Edward Sutherland | International House / 1933

against sexual prohibition: a final stand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter DeLeon and Francis Martin (screenplay, based on a story by Neil Brant and Louis F. Heifetz), A. Edward Sutherland (director) International House / 1933

 

Like so many musical films of the late 1920s and early 1930s, representative of the early talkies, A. Edward Sutherland’s International House is little more than a roster of vaudeville talents patched up into an almost impossible to comprehend plot. This work from 1933, has some of the standard heterosexual and queer tropes of the day, the film containing more than the usual number of sexual double-entendres of what many describe as “pre-code” cinema. But what also makes this film of more than passing interest is the number of first-class comic and musical acts in contains—its stars include W. C. Fields, Bela Lugosi, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Cab Calloway, Baby Rose Marie, Rudy Vallee, Sterling Holloway, and performing in a lead role fussy, frustrated, and effeminate hotel manager Franklin Pangborn—and that its numerous sexual innuendos actually passed the censors’ wrath.

       Despite the common belief that this was “pre-code” Hollywood, the Hays Committee by the time of this film’s release on May 27, 1933 had truly become re-activated due to Joseph Breen’s and others’ startled responses to several films made just before and after this movie. Cecille DeMille’s November 30, 1932 release caused a major outrage with cuts demanded, George Cukor’s Our Betters of February 23, 1933 provided further fodder for their fury, and only the month before International House Walter Lang’s The Warrior’s Husband brought down Breen’s rage as he declared the end of the sissy or “pansy craze,” the last extant representation of male gay homosexuality in US filmmaking for years to come.

       Accordingly, when the crowd of crooked and crazed entrepreneurs descend upon Wuhu, China’s International House all hoping to buy the rights for Dr. Wong’s (Edmund Breese) new invention, a early television described as a “radioscope,” it is rather amazing that Pangborn stands in place ready to prissily greet such savages.

       Today the similarity of name of the fictional Wuhu to the real Chinese city of Wuhan is startling, particularly since in the film, once the central characters Tommy Nash (Stuart Erwin) and Peggy Hopkins Joyce (playing herself) arrive the entire hotel, is put almost immediately under quarantine due to an epidemic, this time of measles, mistakenly diagnosed for Nash by the quack doctor George Burns and his daffy nurse Gracie Allen. It always fascinates me with how remnants of the past percolate through time.

       Burns and Allen’s several routines are among their best, with Gracie almost stealing the entire film with her prescriptions of behavior attributed to her obviously insane family members, which read today almost like the roots of the theater of the absurd. She admits that she cannot even name the school she attended since they pay her monthly not to mention it.

      Lugosi plays the evil Russian General Nicholas Petronovich, formerly married to Joyce, who would love to get his hands of the new device, but is locked out of the hotel by accident just before the quarantine is declared. He and his goons attempt to ram their way into the hotel at the very moment authorities have opened up the doors again when they the American representative of The American Electric Company (Erwin), to whom Wong wants to sell his new contraption, is not really sick. But don’t tell that to the girl he wants to marry, left behind at the altar several times due to his contracting mumps, chickenpox, and other childhood diseases. It is the childlike American, in this case, who is the cause of the epidemic, not the Chinese open market.

      Joyce gamely plays a dame on the lookout for another wealthy husband—in real life she married six wealthy men, one of who committed suicide in her room, and had numerous affairs with W, Averell Harriman, Prince Christopher of Greece, Hiram Bloomingdale (son the co-founder of the department store), the Maharaja of Baroda State of India Sayajirao Gaekwad III, Charlie Chaplin, and Irving Thalberg to name but a few. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin both mention her in their lyrics and comedian Will Rogers and Frank Fay often referred to her in their stand-up routines. In this film she’s after Wong himself or whoever buys his invention, but ends ups with a wealthy interloper Henry R. Quail (W. C. Fields), who arrives in his whirlybird like airship which lands on the hotel rooftop dining room where he queries one and all, “Where am I?” When Pangborn calls out “Wuhu,” Quail looks down at the flower in his lapel and responds, “Don’t let the posey fool ya.”

     When the diners all quickly exit on the announcement of their quarantine, Quail quickly gathers up any half-filled wine and champagne bottles he can carry off and, not having a room reservation, he takes cane in hand to seek out a vacant room, briefly sharing Joyce’s double bed (in this instance, two beds put side by side) before ending up sleeping in a large single with Dr. Wong for the rest of the night. His sole purpose for being in this film is to create general alarm for the hotel manager and his guests, while muttering his Fieldian witticisms.

