Événement

International House + Busy Bodies

UCLA Festival of Preservation

Nov 10

Part of our Comedy Gold Double Feature!

Sunday, Nov 10 at 09:00PM

Featuring a cast that Film Daily described in 1933 as "a fortune in marquee material," International House rides high on dizzy turns by W.C. Fields, George Burns, Gracie Allen and Peggy Hopkins Joyce, making her sound film debut.

While often described as a "pre-Code" comedy, International House was, indeed, given the once-over by the Hays Office, which declared "the whole picture is vulgar and borders constantly on the salacious." Not that Paramount cared at the time.

The manic, boisterous energy that marks many Hollywood comedies of the early sound erararely matched in subsequent decadesowes almost entirely to the presence of vaudeville stars who found second careers on the big screen. The melding of vaudeville's kaleidoscopic variety aesthetic with Hollywood's narrative impulse lead to the emergence at the time of a new sub-genre, that film scholar Henry Jenkins' dubbed the "anarchistic comedy."

Following International House, cleanse your palate with a glimpse of Laurel and Hardy's battle against the fiends of capitalism in Busy Bodiesfiends like grumpy coworkers, unwieldy machinery and their own questionable intellects.

BUSY BODIES
(Lloyd French, USA, 1933, 35mm, 19 min)

INTERNATIONAL HOUSE
(Edward Sutherland, USA, 1933, 35mm, 68 min)

Preservation funding for International House provided by the Packard Humanities Institute.