It is a musical comedy starring four of the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo) in their final movie for Paramount and the final movie for Zeppo. It also features Marx Brothers’ regular Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Teasdale and Louis Calhern as ambassador Trentino and the antagonist. Since I was traveling this week, I downloaded it from the Internet Archive Marx Brothers Collection, which lists their 15 feature length films.
Growing up, like my earliest memories until we got cable when I was 6, I watched a lot of 20s-40s comedy. I think, Guatemalan TV got those shows on the cheap, so lots of Harold Lloyd, The Three Stooges, even some Chaplin. I think they also dubbed them on the super cheap if at all, so that must have been the reason why the Marx Brothers didn’t make it, since their comedy is quite filled with word play also. I look back fondly at those evening watching those shows, so I thought, hey, let’s fill a cultural hole, in that I have never watched a Marx Brothers movie ever. 1933’s Duck Soup is probably their most famous one – that mirror scene being one of the most transcendental situational comedy scene in movie history.
I was also traveling this week and quite busy the week before, so I didn’t have much time, so watching this on the train back from my trip was perfect – a comedy that barely spans 66 minutes, that’s about all I could take this week.
Perhaps, I was not in the right mood… because I didn’t like it. Yes, I can see it’s a clear attempt at making fun at what was happening in Europe in 1933. Benito Mussolini outright banned the film, it is not that complicated why – Freedonia vs. Sylvania, haha. The Americans lending money only on the condition of installing a dumb beloved doofus as the head of state and it leading straight into war after countless of opportunities of avoiding that war. Yes, the political satire is strong, but for me it was just outdated. And I don’t know if it was the style or the time or both.
Probably the style, because for all the wistfulness I had at watching “The Three Stooges” as a kid, it is quite horrible programming, I saw maybe 2 minutes of an episode somewhere and immediately switched away – “how did I ever like this?”. The same here, I still don’t get the thing with Harpo; he just cuts things and honks away and people found this hilarious? Was that like a known thing? And the first time you hear as a kid Groucho yelling “tanks!” when in war and them answering “you’re welcome!”, it is probably funny, but it got an eyeroll from me, sigh. I am doubly saddened, because I am a fan of Eyebrow Cinema, he just put out his 100 favorite movies, because he passed 100k on YouTube (yay!) and he had it at 83, so I was really looking forward to it.
Tanya's Astro Blog 