Northwest Film Forum

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 era—rarely matched in subsequent decades—owes 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 Bodies—fiends 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.

Preservation funding provided for Busy Bodies by Turner Classic Movies, Jeff Joseph/SabuCat, the Packard Humanities Institute, and the Laurel & Hardy Preservation Fund, including the support of many Sons Of The Desert Tents, and in honor of National Film Preserve: Tom Luddy, Gary Meyer and Julie Huntsinger.

• You can see three films at a discount in our Comedy Gold Double Feature on November 10: $9/Members, $14/Seniors, $20/General Admission. Buy a pass>>