Invitation to a Real "Hollywood Party”

Manawatu Times, Volume 59, Issue 248, 24 October 1934, Page 5

Invitation to a Real "Hollywood Party”

PICTURE THAT HAS ALMOST EVERYTHING IS BOOKED.

(Regent, Screening Saturday.)

Lilting music and gorgeous girls, hilarious comedy, spectacular settings and costumes, a few thrills, and a romance —these are the ingredients of which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has fashioned the much-talked-cf “Hollywood Party.”

Tho picture, a multi-star- extravaganza, brings to tho screen an entirely new form of entertainment, in that a a logical dramatic story, including a love romance, is shown, and into it are woven all the novelties of a musical show, each injected as an integral part of the drama itself.

The play deals with the plot of Jimmy Durante, playing “Schnarzan,” jungle star, to get lions for his picture from Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl). Tho real owners of tho lions show up in the persons of Laurel and Hardy, Jimmy’s rival, “Liondora,” comes to a party given for tho Baron, disguised as a grand duke, and plots with an oil millionaire (Charles Butterworth), to obtain tho lions.

, .So Jimmy vamps the oil man’s wife (Polly Moran) with unexpected results. Lupe Velez “crashes” the party for a hilarious scqucnco with Laurel and Hardy, who looso a lion and stampede the party, whereupon the great “Schnarzan” vanquishes tho big cat. Fifteen hundred of Hollywood’s most beautiful girl's, spectacular cellophane costumes, great settings, the remarkablo “Musical Wall’’ in which an orchestra is suspended in mid-air, and other spectacle abounds. The romance is between June Clyde and Eddie Quillan. The picture has another novelty in the appearance of the cartoon, Mickey Mouse, - with human actors, and a special “Silly Symphony” concocted by Walt Disney specially for this production. Among the musical numbers are the big “Hello” ensemble, in which a whole revue is staged in a single number; Frances Williams’ song with the “Singing Wires”; the spectacular “Musical Bar” with its beautiful girls; Jimmy Durante’s comical "Reincarnation”; “Hot Chocolate Soldier”, a number by Brown and Freed that is used for the Disney Symphony; “I’ve Had My Moments,” the love motif sung by Eddie Quillan and June Clyde, and others. Rodgers and Hart, Donaldson and Kahn, Brown and Freed are three song teams responsible for tho lilting harmonies of tho spectacle. “Shadow Marionettes” arc used in an astonishing scenic detail in “Hollywood Party,” in which gorgeous girls, colourful dance numbers and noted stars figure in a whirlwind romance with comedy.

Moving shadows on a wall, produced by a unique lighting process, provide a shifting, changing background in a sequence that is a vivid blend of story and musical spectacle. This is the idea used in a great glass and cellophane set depicting the welcome tendered by Jimmy Durante to Jack Pearl (Baron Munchausen) in a colourful episode in the reproduction of a star’s party in Hollywood.