International House is a 1933 American pre-Code comedy film starring Peggy Hopkins Joyce and W. C. Fields, directed by A. Edward Sutherland and released by Paramount Pictures.
At International House, a large hotel in metropolitan Wuhu, China Chinese inventor Dr. Wong (Edmund Breese) is soliciting bids for the rights to his "radioscope", a kind of television.
Prof. Henry R. Quail (W. C. Fields) is one of many people from around the world converging on the hotel, though he is one of the few not hoping to buy (or steal) Dr. Wong's invention, as he was intending to land in Kansas City in his autogyro but flew off course.
Dr. Wong is particularly eager to look in on a six-day indoor bicycle race in New York, but instead somehow brings in performances by popular crooner Rudy Vallée, bandleader-vocalist Cab Calloway, and precocious torch singer Baby Rose Marie, and comedians Stoopnagle and Budd.
Ultimately, Tommy wins both the rights to the radioscope and his sweetheart, and Peggy Hopkins Joyce, having learned that Prof. Quail is a millionaire, quickly attaches herself to her next sugar daddy.
Her many affairs with and several marriages to wealthy older men earned her millions, and in the film she makes several humorous references to her profitable divorces, a topic that would become almost completely off-limits with enforcement of the Code.
Hearing the city's name, W. C. Fields, as Professor Quail, responds to what he mistakes as homosexual flirting with "Don't let the posy fool you", referring to his own boutonniere, which he plucks out and tosses away.
On March 10, 1933, an earthquake occurred during production, and a Paramount newsreel featured what was presented as footage of cast members on the set reacting as it struck.
A fourth Robin-Rainger song, "Look What I've Got", originally featured in the slightly earlier film A Bedtime Story, is heard as an instrumental, supposedly played by "Ah Phooey and His Manly Mandarins" in a broadcast from a radio station that calls itself "The Voice of Long Tung"; it provides the musical accompaniment for an otherwise silent he-and-she undressing scene.