After a psychic predicts his death, a small-time hoodlum named Julian hires a cheap documentary film crew to document the last few days of his mis-spent life. This is the film that pioneered the show of the same name.
Arbuckle escapes the watch of his domineering wife and heads for Coney Island. Keaton arrives that same day with his attractive, and rather easy, girlfriend, who is immediately stolen from him by St. John.
A young golfer is mugged by an escaped convict and finds himself in a prison where he foils a jailbreak.
Told in flashback, Depression-era bum Dan McGinty is recruited by the city's political machine to help with vote fraud. His great aptitude for this brings rapid promotion from "the boss," who finally decides he'd be ideal as a new, nominally "reform" mayor; but this candidacy requires marriage. His in-name-only marriage to honest Catherine proves the beginning of the end for dishonest Dan...
Kalora is the "slim princess of Morevana," a land in which fat is prized. This distresses her family, who must marry off Kalora, before her rotund younger sister Papova may wed. To remedy this situation, Kalora's father, the governor general, throws a garden party and disguises his slim daughter in an inflated rubber suit. All goes well until the suit ruptures, deflating Kalora to her normal size....
Alec Lloyd, the foreman of the Sewell ranch, is nicknamed "Cupid" because of his propensity for matchmaking. When Macie Sewell returns from boarding school, Cupid himself falls victim to love, but Macie has aspirations to go to New York and become an opera singer, and so ignores his advances. However, Leroy Simpson, a poor doctor who is enamored of Macie's father's money, encourages her ambitions....
The story takes place in Monte Carlo, where the impoverished Julian proposes marriage to the wealthy Dora, only to be turned down by the girl's mercenary mother. Several years later, Julian manages not only to obtain a huge fortune, but also a prominent position in the British diplomatic service. Now a suitable husband for Dora, Julian marries the girl. Alas, their happiness is short-lived.
Mammy Two-Shoes threatens to throw Tom out of the house if he makes a mess. Jerry sees an opportunity to rid himself of his feline nemesis.
Mammy Two-Shoes tells Tom and Butch that the cat who gets rid of the icebox-raiding, breadbox-invading mouse (Jerry) is the one who can stay.
The seven short films making up GENIUS PARTY couldn’t be more diverse, linked only by a high standard of quality and inspiration. Atsuko Fukushima’s intro piece is a fantastic abstraction to soak up with the eyes. Masaaki Yuasa, of MIND GAME and CAT SOUP fame, brings his distinctive and deceptively simple graphic style and dream-state logic to the table with “Happy Machine,” his spin on a child’s earliest year. Shinji Kimura’s spookier “Deathtic 4,” meanwhile, seems to tap into the creepier corners of a child’s imagination and open up a toybox full of dark delights. Hideki Futamura’s “Limit Cycle” conjures up a vision of virtual reality, while Yuji Fukuyama’s "Doorbell" and "Baby Blue" by Shinichiro Watanabe use understated realism for very surreal purposes. And Shoji Kawamori, with “Shanghai Dragon,” takes the tropes and conventions of traditional anime out for very fun joyride.
A pawn shop employee must substitute for a robot in this short silent comedy.
Oswald the Rabbit enters an airplane race with a makeshift aircraft and ends up riding a dachshund lifted into the air by balloons. Meanwhile, his peg-legged rival tries to cheat his way to victory.
Oswald's country is at war, like many other volunters he joins the army and finds himself soon in the trenches. A short battle leaves him wounded, but at least in the field hospital where his girlfriend is working.
Jerry runs into a dog pound (and right on top of a napping Spike) to escape a rather mangy-looking Tom. To avoid being ripped to shreds, Tom borrows the head of a nearby dog statue. This easily fools the dogs, but not Jerry, and Tom keeps losing his newfound head...
Tom enters from stage left in white tie and tails, sits at the piano, gets his focus as the orchestra in the pit beneath him warms up, and begins to play Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody". Unbeknownst to Tom and the audience, Jerry is asleep across several of the high-note keys inside the instrument, so Tom's playing eventually wakes him. Jerry is pummeled by hammers, bounced by wires, and squeezed by Tom as the cat tries to play the concerto while dispensing with Jerry. Jerry's defensive antics add to the brio of the program and answer Tom with Jerry's own skillful musical attack. By the concerto's end, the duet leaves only one animal standing for the audience's applause.
Tom ties up Spike and sneaks into the courtyard of the glamorous Toodles Galore with his bass, hoping to woo her with his song, much to the annoyance of a sleeping Jerry.
Jerry crashes a vase onto Tom's head, which gets Mammy to throw Tom out. Jerry at first revels in his freedom, but soon tires of this, and, under a flag of truce, hatches a plan with Tom.
A sequel of sorts, the Jewish ethnic comedy characters of Potash and Perlmutter return from their 1923 debut film, also produced by Goldwyn, but with a different actor for Potash.
At a Florida hotel, absconding miscreant J. Effingham Bellweather goes slapstick golfing with the house detective's flirtatious wife and an incompetent caddy.
Buster clowns around in a blacksmith's shop until he and the smithy get in a fight which sends the smithy to jail. Buster helps several customers with horses, then destroys a Rolls Royce while fixing the car parked next to it.