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and the director persuaded Vallee that the scene was harmless.
"I wasn't really convinced myself," says Sutherland, "but we had to get on with the picture."
So, granted a free hand, Fields walked into a room where a television set was turned on, saw Vallee singing on the screen, and without hesitation pulled out a revolver and shot him, the crooner falling dead instantly. It was the first television joke of a kind that is still going strong.
All his life Fields saw depths of humor in the Chinese that many others missed; he was pleased that International House had a Chinese locale. It was his custom, in the Hollywood days, to address one of his girl friends as "the Chinaman" and to clothe her in a Chinese costume. She still views his motives as obscure, but the sight of her padding along in satin slippers and a split black skirt awoke in him some immensely satisfying inner hilarity. He romped through the Chinese sets of International House as though he were involved in an authentic Cook's tour of the country. In an elaborate Shanghai restaurant, occidental in tone, he studied the menu at a dinner party and told the waiter, with traveled familiarity, that he'd have "a bird's nest and a couple of hundred-yearold eggs boiled in perfume." The waiter nodded, as if he had made a wise choice, and duly noted the order on his pad. In this movie, fired upon by ruffians, Fields leaned out of a window and delivered a sarcasm that became, for a few years, a popular blanket denunciation.
"Can't hit a moving target, hey?" he said; then, outside the house and beleaguered by enemies approaching from opposite directions, he spread the barrels of a double-barreled shotgun and felled them with a single, epic blast.
On the strength of International House, which appeared in 1932, Paramount signed him to a long-term contract, but his signature was obtained only after vexatious snags had developed.
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