Animal Crackers (1930) - film review

Society dowager Mrs Rittenhouse is hosting an extravagant party at her Long Island mansion.  The purpose of the party is to welcome back the famous explorer, Captain Spaulding, after his expedition to Africa, but the hostess cannot resist using the occasion to show off a priceless Beaugard painting, which has been given to her by her most fervent admirer, Roscoe W. Chandler.  Two of the guests at the party decide to play a practical joke and persuade the butler to take down the painting and replace it with a copy that one of them made earlier.  Then Mrs Rittenhouse’s daughter, Arabella, has the same idea.  She elects to replace the painting with another copy that her boyfriend, a penniless artist, painted, the intention being to show the world how talented he is.  When the original painting and the two copies go missing, Spaulding assists Mrs Rittenhouse in locating them, and soon discovers that a pair of very strange musicians, Signor Ravelli and the Professor, may be the culprits...

Buoyed up by the immense success of their first movie, The Cocoanuts (1929), the Marx Brothers soon returned with more of the same, quickly establishing themselves as cinema’s leading comedy troupe.   Like the film that preceded it, Animal Crackers is a rough adaptation of a successful Broadway musical comedy by George S. Kaufman, in which the Marx Brothers had starred to great acclaim.  This is the film which contains Groucho’s best line: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas I’ll never know..."

The plot and musical numbers are pretty well incidental, since the film’s main attraction is the anarchic comedy which the Marxes hurl at each other and their audience with scant regard to logic, narrative coherence or the niceties of social etiquette.  The film is both a deliciously acerbic satire on high society (an easy target for mirth in the early years of the Great Depression) and a vehicle for the Marx Brothers to show off the full range of their comedic and musical skills.  The film’s two most famous numbers, Hello, I Must Be Going and Hooray for Captain Spaulding would become signature tunes for Groucho in later years, the latter providing the theme for his radio and TV game show You Bet Your Life.

Animal Crackers, widely regarded as one of the Marxes’ finest films, features some of the brothers’ best material.  Once again, Groucho has communication difficulties with Chico, evidenced by the exchange: "You know, I’d buy you a parachute if I knew it wouldn’t open."  "Haha you’re crazy, I got a pair of shoes."  But this is nothing compared with what happens when Chico and Harpo end up at cross-purposes.  In response to Chico’s request for a flash (i.e. torch), Harpo pulls just about everything that sounds even remotely like flash from his seemingly bottomless overcoat.  Just imagine how much comedy magic we would have missed if the talkies had taken another decade to arrive.  Sound cinema may not have been invented exclusively for the Marxes, but the brothers certainly put the new medium to good use, perhaps better than any other comedy act of the time.

Whilst Chico impresses with his musical skills and Harpo is busy chasing pretty young girls all over the set (and presumably off it as well), Groucho sets about tying everyone he meets up in verbal knots - "Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple sauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does..."  If any of this was scripted, I’m a Dutchman with five legs.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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