This chaotic mess of a film took over a year to complete, with eight directors (including Richard Boleslawki, Allan Dwan, Edmund Goulding, Russell Mack, Chuck Reisner, Roy Rowland, Sam Wood, and George Stevens) taking turns at the helm. Jimmy Durante plays as a Tarzan-like jungle movie star who throws a big party in order to convince Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl) to let him use his real lions in his next picture and add some real thrills to it for a change. Polly Moran, Charles Butterworth, Eddie Quillan and June Clyde are among the cast who appear in the various scattered threads of the plot, which is peppered with cameos by Robert Young, The Three Stooges, and even Mickey Mouse, in an animated sequence provided by Walt Disney. Incredibly, the whole thing was shot by the great James Wong Howe, whose talents were certainly wasted here.
Laurel and Hardy steal the picture when they show up toward the end to deliver the lions, and quickly become engaged in an egg-breaking battle of tit-for-tat with Lupe Velez. This sequence, the highlight of the film, was directed by their old cameraman George Stevens, whose masterful handling of comedy is evident in giving Velez and The Boys room to perform the routine without any unnecessary intrusions. It says so much about Laurel and Hardy's incredible gifts for comedy that they could do more with a little scene like this than MGM could with all of its mighty resources poured into the film.
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