Horse Feathers

Horse Feathers
August 19, 1932
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
B+

Why is this so much better than Monkey Business?  After all, it's got the same director, stars, leading lady, and some of the same writers.  (Johnstone, Perelman, and Sheekman, the last appearing uncredited as Typing Sportswriter.)  Yes, it helps that Kalmar & Ruby are doing the music, as they did for Animal Crackers.  We again have a great Groucho-introduction song, this time "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It."  And the song repeated this time, with every Brother giving it at least one rendition, is the marvelous "Everyone Says I Love You."  But the writing is overall stronger, perhaps because the setting of a college is the best yet.

I'm sure this wasn't the first, and it definitely wouldn't be the last, movie to feature college students who look far too old for college.  At least thirty-one-year-old Zeppo has an excuse, since his character has been in one college for twelve years.  Groucho was then forty-one and he's playing Zeppo's father!  Some of the best moments in the movie are Groucho insulting his son, who's "a disgrace to the name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible."  At one point, Groucho points to a picture of a horse (guess what part) and is reminded of Zeppo!

Yes, we're still happily living in pre-Code times, most notably with anything to do with Thelma Todd's character of the "college widow."  All the Brothers and the villain flirt (or more) with her, and the movie actually ends with Groucho, Chico, and Harpo pushing the groom, presumably Zeppo, out of the way so they can all marry her!  She's gorgeous in this movie (in one slinky outfit after another) and seems to be having a better time than in Monkey B, especially during Chico's "music lesson," which Groucho tells us we can go to the lobby to avoid.  The bedroom-farcical scene that this is part of is my favorite, although the opening is a close second.  I love how eventually Harpo just walks along the top of the couch and throws ice out the window, as Groucho and Chico put the moves on Thelma.  This scene is choppy, due to age and later censorship (there's a butchered exchange where Thelma says, "Baravelli, you overcome me," and Chico says, "All right, but remember, it was your idea," which you can still catch with the subtitles on), but it's still hilarious.

Meanwhile, there's a class with Professor Robert Greig, a speakeasy, and a whole lot of nonsense, or horse feathers.  That's what the title means, although Zeppo's portrait is part of it, as is Harpo's abiding love for horses (he had a picture of one as his true love in Animal Crackers), and of course the chariot-riding towards the end.

The whole thing of the importance of football on campus would insure that this movie will probably never become fully dated, bootlegging and college widow notwithstanding.  It is very '30s of course, with a "bum" telling Harpo he wants a cup of coffee.  Guess what Harpo pulls out of his magical coat?  And guess what Groucho throws to Thelma when she's drowning?

Monkey Business (1931)

Monkey Business
September 19, 1931
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
B-

Well, I could've sworn that my view of the Paramount movies was that they got better and better, but this go-round, my first in a few years, I didn't find this as solid as Animal Crackers.  Yes, there are some great bits-- the puppet show, the Groucho/Thelma scenes, and the Maurice Chevalier imitations-- but the Brothers need more structure to rebel against than a ship and a masquerade party.  Also, there's too much of them picking on innocent victims, not only the man with the "frog in his throat" but most of the women they harass. I've been a Marx Brothers fan longer than I've been a feminist, so I'm not going to get overly p.c. about it, but it's not even funny harassment, except with the opera singer.

The opera jokes, as well as of course the stowing away, foreshadow A Night at the Opera (1935), but there's also a line that hints at A Day at the Races (1937), when someone's looking for a doctor and Groucho asks where the horse is.  He even macabrely predicts Thelma Todd's death in a garage!

Chico meanwhile cracks what may well be his worst set of puns, including but not limited to "strawberry shortcut," "vessel" for "whistle," and "It's better to have loft and lost than never to have loft at all," which Groucho pats him on the back for.  Harpo manages to "sing" along with his brothers in a barbershop quartet and later to, yes, impersonate Chevalier.  Even Zeppo has things to do, making a joke ("What do we plug him with?"), romancing a girl, and fighting a henchman.  Not only that, but Uncle Al Shean contributed to the screenplay, and Frenchie Marx, the seventy-one-year-old father of the Brothers, appears on the dockside.  (He's got a mustache, a white hat, and a proud smile.)  I didn't spot Billy Barty, uncredited except at IMDB, but I'm tagging him anyway.

This is the first of the Marxes' films to not be written for the screen, and it's also the first to feel more '30s than '20s, with Groucho making lots of jokes about money, like "Don't forget that the stockholder of yesteryear is the stowaway of today."  Also, there's the gangster plot, in the same year as Robinson's Little Caesar and Cagney's Public Enemy.  The Code is being ignored more obviously, as the studios tried to lure the Depression audience back into theaters.  All Groucho's jokes about adultery-- Todd's, his, and that of the hapless party guests on the veranda-- would've been frowned upon a few years later.

The title this time is more straightforward, since it means "mischievous behavior."