Film Review
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.
© James Travers 2009
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.