A Long Way to Go for Pussy, Dept.

Above, you see "Baby" Rose Marie performing her number in International House (1933).

Yes, that Rose Marie.  Thirty years before she played Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show, she was a child star on the radio.  By the time she made this appearance at the age of 10, she'd already been in show biz for seven years.

This film is quite excellent for a number of reasons.

• W.C. Fields is as anarchic and acerbic as one could imagine as the bibulous professor who lands in Wuhu, China ("Woo-hoo!") in his auto-gyro and asks if he's in Kansas City, Missouri, or Kansas City, Kansas.
• Peggy Hopkins Joyce, best known IRL as a multihusband homewrecker, golddigger and sexpot immortalized by Cole Porter in a number of songs, stars as herself and is featured in an involved setup at the film's end in which she keeps claiming to be uncomfortably sitting on something in Fields' car that ends up being a cat just so Fields can say, "You were sitting on a pussy."
• Sterling Holloway, best known to modern audiences as the original voice of Winnie the Pooh, does an eccentric dance routine in a musical number about a Chinese teacup (white girl in yellowface) and a coffee "mug" (Holloway) that rips off Busby Berkeley's penchant for crotch shots of scantily clad dancers.
• Cab Calloway performs "Reefer Man," itself worth the price of admission: [bass player furiously plucks at his instrument; Cab speaks] "What's the matter with this cat here?!" "He's high!" "What do you mean, he's high?!"  "Full'a weed!"  "Full of weed?!"  "Yeah!" "Who is this cat anyway?!"  "The reefer man!"  "The reefer man?!" "Yeah!" "Well, look at that dog, he looks like he's losing his mind!"
• Burns and Allen are Burns and Allen.  One of the more surreal double acts in American entertainment.
• Franklin Pangborn plays the wilting, glowering pansy for which he is best known.
• Peggy Hopkins Joyce's pussy aside, there's plenty of pre-Code humor here.
• Rudy Vallee sings a love song to his megaphone.
• Bela Lugosi, in a rare comedy role, plays a Russian who's murderously jealous of anyone paying attention to Hopkins Joyce.
• Radio comedy team Stoopnagle and Budd appear in their only feature film.  Okay, that's pretty obscure, but meaningful to OTR fans.

Why it's set in Wuhu, a real city in Anhui province, I cannot say except that it sets up a "Who's on First?"-type exchange: "Where am I?" "Wuhu." "Woo-hoo to you, but where am I?"  The whole film leans on the flimsiest of reeds: a Chinese inventor (Edmund Breese in yellowface) invents a TV-like device to which all these characters want to buy the rights.  This device is the medium by which all the music acts, except Holloway's, are "televised" in this Chinese hotel.

In sum, it's brilliant. They don't--and can't--make 'em like this any more.  And the director, Edward Sutherland, was Louise Brooks' first husband.  So, really, I can't sell it any harder than I already have.