I decided that I needed some good old-fashioned Vaudevillian humor and so dove into Universal’s collection of the first five Marx Brothers movies, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.
It’s funny every time I watch these, which I usually do as a mini-festival like this, that it’s Animal Crackers and Duck Soup that consistently work the best for me. Duck Soup has long been my favorite and there are great bits in the other films but Animal Crackers, it seems to me, is the best distilling of the Marx Brothers format that exists, especially when it comes to their interplay with Margaret Dumont and the entire notion of class divisions.
Horse Feathers, on the other hand, is the one in this batch that I can never quite get my head around. While some truly classic moments have come out of this (swordfish in particular) it never jells for me as a whole the way the others do. It’s a slight ebb in the inspired genius between the first three movies and then Duck Soup, but that still makes it better than 80 percent of what’s available.
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Chris Thilk