Animal Crackers ***** (1930, Marx Brothers) – Classic Movie Review 1471

‘One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.’ – Groucho Marx. The four Marx Brothers Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo are on tip-top funny form in their second movie, a zany and hilarious version of Morrie Ryskind and George S Kaufman’s Broadway musical hit, with Ryskind adapting his own work for the screenplay.

Groucho plays the famed African explorer Captain Spaulding, who attends a gala homecoming party held in his honour by Mrs Rittenhouse, during which a valuable painting on display goes missing. Wacky mayhem ensues as the Marx Brothers help to recover it.  Chico plays Signor Emanuel Ravelli, Harpo is The Professor and Zeppo plays Horatio Jamison.

Director Victor Heerman’s 1930 early-sound Paramount studio production is unfortunately patchy, stagey and technically dodgy, but that doesn’t spoil the fun at all. It’s great that some of the Marxes’ freshest, most exuberant, inventive, witty, funniest work lies herein.

Groucho performs his classic songs ‘Hello, I Must Be Going’ and ‘Hooray for Captain Spaulding’, both written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. And it’s hooray too for the redoubtable Margaret Dumont (as Mrs Rittenhouse), stooge extraordinaire, the dignified, brave butt of so many of Groucho’s classic bitchy lines (‘Ever since I met you, I’ve swept you off my feet’). Lillian Roth plays her daughter, Arabella Rittenhouse. ‘Hooray for Captain Spaulding’ refers to a real Captain Spaulding, an army officer arrested a few years earlier for selling cocaine to Hollywood residents.

Chico keeps asking Harpo for ‘a flash’ (ie a flashlight, torch) and Harpo, not understanding, produces from his bottomless trench-coat and baggy pants a fish, a flask, a flute, a ‘flit’, a ‘flush’ and so on.

In the 1990s, a 15-second clip filmed in Multicolor during the rehearsal of a scene in Animal Crackers was found. It is the oldest known colour footage of the Marx Brothers. Harpo appears in a robe and without his usual wig.

On February 7 1974, Groucho visited UCLA under the aegis of UCLA student and Marx Brothers fan Steve Stoliar’s Committee for the Re-release of Animal Crackers (CRAC), newly formed as the film was in a bad physical state and had not had a theatrical release since the mid-1950s. Asked to name his favourite comedian, Groucho said ‘Me’, adding that ‘Animal Crackers is the best of our movies’.

When Universal screened a sharp new print of the film on May 23 at the UA Theater in Westwood, just south of the UCLA campus, Groucho made a personal appearance. On June 23 the studio screened the film at the Sutton Theater in New York, with Groucho attending the premiere. A near-riot broke out and a police escort was summoned. Then Animal Crackers went on US national release.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1471

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