#5 Hollywood Party

January 5, 2021
Hollywood Party (1934) ***
TCM
Free
Wildcard

No, still no Iron Man 2, get off my back! I’m just never going to watch a movie that long that I start watching at 11p, it’s just the way it is. And then there was another movie I was thinking of watching in a different category, that I will not talk about because it’s a story for when I actually do watch that movie.

So I ended up scrolling through TCM to see what they had on offer, and it’s just so many awesome movies I may never watch anything but TCM movies again. They just sort of currently have an overabundance of short, comedic films from the ’30s and ’40s that I’ve never seen before, but star Cary Grant and June Allison and William Powell and so on, and I am not made of stone.

Basically, I was looking for something short and cheerful, and I lighted on something called Hollywood Party, starring Laurel and Hardy. I really have seen very little Laurel and Hardy, so I decided to give it a go. Well! It turned out to be one of the weirdest little movies I ever did see.

First of all, Laurel and Hardy may well have top billing, but they don’t show up until the last 10 minutes of the movie! It is mostly about Jimmy Durante, who plays a very famous jungle adventure movie actor called Schnarzan, who gives a big party in order to get some real, fierce lions from a jungle explorer. Also trying to get these lions is a rival performer called Liondora, who disguises himself as a Grand Royal Duke. A very rich couple attends the party with their niece, who instantly falls for a juvenile, while the fake Grand Royal Duke seduces the wife, and the husband walks around ripping up thousand dollar bills to prove how rich he is. Not invited to the party is Lupe Valez (The Mexican Spitfire), who plays Jane in the Schnarzan movies, because Durante breaks up with her right before the party, but she crashes the party anyway, and is very fiery and Mexican, and when Laurel and Hardy show up as the real owners of the lions, they have a long scene with her in which they keep cracking eggs on each other, for some reason. Also, it’s a musical in the Busby Berkeley style, did I mention that? Well, it is. And heads up for one number with Black actors as African warriors with really truly bones in their noses.

Actually, it’s about eight movies in one, and since apparently it had eight directors, each directing a different section, I’m not entirely shocked that it doesn’t really all mesh. Zero things are resolved, of course, it all ends up being a dream, sorry, spoilers.

“Well,” I thought, as I started watching it, “At least I will break the unplanned streak of every movie so far this year being at least partially animated!” And then Mickey Mouse showed up at the party as a guest. It is fate!

So, like I said, it is an extremely weird film, I’d call it avant-garde if it didn’t star Durante, Laurel and Hardy, and have an uncredited bit by the Three Stooges (and also Ted Healy!), and it deserves either one million stars, or zero stars, so I split the difference and gave it three.