The Christmas Party

Jackie Cooper wheedles his mother into letting his football team come over for a party. The numbers keep growing, so. he heads to the studio and talks Norma Shearer into wheedling Louis B. Mayer into letting them throw it at the studio. So there they are on Sound Stage 2, with Jimmy Durante as Santa, Wallace Beery as the chef, and other MGM players as waiters.

It's the showing off of MGM players that is the point of this short, too, and it's done with some good humor and technical panache, including a long tracking shot as Cooper rushes through the studio gates and over to Miss Shearer's dressing room. It's a very pleasant holiday short.

This hard-to-find little film was MGM's Christmas Short Subject for 1931 and it's a lot of fun for old movie buffs.

The plot (Jackie Cooper wants to give a Christmas dinner to his neighborhood pals and his friends at the studio lend a hand) is a mere contrivance to show as many of MGM's top talent as possible in 9 minutes. Norma Shearer - as Thalberg's wife she was Queen of the Lot - gets the most screen time. The enjoyment is in trying to put the correct moniker to all the others as they appear - most for only a few seconds.

In order of their appearance, here is a complete listing of the uncredited celebrities: Jackie Cooper, Norma Shearer, Jimmy Durante (dressed as Santa), Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery, Polly Moran, Reginald Denny, Clark Gable, Charlotte Greenwood, Lionel Barrymore, Leila Hyams, Cliff Edwards, Ramon Novarro, Marion Davies, and Anita Page.

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Often overlooked or neglected today, the one and two-reel short subjects were useful to the Studios as important training grounds for new or burgeoning talents, both in front & behind the camera. The dynamics for creating a successful short subject was completely different from that of a feature length film, something akin to writing a topnotch short story rather than a novel. Economical to produce in terms of both budget & schedule and capable of portraying a wide range of material, short subjects were the perfect complement to the Studios' feature films.

When this short film begins, Jackie Cooper arrives home after his team won the football game. He asks his kind of grouchy mother if he can have the team over for a Christmas party and she reluctantly agrees. But soon kids start inviting ALL their friends and it looks like the party might be a disaster. When Jackie realizes what's happened, he asks Norma Shearer to help him and soon all the swell folks at MGM are throwing the kids a nice party. Included among the cameos are Clark Gable, Polly Moran, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler, Marion Davies, Lionel Barrymore, Ramon Novarro, Cliff Edwards, Charlotte Greenwood (and her long and wiggly legs) and quite a few others.

The film is a totally staged but enjoyable film. I truly doubt these movie folks would routinely throw parties for kids...especially Wallace Beery, who Cooper described as a complete creep in his autobiography. So, it's a film you can enjoy...provided you really don't take the story very seriously. I liked seeing all the cameos and like it despite it being incredibly phony.

MGM used young Jackie Cooper to hold a party for a big bunch of his friends. Then it paraded more than a dozen of its major stars of the day as wait staff to serve the kids. Cooper appeals to Norma Shearer to help get a place big enough and she says she'll talk to Mr. Mayer (that would be Louie B. - Louis, pronounced as the French do).

Well, about 50 kids, 7-10 years old pack Sound Stage No. 2 for this nine-minute short. Among the stars pitching in for the party are Marie Dressler, Wallace Beery and Polly Moran in chefs hats serving at a long buffet steam table. Clark Gable serves a couple of boys at their table. Charlotte Greenwood serves milk to several girls. Lionel Barrymore serves some boys hot biscuits, and Ramon Navarro takes food requests from a couple of kids. A very young and hardly recognizable Bette Davis serves some girls, and Jimmy Durante is dressed as Santa Clause and passes out goodies.

This was an MGM Christmas card promo that it packaged with one or more feature films it released before the 1931 Christmas season. It's short on script and dialog, but has lots of MGM mugs of the day.

1931 was quite a year for Jackie Cooper. He began it while still a member of Hal Roach's Rascals (a.k.a Our Gang) before then filming Skippy for his uncle Norman Taurog at Paramount. After that film's success, Roach then sold Cooper's contract to his distributor M-G-M so he could do features there starting with The Champ which was also a success. So that probably got the powers-that-be there to make a promotional short featuring their now-hot child star and surrounding him with many of the studio's other adult stars in a holiday greeting meant to wow the theatrical audience with all the celebs in the studio's roster at the time. What I saw was quite amusing if not hilarious with whoever I recognized turning up at Jackie's "party" like Clark Gable, and, oh, let's not forget Norma Shearer who seems to have an "in" with Mr. Mayer but then, she was married to his second-in-command, Irving Thalberg, at the time. So on that note, The Christmas Party is worth a look for anyone curious about these things.