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<i>Hollywood Party</i>, Jimmy Durante, and the Cultural Politics of Coherence

2009; University of Texas Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vlt.0.0038

1542-4251

Allen Larson,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Hollywood Party, Jimmy Durante, and the Cultural Politics of Coherence Allen Larson In the opening scene of Hollywood Party (MGM, 1934) a movie mogul and theater-owner chat about business beneath a sidewalk marquee. The day's receipts are good because the current feature "is Garbo, you know," but the mogul boasts that his own upcoming release will draw even bigger crowds. As the men slip into the back of the theater auditorium to catch the audience reaction to the preview trailer for the mogul's new movie, Greta Garbo's indelible final Queen Christina, close-up fills a diegetically framed movie screen. Most of MGM's major stars have actual cameos in Hollywood Party, but this is Garbo's—a gesture that perfectly signals the Garbo mystique as her cinematic incarnation is inscribed with the full force of materiality in its own right.1 Although Roland Barthes, when writing of Queen Christina, perhaps too sweepingly took her as the marker of a lost epoch, "that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest of ecstasy" he testified eloquently, in taking the bait, to the lasting magnitude of her image (56). Never merely representative of Hollywood stardom, Garbo was always, as she is here, the "Divine" set against her worldly counterparts; "the face of Garbo" metonymizes cinema in its most idealized (mis)remembrances. And it is as such that she functions for this brief moment in Hollywood Party before she's jarringly displaced by the image of Jimmy Durante plopping to the ground from a vine—in a loin cloth, with billowing tufts of artificial body hair pasted to his modest physique—as graphic text announces the forthcoming adventures of "the mighty monarch of the mudlands," Schnarzan the Conqueror. In the guise of jungle movie star Schnarzan/Durante vigorously pounds his chest with both fists. But instead of a hearty trill of thumps, we hear hollow timpani beats. Schnarzan then tries to let out a version of the famous yodel. Instead, the soundtrack offers up something more like the moan of a mangled, asthmatic trumpet. As Hollywood Party's jungle movie trailer unfolds from the establishing proscenium shot to an unframed occupation of the entire filmic space, playing as an uninterrupted internal text without reaction shots or framing visual cues to remind us of its status as a "film-within-a-film," gag comedy conventions blend with classic burlesque traditions of more nuanced and sophisticated formal parody, building upon the initial juxtaposition of Durante's meager and artificially hirsute frame against the cultural referent of the highly eroticized presentation of Johnny Weissmuller's smooth, and glaringly white, Olympian muscularity in the MGM series of Tarzan feature films. The sequence does not simply allude to but literally appropriates (and "samples") its object of scrutiny as stock jungle footage—probably the same stock footage that MGM recycled in Tarzan the Ape-Man (1932) from W. S. Van Dyke's epic African shoot for Trader Horn (1931)—is intercut with scenes imitating the style and mise-en-scène of the Tarzan films. Spying a raging lion in swift pursuit of a fleeing woman (Lupe Velez as "Jane"), Schnarzan runs to the rescue and does battle with the lion to save her. But the edits in the action sequence foreground rather than disguise discontinuity, making a joke of the expected illusion. The stand-in trainer we see "attacked" by the lion is obviously not Durante (the lack of the prosthetic chest hair is, if nothing else, the visible sign of this), and the lion draped upon Schnarzan/Durante's shoulder in the subsequent close-up is clearly an inanimate prop, suspiciously void of any apparent movement—just as a stand-in trainer, not Weissmuller, performed the lion wrestling in Tarzan the Ape Man, and just as a circus performer stunt man did that film's spectacular vine swinging. Complementing the way gag humor first calls attention to the fictive construction of cinematic sound, formal parody foregrounds the mechanical structure of visual illusion, placing the very terms of cinematic address in question in the opening moments of the film. [End Page 11] Despite the intriguing appeal of this...