Hollywood Party *** (1934, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jimmy Durante, Lupe Velez, Mickey Mouse, The Three Stooges) – Classic Movie Review 7449

Take almost the entire MGM comedy team (Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Jimmy Durante, Lupe Velez, and The Three Stooges), throw them into an all-star film in which virtually every comedy director on the lot had a hand (well, eight directors, actually), and you come up with this messy concoction over-rich in comedians. But, still, it is fun, and it is simply worthwhile for the vintage performers.

Jimmy Durante plays jungle adventure-movie star Schnarzan the Conqueror, who gives a party for his animal discoverer Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl), who has arrived with real man-eating lions. Schnarzan falls asleep while waiting for his wife (Durante’s real-life wife Jean Durante) to get dressed for the party, and then dreams the rest of the action, with Laurel and Hardy finally turning up as the owners of his lion. This wrap-around of beginning and ending framing sequences was an afterthought by the final director Allan Dwan (additional sequences, uncredited) to try to bind together a movie with almost no connecting narrative.

Occasional amusing scenes such as Stan and Ollie battling The Jaguar Woman (‘Mexican Spitfire’ Velez) keep up the level of comedy interest, and the songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Gus Kahn and Arthur Freed aren’t bad either, but the result falls short of the potential.

Hollywood Party is shot in black and white, but with a Technicolor animated sequence, featuring Disney’s Mickey Mouse.

Moe Howard, Curly Howard and Larry Fine are of course The Three Stooges.

Also in the cast are Charles Butterworth, Eddie Quillan, Ted Healy, Polly Moran, Jean Durante, Frances Williams, Robert Young, Tom Kennedy, Ben Bard, Richard Carle, George Givot, Eddie Quillan, Jack Pearl, June Clyde, Leonid Kinskey, Tom Herbert, Tom London, Jed Prouty and Harry Barris.

Hollywood Party is directed by Richard Boleslawski, Allan Dwan, Roy Rowland, George Stevens, Edmund Goulding, Russell Mack, Charles Reisner and Sam Wood, runs 68 minutes, is made and released by MGM, and is written by Howard Dietz (screenplay) and Arthur Kober (screenplay), as well as Richy Craig Jr, Herbert Fields, Edmund Goulding, Henry Myers and Edgar Allan Woolf.

Laurel and Hardy recycle their tit-for-tat egg-breaking sequence in The Bullfighters (1945).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7449

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