My general comments on the Marx Brothers Films.
I think their most underrated film is A Night in Casablanca. Also, Room Service is really not bad, though it suffers from being a movie with the Marx Brothers in it instead of a Marx Brothers movie.
Aw, I saw A Night in Casablanca and liked it fine, and since I heard it was terrible, I was assuming that the worst for the Marx Brothers wasn’t that bad. Still, it seems like none of the scenes in the movie are as famous as Groucho’s letters to the Warner Brothers lawyers about the title, which are hysterical.
Ah, Lydia! To this day, I can’t meet a woman named Lydia and not think about that song. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often!
Most of them are funny, but Das Kapital kind of drags.
Nah, A Night in Casablanca is the best of their last five or six movies. The handful before it, like The Big Store, are very skippable. Especially if you haven’t seen all the Warner stuff. Almost all of their best movies were for Warner Brothers. A Night at the Opera is the only one of their post-Warner movies that cracks the top five in my opinion. The top few for me are Duck Soup, Night at the Opera, Horse Feathers, Monkey Business, and Animal Crackers. The best parts of A Day at the Races are very good but the ending just makes me cringe.
I don’t know where to start with a favorite line. Maybe “Marriage was good enough for your grandfather, but who wants to marry your grandfather? Nobody. Not even your grandmother.” Or any of his insults to Margaret Dumont at the beginning of Duck Soup, ending with “…if you can’t leave in a taxi you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon you can leave in a minute and a huff.”
“You see that man eating spaghetti? No? Well you see the spaghetti, don’t you?”
Nitpick: the Marx Brothers were at Paramount–not Warner Brothers–before they moved to MGM for A Night at the Opera.
I shot an elephant in my pajamas…
Paramount. Sometime after Thalberg died, they jumped to MGM. They never worked for Warners.
Thalberg was at MGM and made their first two MGM movies, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
Horse Feathers is my favorite too.
Swordfish!
:smack:
“Who are you?”
“I’m fine, thanks. Who are you?”
Production companies:
The Coconuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup: Paramount
Night at the Opera, Day at the Races, At the Circus, Go West, The Big Store: MGM
**Room Service: ** RKO
A Night in Casablanca, Love Happy: United Artists
Watched Night at the Opera and A Day a the Races today. Thought the lauded stateroom scene in Opera was amusing but not the funniest scene ever or even the funniest scene in the movie. My favorite line was “I’d give you my seat, but I’m sitting here.” Cringed a bit at the blackface scene in Races but otherwise both were quite enjoyable (overall I thought the big musical number at the end (with Harpo on flute) was too joyous to be offensive, as some people find it.) They felt more conventional and less manic than Duck Soup and Animal Crackers but excellent all the same.
I don’t think it was a blackface scene, it was real African-American performers. Acting a bit like minstrel-show clowns, I grant you.
The Brothers do put axle grease on their faces as a disguise at the end of the dance sequence. (Harpo only does half his face.) It’s a very stereotyped depiction of black people and it reflects the time the movie was made. On the other hand these people can really dance, and it sounds like some of the musicians played with Duke Ellington, so in that sense they showed off some major talent.
Yes, it’s like a gag that would just as easily have fit into a Buster Keaton movie, if Mayer & Thalberg hadn’t destroyed his career and reduced him to a piece-work gag writer. The stateroom scene is more sad than funny when viewed as a fragment of what MGM kept from us.
I feel the same way about Marx/Paramount & Our Gang/Hal Roach vs their MGM incarnations.
The stateroom scene is too verbal to work for Keaton (“And a hard boiled egg.” <honk> “Make that two hard boiled eggs”). But I agree it’s not as funny as people make it out to be. I can think of a dozen Marx Brothers scenes that work better. Also, the payoff – when the door is opened – is poorly staged.
A lot of Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce is basically lifted from Groucho Marx, IMO.