Hollywood Party

Hollywood Party (1937)

* (out of 4)

One hopes a real Hollywood party wasn't as boring as this mess of a short from MGM. The main reason to tune in is the three-strip Technicolor, which was just starting out. In the film Charley Chase and Elissa Landi are introducing various music acts and a few Hollywood A-listers with it all set to a Chinese theme. The Chinese theme also means Chase slanting his eyes, wearing some funny facial hair and throwing around rather stereotypical slang. The movie, no matter how you look at it, is a real embarrassment and one can't help but feel bad for Chase, a veteran of over 250 films, for having to appear in it as MGM certainly didn't do him any favors. The biggest problem is that the film never knows what it wants to be. It starts off appearing to just want to make fun of Chinese customs. It then turns into a music and features some very bad songs. It then tries to be a fashion show, which is fails at miserably even though we see some nearly naked women, which makes one wonder how this got passed by the Hayes Office. Everything this film tries it fails at and the cameos by Joe E. Brown, Anna May Wong, Freddie Bartholomew, Joan Bennett and Clark Gable can't help.