A Day at the Races (1937) - film review

Judy Standish is the unhappy owner of a sanatorium which faces closure unless she can raise the money to pay the mortgage.  Her only hope is her wealthy client Emily Upjohn, an inveterate hypochondriac, but she has opted to leave the sanatorium when the doctors tell her that there is nothing wrong with her.  Judy’s chauffeur, Tony, comes to the rescue.  He persuades Judy to appoint Dr Hugo Z. Hackenbush as the new director of the sanatorium.  Hackenbush is in truth a veterinary but he convinces Mrs Upjohn that her imaginary ailments are real and so persuades her to stay on.  This development does not please the property magnate Mr Morgan, who is determined to buy the sanatorium from Judy.   Realising that Hackenbush is a fraud, the ruthless Mr Morgan sets about trying to expose him...

The Marx Brothers followed up their phenomenonally successful A Night at the Opera with this equally frenetic comedy which proved to be an even greater box office hit.   Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder producer who persuaded the Marxes to join him at MGM and who had considerable input into the films they made for him, died from pneumonia mid-way through the shooting of this film, aged 37.  The loss of Thalberg was a blow to the Marx Brothers and could explain the decline in the quality of their subsequent films: they had lost a valuable guiding hand, someone who knew how to get the best out of their unique brand of comedy.   

Whilst it still divides critical opinion, A Day at the Races contains some of the Marx Brothers most memorable comedy routines.  Amongst these, the best is the Tootsie-frootsie ice cream scam, in which Chico offers Groucho a betting tip and ends up getting him to buy a small library of useless guides in order to decode the tip.   Almost as hilarious is the sequence in which Chico and Harpo try to rescue Groucho from being exposed in flagrante delicto with a scheming femme fatale, their solution being to wallpaper over the offending female.  The best visual gag is where Harpo casually smashes up grand piano and pulls his trademark harp from the debris.  This film shows us the Marx Brothers at their slickest and most inventive, although we miss the wild anarchy and lunatic improvisation of their earlier films.

With some judicious trimming and a little less excess padding this could easily have been the best of the Marx Brothers films.  Unfortunately, in their infinite wisdom, MGM insisted on shoehorning several song and dance numbers into the proceedings, and these take away much more than they add.  Who, going to watch a Marx Brothers film, wants to see a languorous ballet routine or listen to a succession of insipid romantic ballads?  It would be an interesting exercise to see what kind of film this would become if all this unnecessary padding were removed and we were left only with the Marx Brothers’ material.  Maybe MGM believed that this high concentration of humour would be too much for audiences to endure...?

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?