Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

Once again, this movie is not in the public domain yet, but thanks to being based on a stage musical, the score and song lyrics are. Though apparently not the script of that stage show, which I don’t know the legal mechanisms behind. Aside from Marx Brothers Vaudeville schtick, I don’t really know what to expect here.

When I think “Animal Crackers” and musical, I think of the song made famous by Shirley Temple, but it seems not even the song is here, let alone Temple, so I’m already going in a little disappointed.

After watching the movie:

The wealthy widow Mrs. Rittenhouse gives a fancy party in her home hosting both the famous explorer Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding, fresh from Africa, and art collector Roscoe W. Chandler, who will display for the first time his newly acquired Beaugard painting. John, the fiance of Mrs. Rittenhouse’s… niece? Arabella, mentions that when he was in Europe, he and many other art students spent weeks copying the exact Beaugard piece in their studies, and Arabella comes up with a scheme to get the hired musicians Signor Ravelli and the Professor to borrow the original Beaugard and replace it with John’s copy and prove John’s skill. Soon thereafter, party guests Grace Carpenter and Mrs. Whitehead, enact the same plan with Grace’s bad copy in order to discredit Mrs. Rittenhouse. At the unveiling, everyone immediately notices the bad imitation before the lights go out and the copy vanishes. Immediately, Captain Spaulding quips into action to find the painting thief.

I believe they got better at this as they went on, but Marx Brothers movies are not good at being movies. I couldn’t properly enjoy the showstopper jokes because I was waiting for the plot to resume, and then by the time the plot materialized, it was time to wrap everything up. I spent the whole movie wondering how much story got cut to make room for the Marx Brothers to be the Marx Brothers, but it seems that the stage version was their vehicle too. What did get cut was most of the songs, which is strange because it’s pretty short for a musical. But then it would probably be even more unwieldy if there was a full bank of musical numbers competing for attention with the Vaudeville bits. I was taken by surprise that I already knew one (two?) of the songs, as the vinyl version of Hooray for Captain Spaulding/I Must Be Going was in a Doctor Demento collection.

For all that Groucho seems to have become the biggest star out of the gang, it seems like every movie I’ve seen ends up putting more emphasis on Harpo and Chico. Groucho gets scenes with both of them but ends up mostly working against a few of the incidental characters. They all immediately lose whatever context they were given by the plot the moment it stops being relevant to whatever bit they’re going into.

While there are plenty of famous quips and elaborate bits, I think my favorite is in the scene where Spaulding (Groucho) and the art collector have a conversation about nothing much and in the middle of Spaulding talking circles around him, the collector calls Spaulding by his own name and Spaulding corrects him, then immediately almost slips up himself. Groucho’s act has a loose enough relationship with the Fourth Wall that it’s possible this was scripted, but it has a feeling of a moment where Groucho improvised to cover the other actor’s flub and then they both have to try to find their way back to the script when they realized the director wasn’t going to have them cut.

I feel I would have enjoyed this movie a lot more if the plot hadn’t been there as a distraction from the real reason everyone is here. It’s okay to just film a variety show. Losing the script would’ve also left more time for the songs left out in the adaptation. The film as it stands is just too frustrating to enjoy in the way one normally enjoys a movie.