackpot invention that looked like Frankenstein's lab reject put through a sifter by Fu Manchu (and called for purpose here a "radioscope"). In fact, it's a benign Chinaman who offers the balky device to bidders at International House, sensible ones backing out of the room where demonstrations play. Television was a concept in the early 30's forged on failed experiment since the mid-20's when a first demo made clear how far the dream was from commercial usefulness. In short, this was science-fiction, and that's how International House treated it (Fields refers to the device as a "magic lantern"). Would-be visionaries said widespread TV was "around the corner," optimism based on how fast radio penetrated a market once kinks were ironed out. Trouble was television being more kink than functional, with less promise for near-future progress. In a meantime, the medium would be basis for far-out comedy and product of screwball science.

Radio was something else, to which Paramount was invested by way of half-interest in CBS since mid-1929. The company hugged radio because they could use it to promote Paramount stars and films. By 1933, a public was listening as much at home as watching in theatres, so mindful Paramount plucked flowers from broadcasting to satisfy curiosity for faces that went with much-heard voices. A lot of these had been familiar to vaudeville-goers, but most of that was past now, and lucky performers had made new home on airwaves. A much wider audience had never seen Baby Rose Marie or Cab Calloway, and wanted to. Maybe you couldn't star these and others in a feature, but as highlight for shorts or specialty in features, they were ideal. Paramounthad applied this concept to The Big Broadcast in 1932, and success of that spawned a decade's worth of follow-upping. International House plopping its radio acts into sputtering device that was television proved prophetic for fact that TV would years later come to rescue of these and countless other entertainers fallen on hard times of vanished vaud and by-then declining radio.

What are we to make of International House today? What, in fact, did watchers make of it when the thing by late-50’s landed on the very tube it lambasted? Many of the acts seem strange in the extreme. Had watchers once laughed at Colonel Stoopnagle and Bud, and if so, why? Well, yes, they certainly had, for perhaps good reason obscured by time and limited access to work the team did. Stoop and Bud did nonsense singing, verbal ying-yang, and gags spun off foolishness of their day, like Technocracy and ... television. To us and for a last ninety years, they seem impossibly quaint and dated, but in career clover, these boys were up-to-minute. Some International House acts would catch unexpected fire and speak direct to a changed culture. Cab Calloway's madhouse still seems fresh as a daisy, or cannabis leaf. His pell-mell rendition of "Reefer Man" is bald celebration of marijuana as creative stimulant, and you have to wonder from such spirited perf if he's right. International House would have been worth booking to a 70's college campus just for student howl when Cab and Company traverse decades to speak direct at a counterculture.

Baby Rose Marie --- now there's some strange. Age nine when she performed here, Rose had been on radio since three years old and had a growler voice and torchy manner in keeping with kids warped by vaud into queasy parody of been-around songstresses, only she was better at it even if lyrics got way more worldly than Baby Rose could grasp. International House has continuing value for odd assemblage of these and other acts planted firmly at its time of release, hard-core buffs and completists the admitted (and maybe sole) viewership left for same. If there's reason for International House being other than lost, it's W.C. Fields. He kept this and every Para feature in which he worked commercially viable even unto DVD. When MCA packaged his and Mae West/Marx Bros. property into a twenty-six pack for early-70's syndication, buyer stations must have wondered how the deuce to proper-exploit likes of International House, If I Had A Million, Alice In Wonderland, and others of limited Fields participation (I'd ask myself then why it was necessary to again sit through Mrs. Wiggs Of The Cabbage Patch just to see Bill arrive almost at an end).

This post first appeared on Greenbriar Picture Shows, please read the originial post: here