A Day at the Races

A Day at the Races
June 11, 1937
MGM
Comedy, Musical
VHS
C+

Once again, as in A Night at the Opera, Sam Wood directs, Allan Jones is the male romantic lead, Sig Ruman and his beard are mocked by Groucho, and Kaufman, Pirosh, Seaton, and Boasberg worked on the script.  This time, Maureen O'Sullivan is the female romantic lead, and she's more appealing than anyone since Lillian Roth.  Also, the movie doesn't suffer the over-inflated reputation of its immediate predecessor.  So in a way, I have a softer spot for it than I do for Night, but I will admit that it's just not as good a movie.

It starts out all right, and for awhile I was thinking of giving it a B-, like Night.  The brothers all have their moments, Chico especially in the "tootsie-frootsing" of Groucho and in his Jew-does-Italian-does-Irish house detective disguise, Harpo during his medical exam (I like how he "shouts" aah), and of course Groucho, especially when he's dancing.  Margaret Dumont actually shows a range of emotion (from A to C) for a change, although she's not given enough to do with Groucho.  Yes, the Water Carnival sequence is far too long (the entire movie is about double the length of Thank You, Jeeves!), but Chico and Harpo again have some nice musical moments.

Then around the 80- or 90-minute mark (I wasn't watching the clock, and my VCR doesn't have the time points), things start to sour.  We get another down-on-their-luck sequence, this time with the Brothers and the romantic couple picking up their spirits by hanging out in Shantytown, where the local Negroes salute a flute-playing Harpo as Gabriel, as in the angel.  (It might make sense if he were playing a horn.)  It is the best musical sequence but is marred by disjointedness (it can't decide if it's a medley or a jam session) and of course racism.  While the singers and dancers are undeniably talented-- one of them, Etta Moten, also sang in Flying Down to Rio-- their exaggerated facial expressions, especially eye-rolling, will probably have you rolling your own eyes, in disbelief or disgust.  And then the whole undercutting of the big horse race near the end goes on far too long, paling in comparison to the football sequence in Horse Feathers, which was itself far from their best filmic climax.  The very ending of this film, with the characters singing bits of songs (including one of Groucho's that was foolishly edited out) and Groucho actually sounding sincere as he proposes to Dumont, isn't bad but it's too little too late.  Results, the Brothers' worst movie since The Cocoanuts, although still watchable in bits and pieces.

Frankie Darro, "Frankie" from Phantom Empire, appears as the rival jockey.  Marx and/or Fields regulars Edith Kingdon, Edward LeSaint, Edmund Mortimer, Frank O'Connor, and Cyril Ring have small roles.  Esther Muir, who appears as "Flo," would have a small part in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, as would musician Jack George and doctor Max Lucke.  Billy Dooley would go on to The Double Wedding, Lee Murray to The Wizard of Oz, Jack Kenny to You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, Vangie Beilby to The Bank Dick, Ray Flynn and Field Norton to Citizen Kane, Robert Middlemass and Buck Woods to The Road to Zanzibar, Victor Potel to Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Helen Dickson and Arthur Stuart Hull to It's a Wonderful Life, Florence Wix to High Society, and Harry Wilson to Some Like It Hot.  Furthermore, Kenny Baker, who would be Jones's counterpart in At the Circus, pops up here as a party guest, as does Carl M. Leviness, who has a much smaller role than Baker's in Circus.

A Night at the Opera

A Night at the Opera
November 15, 1935
MGM
Comedy, Musical
VHS
B-

Today's tale:  So the Marx Brothers went to MGM, and "genius" Irving Thalberg said, "Women don't like your movies.  You need more sappy romance, boring songs, and, oh yeah, temporary defeat."  They listened to him and had a hit movie again.  The End.

OK, there's a bit more to it than that, but that's basically the story on how this film came to be, and how, after Thalberg's death, the formula was beat into the ground until we got, well, The Big Store (1941).  At least here they had good writers, not just Marx veterans Kaufman and Riskind, Kalmar and Ruby, but newcomers Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, and Al Boasberg, who would return for A Day at the Races.  I'm not tagging the newbies, because I reached the label limit for this post.  But, yes, Buster Keaton, then down on his luck, also contributed.  The writing, especially Groucho's wisecracks, is amusing some of the time, without the highs or lows of Monkey Business (its nearest equal so far).  Despite the Code, Groucho still gets some suggestive lines, not just the censored-by-individual-states reply to "Otis, do you have everything?" ("I haven't had any complaints yet"), but one about Mrs. Claypool (good ol' Dumont) not yet having  experienced his "services."  There is too much of Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones as the romantic couple, but, hey, they're much better than the pair in The Cocoanuts.  (Or the one in Roberta for that matter.)  And, yes, the songs, not just the opera, are boring, but I like Chico at the piano (an instrumental of the "All I Do Is Dream of You" song Debbie Reynolds sings in Singing in the Rain) and Harpo at the, yeah, harp (sounding a bit proto-Pet Sounds, believe it or not).

Alex Chivra and Frances Maran were in Flying Down to Rio.  Stanley Blystone, the television operator in Phantom Empire, is a ship's officer here.  A couple of the Fields folk appear, George Irving and Jerry Mandy.  Mario Dominici and Leo Sulky were in Duck Soup.  Edmund Mortimer was in both FDtR and Soup.  Allan Jones, Sig Ruman, and extras Edna Bennett, Ruth Cherrington, Field Norton, and Phillips Smalley would be back in A Day at the Races, while villain Walter King would return in Go West.  Lorraine Bridges would be in Wizard of Oz, Bruce Sidney in Citizen Kane, and Al Bridge in Miracle in Morgan's Creek.  Art Howard and Edward Keane went on to It's a Wonderful Life.  Kitty Carlisle would appear as a singer more than fifty years later in Radio Days.

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.