Some Thoughts
The original title of Hollywood Party was The Hollywood Revue of 1933, which is an indicator of why the film is so chaotic. It was intended as another all-star revue (though few of the major stars made the final version), and has a nonsensical plot that was added in an unsuccessful attempt to give the picture coherence. Its production was interminable and it was a box office turkey.
Hollywood Party had at least eight directors, none of whom chose to have an onscreen credit. Indeed, all the technical credits are on a single card shown after the end of the picture, presumably in the hope that most of the audience would be filing out and not notice it.
Yet Hollywood Party is not the disaster all of that makes it sound. It contains much that is entertaining: Laurel and Hardy in a tit-for-tat escalation with Lupe Velez, directed by their former cinematographer, George Stevens; Charles Butterworth as Texas’s most unlikely oil magnate; the Three Stooges as autograph hunters; a production number with the orchestra arranged vertically up a high wall; Jimmy Durante and Polly Moran reining it in to good effect; and Durante’s real-life wife given the last line, a Pre-Code innuendo zinger.
Hollywood Party was the last time, at least for many years, that MGM would let a musical extravaganza get out of control, and is a testament to just how inept Harry Rapf could be as a producer. How could anyone think that Richard Boleslawsky, a director trained in the Stanislavskyan method, would be a good fit with Jimmy Durante?
Much that was shot for this film ended up on the editor’s floor, though British audiences saw a longer version than that which survives. The remaining production number, ‘Hollywood Party’, has a catchy song by Rodgers and Hart and good production values, but lacks the integrity of the stuff that Busby Berkely was doing over at Warner Bros.
The weirdest moment is probably when the party is crashed by Mickey Mouse, who presents a Disney Technicolor cartoon, ‘The Hot Choc-Late Soldiers’, featuring a Freed-Brown song that rips off their own ‘Wedding of the Painted Doll’. The cartoon is beautiful to look at, but tedious.
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