Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

GrimPrecise I'll tell you why so serious

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

suesan629 But it is in beautiful Technicolor. That's the only bright aspect here.

classicsoncall You'll be giving this short the bird too, and yes, Charlie Chan Chase actually did say that to the film's hostess, Elissa Landi. This is really an embarrassing little flick with all sorts of racial stereotyping; given the era most of it's understandable but it's still painful to watch. Clark Gable, Joan Bennett and Joe E. Lewis all make brief cameos, they probably should have begged off. The setting is an East-Asian themed garden tea party, and the Oriental flavor is most evident in the brightly colored costumes of the dancers. There's a segment in which a host of Oriental ladies wearing very little make their appearance. I have a comment to make about that but it might get the old heave-ho here and I don't want to offend. Among the mostly talent-less performers, Anita May Wong is fairly entertaining with her song number, one of the brighter spots in this mercifully short offering.

Michael_Elliott 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.

charlytully The producers of THE GOOD EARTH d.v.d. apparently figured they needed something ELSE from 1937 to lighten the mood after the tear-jerking ending of the movie version of Pearl Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. While the color of this short contrasts nicely with the feature's black & white mode, the content is even more grating than the similar, albeit non-color, short from the MGM of 1937, SUN.DAY NIGHT AT THE TROCADERO. Where HO11YWOOD PARTY lacks major cast members of THE WIZARD OF OZ (TROCADERO had the Wiz himself, Frank Morgan), THE GOOD EARTH patriarch is played by Charley Grapewin, who'd become Dorothy Gale's "Uncle Henry" two years later. Furthermore, several snippets of incidental music from EARTH's score would be recycled into the OZ soundtrack. The other extra on the EARTH d.v.d., "Supreme Court of Films Picks the Champions Newsreel," is a poorly-edited mess (with NO title card help) from the Oscar Awards the year EARTH was eligible (a clip of Luise Rainer's brief acceptance speech for her award-winning portrayal of "O-Lan" is included).