From the Shelf: Animal Crackers (1930, Victor Heerman)
Acquired: Birthday present, 2005.
Seen before?: Roughly fifteen years ago on VHS.
There’s something gleefully freeing about the Marx Brothers’ particular brand of vaudeville anarchy, a bubbly stew where whiplash verbal banter butts up against sharp slapstick and clever and corny seem like two sides of one coin. My spirits are always lifted whenever I see them hurling their sensibilities at dignified institutions (high society, college, goverment, the opera, etc.) and, in doing so, reducing them to scorched comedic rubble. (Quite literally in Duck Soup, but we’ll get there when we get there.) I used to think Animal Crackers was the weakest of the Brothers’ classic period, which I think we can agree starts here and goes through A Day at the Races (The Cocoanuts is clearly too creaky to be included, and general wisdom has them falling off post-Races). And it still may be - the last half-hour of the film, though including the amazing back-and-forth between Groucho and Chico about clues and house-building, can’t quite sustain the fever pitch of the first two acts, owing mainly to its having to pretend that it has a plot that involves stolen paintings or something. But even if this supposition is true, it’s the weakest by a degree of angstroms - these guys were ridiculously consistent, finding fresh absurdities to deflate or explode in every milieu they tackled.
The evolutionary leap from The Cocoanuts to this is really spectacular - on their second cinematic go-around, the Marx template comes out fully formed. It’s like that first film was a testing ground to shake the bugs out of the system in moving their material from stage to screen, and the second is where it all clicks. From the delightful opening musical number introducing Groucho’s intrepid explorer Captain Spaulding to Groucho’s hilarious stories of shooting elephants (which leads into maybe the greatest set of twin puns I’ve heard) to the rigged bridge game to the endless climactic shakedown of Harpo (an early appearance of what most people know now as the “Simpsons Rake Gag”), this thing just gives and gives. There’s the requisite musical number/harp piece for Harpo, but it’s fairly minor - nothing as showstopping as the stable-hand musical bit in A Day at the Races or Harpo’s Night at the Opera harp epic.
It is kinda sad, though, how little Zeppo has to do here even by Zeppo’s standards - when Groucho called him in to take a letter to Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and McCormick, it occurred to me that I’d forgotten Zeppo was even in the film. Maybe the film had as well. Also, I’ve never observed this in any of the other Marx films, so maybe I’ll have to pay closer attention next time around, but Margaret Dumont looks like she’s constantly on the verge of losing her shit and collapsing with laughter in this film.
Up next: La-dee-da…
