Animal Crackers

Animal Crackers
August 28, 1930
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
B

The trailer says this is ten times funnier than The Cocoanuts.  (Joe Adamson would say five times.)  Of course, the trailer also says that the Marx Brothers were the four funniest men on earth!  Still, there's no question that this is an improvement over the first movie, in every regard.  Yes, it's funnier, including some now famous lines, like "How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know."  Everyone, even Margaret Dumont,  seems more relaxed, and Groucho is starting to really zing people, as well as break the fourth wall (as when he apologizes for one joke).  Harpo and Chico get more musical numbers, sometimes with Groucho wisecracking during.  There are no long, drawn-out numbers by other people.  The "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" song is far better than anything in Cocoanuts, and not surprisingly became Groucho's theme song on You Bet Your Life.

Even the romantic couple are a huge improvement, particularly absolutely charming Lillian Roth.  What other '30s ingenue could get away with lines like "What would you suggest, Mom?  Suicide?" and "We'll be married and divorced in no time"?  Or catch her saying that it might turn out that her boyfriend really is a good artist after all.

What does this movie title mean?  Well, Captain Jeffrey/Geoffrey Spaulding (his name is spelled differently in the opening credits than in the newspaper story) is the famous African explorer and hunter, "bagging tigers" and catching elephants.  While there's often a borderline racism in Marx Brothers movies, I give this one a pass because when he comes in carried by tribal bearers, you just know he hired them somewhere in the city before heading out to Long Island, just so he could make a fabulous entrance, playing off the prejudices of Mrs. Rittenhouse and her guests.  Even the line about the undeveloped pictures of native girls I think of more as an example of getting something past the not-yet-strictly enforced Production Code.  (In Cocoanuts, he offered Mrs. Potter [Dumont] "snappy necking," and here Roth sings about petting!)

There are some weak spots, notably the boxing match and bridge game that Harpo and Chico have with Mrs. Rittenhouse and her frenemy, but overall it's a solid movie.  Speaking of solid, Robert Greig, who plays the plump butler here, will return in Horse Feathers.

For the second movie in a row, Zeppo is playing a character named Jamison.  There are other things that are carried over, not yet (on film anyway) stale routines, among them a lot of Harpo and Chico's physical humor, like their fights, and Harpo giving people his leg.  A joke or two of Groucho's is repeated, like the one about Dumont's character being close to retirement.  But the movie is surprisingly fresh and "modern" (there's a reference to Frigidaire, and Groucho spoofs Eugene O'Neill), while still definitely a 1920s story in early '30s form.  (Again, based on a play.)

The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts [sic]
August 3, 1929
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
C+

The first Marx Brothers movie is slow, awkward, and of course stagy, but hey, it's the first Marx Brothers movie.   So it's at least of historical interest.  Based on their smash hit stage play of a few years earlier, it shows the Marxes and everyone trying to adapt to the very early days of sound.  The dance numbers are pretty bad and seem to go on forever.  The many, many reprises of Irving Berlin's "When My Dreams Come True" feel less necessary each time.  And some of the dialogue, even Groucho's, feels parceled out.  Not till the wedding speeches section, with Harpo hilariously getting annoyed and then drunk, as Groucho undercuts everyone including himself, does it feel like the timing works.  It is fun to see Groucho first (on film) insulting the imposing Margaret Dumont (so stodgy in this one, she carries a monocle and seldom smiles), but the only line that has real spin on it is when she says she likes the color scheme of his outfit, and he says, "It's not a scheme, it's a conspiracy!"

Meanwhile the romantic couple (with a man who looks like he could be a young Richard Nixon) and the villainous couple dream and scheme.  Harpo and Chico don't show up till almost twenty minutes in, but Groucho perks up then, and eggs on Harpo eating anything he likes in the lobby, including a telephone.  Groucho also of course verbally battles Chico, at one point calling him "Einstein."  The movie is VERY 1920s, definitely a product of another time, a time that reveled in its modernness, with the heroine dancing and showing her underwear to the crowd, and the villainess smoking cigarettes.  Chico not only, of course, plays an Italian, but he makes ethnic jokes about Jews and "Polacks."  As for Zeppo, well, he smiles a lot.

Is the movie funny?  Yes, sometimes even deliberately.

With the Paramount Marx Brothers movies, you always want to know not only why a duck, but why this title?  Well, I guess it's the Florida setting, palm trees and all (even if represented by New York indoor sets), but apparently no one knew how to spell "coconuts."  Donny & Marie would know better fifty years later.

Introduction

Welcome, My Friends!  Pull up a seat, grab some popcorn and other noms!  We're going to travel through what will be about 85 years of my movie collection, 1929 to 2013 and hopefully beyond.  That's right, I don't own any silent movies.  (I generally get fidgety when there's no dialogue, although there are exceptions.)  We'll start with the Marx Brothers Paramount movies, which is appropriate because they're probably the first old movies I enjoyed as a kid in the 1970s.

But first, a few words about this blog.  Each entry will have the format
Title
Release date
Studio
Genre(s)
Format (at this point, VHS or DVD, but I'm not ruling out Blue-Ray)
Grade (F- to A+ hypothetically)
Review

Performers, directors, writers, and other contributors will be tagged if I think they're significant.  The films will be in chronological order of release date, as much as possible.  (Bless you, IMDB!)  The "reviewing" is both giving my opinion and viewing again.

OK, roll 'em!