HOLLYWOOD PARTY: while Mayer's away the employees will play

This 1934 feature from MGM is really bizarre. It's part Busby Berkeley-style musical, part

Marx Brothers-wannabe comedy and 100% a shambles.
If HOLLYWOOD PARTY had been made 30 years later I would have assumed it was the product of a bad acid trip but as this pre-dates LSD by a good couple of decades and was produced by MGM, a studio not given to committing hallucinations to celluloid, I'm at a loss to understand how the film ever came to be made.
Given the studio's emphasis on class, style and family entertainment I have to imagine that studio head Louis B. Mayer and production chief Irving Thalberg were out of town and unreachable by phone, telegram or carrier pigeon while shooting took place because I can't conceive of the circumstances in which they would have given their approval.   
In what starts out as a spoof on MGM's 'Tarzan' movies, Jimmy Durante stars as Schnarzan the Conqueror, looking to revitalise his flagging jungle man franchise by purchasing a pride of genuinely wild lions to wrestle in his next movie. To persuade their owner to do the deal Durante throws a lavish party in his honour inviting everyone who's anyone in Hollywood although, with the exception of cameos by Robert Young and The Three Stooges in the days before they were the Three Stooges, no actual film stars turn up.
Instead we're forced to make do with a motley bunch of charisma-free C and D list entertainers now mercifully forgotten by history who are lavished by more screen time than they could ever possibly deserve.
Eddie Quillan (a man in desperate need of some serious orthodentistry) and the impressively plain June Clyde fail to strike a single plausible spark as a young couple trilling their new love to each other, while Durante goes all Groucho Marx in some leaden routines with Polly Moran as an ersatz Margaret Dumont. The 'humour' is punctuated by some sub-Busby Berkeley dance numbers which earn a little credit for creativity if not style, and a Walt Disney cartoon, introduced by Mickey Mouse, which seems to exists for no other reason than MGM had a distribution deal with Disney.

Then, just when you think it can't get anymore weird Laurel and Hardy show up, playing themselves and go rather listlessly through some of their more well-worn routines at what feels like half speed. I'm an L & H fan from way back, and their appearance was my sole motivation for watching the film, but I can't pretend I enjoyed it. It's not that they're bad but they're out of their element and their comedy just doesn't mesh with the semi-surrealism of the surroundings. Their sequence with Lupe Velez lacks any of the life which makes their 1930s shorts for Hal Roach such a joy to watch regardless of how many times I've seen them.
Tellingly, the end credits fail to identify a director for this farrago, although according to IMDb no less than 8 directors made a contribution including some of the biggest names of the era. Presumably their agents were more effective in keeping their names off the finished product than Mayer and Thalberg were in preventing its release.