Horse Feathers (1932) - film review

When he takes over the position of dean of Huxley College, Professor Quincy Wagstaff decides that academic success is distinctly démodé and declares that the college should work on enhancing its sporting prowess.   His son Frank divides his time between courting the college widow and scoring points on the football pitch; Wagstaff approves of the latter, but sanctions the former, mainly because he himself has taken a liking to the widow in question.  To ensure that Huxley College wins a football game against the rival Darwin College, Wagstaff recruits speakeasy iceman Baravelli and speak-not-at-all dogcatcher Pinky to kidnap two players in the opposing team.  Inevitably, things do not go according to plan...

The Marx Brothers are at their manic peak in this hilarious send-up of college life, one of their most popular and entertaining films.  Buoyed up by the success of their previous films for Paramount (which had all been based on their stage plays) and free of the restraints that would later be imposed on them after their move to MGM, the Marxes are at their most inventive and uninhibited, never letting convention, logic or good taste get in the way of a good joke.  How they managed to evade ending up in a lunatic asylum is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Hollywood.   

The humour ranges from innocent slapstick to the downright risqué, with several madcap excursions into surrealism along the way.  Whether it’s the relentlessly funny banter between Groucho and Chico (their password sequence is pure genius), or Harpo’s constantly surprising visual jokes, the humour never flags for a second and there is hardly a gag that misfires (although you may have to watch the film two or three times to catch all of them).

Horse Feathers is an absolute delight – fast, witty and the most brilliantly observed satire of college life ever.   In no other film do the Marx brothers work together so well, sparring off each other with an unerring precision that not even a Swiss clock could match.  Even Zeppo, the oft-neglected spare rib of the team, gets to shine as the juvenile lead, offering a glimpse of what might have been if he had pursued a solo career as a straight actor.  

An anarchic tour de force, Horse Feathers is a film that had audiences rolling in the aisles when it was first released and it is still just as funny today – a super-duper tsunami-sized barrage of the funniest jokes you will ever find outside a Monty Python sketch.  If ever there was a film that proves beyond any doubt that comedy is the noblest of the arts, this maelstrom of inspired madness is it.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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