      As he and Joyce drive his auto (previously embedded on his plane) through the hotel halls, she wonders what she might be sitting on—which we know to be a cat that has crawled in just before her—while Field takes a wrench to the bolts on his auto horn, describing the act as “screwing in his loose nuts.” And when she later discovers, now beneath her bottom on the airplane seat an entire litter of newborn pussies, she ponders, “I wonder who their parents were,” Field responds, “Careless, my little nut-cake, careless,” the last lines of the film.

      Six-year-old Baby Rose Marie (yes, the same Rose Marie Mazzetta who made us laugh on The Dick Van Dyke Show) sings out a beebop number in gutteral countertenor more in the manner of Sophie Tucker than Shirley Temple. Rudy Vallee sings a sweet love song to someone in a nearby bed hidden under covers, who we later discover is none other than his beloved megaphone. And Cab Calloway jazzes up his band to sing “Reefer Man”:

 

                    "Man, what’s the matter with that cat there?"

                    "Must be full of reefer"

                    "Full of reefer?!"

                    "Yeah man"

                    "You mean that cat's high?!"

                    "Sailing"

                    "Sailing"

                    "Sailing lightly"

                    "Get away from here"

                    "Man, is that the reefer man?"

                    "That's the reefer man"

                    "I believe he's losing his mind"

                    "I think he's lost his mind!"

 

And that’s just the introduction.

      But the Prima donna of the show is Pangborn, nearly always in a tizzy, but also terribly titillated by Wong’s offer to show him something he’s never seen before. As Wong asks him to pull the blinds, the hotel manager gets almost giddy: “This is positively thrilling. I have gooseflesh all over. What are you going to show me doctor?” Even if he’s a bit disappointed at learning that what Wong really intends to reveal was “the four-day bicycle races,” from which the manager quickly bows out, we know that this sissy is at least up to enjoying life’s special pleasures, despite his inevitable frustration with what is tossed his way instead. When Burns confides, “I have a good mind to get a different nurse,” the manager quips, “Oh no no no no doctor, don’t do that, this one is different enough!”

      And difference, if nothing else, might be said to be what this film mostly offers up. Sterling Holloway dances as a loose-jointed sailor, “an ordinary mug,” with a yen for a “Chinese teacup,”  (Lona Andre) the lovely paintings of each suddenly breaking into pieces of a puzzle as they are suddenly seen to be held over a bevy of chlorines’ heads. Just a moment before, however, the sailor has finally leaped in the Chinese cup, presumably producing a very different kind of blend of the treasured substance. In the background, watching the show, is an Asian woman in the lesbian garb of black tuxedo, cigarette in a holder in her right hand.

      Pangborn in the midst of chaos, as he repeats three times to his rooftop audience, hopes just to present “pleasure” (“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces the next act, “for your pleasure we will present our dancing girls who will give you pleasure in a novelty number which I hope will give you pleasure” [italics mine]), but gets little return for all his fussy attempts to protect order. When near the end of the film chaos erupts once more in the lobby of the International Hotel, the front desk with walls of post boxes filled with keys again being threatened to topple, we can only imagine that he fears that the keys to what goes on behind all those bedroom doors will become mixed-up and lost forever, the different kinds of pleasures once available to become longer available to our eyes behind the locked doors. In near despair, the manager grabs the tottering wall and pulls it over, standing atop the check-in desk to cry out like a warrior mounting a hilltop with a flag: “Ahhh, I fooled that time, didn’t I?” having joined up with the chaos himself.

       Perhaps he fooled the censors as well since Pangborn outlived even Breen’s ban, playing his “Nervous Nellie” shopkeepers, hotel and theater managers, and salesmen throughout the 1940s and into the 50s, long after the Hays Committee declared homosexuals to be nonexistent. And in that sense, as Richard Barrios describes him, he was a kind of gay movie hero who was also, perhaps unknown to most, a real-life hero as well. As Boyd MacDonald put it in 1985:

 

                  It is not faintly surprising to anyone who knows the truth about the

                  military, as opposed to the Pentagon version, that Pangborn

                  was wounded in the Argonne in World War I, while such he-men

                  as John Wayne and Ronnie Regan performed their heroic

                  military acts exclusively on camera.

 

     International House is by no means a great movie, but its very existence makes clear that Hollywood writers, directors, and producers put up a good fight until the very end in the struggle against the Hays board’s censorship in a time which could no longer be described as “pre-code” since legions of humorless do-gooders were very actively establishing their code in opposition to the films being shown in 1932 and 1933. 1934 in comparison was a rather dreary year for US movies except for those films by filmmakers who had already moved on to another kind of code, a coding of their own creation.

 

Los Angeles, May 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).