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The pillars are from Ford (mainly The Iron Horse, with a dash of Stagecoach for an overlap with My Little Chickadee), taken apart for the Marx Brothers to cavort through. Dead Man's Gulch is the sagebrush netherworld, Groucho as S. Quentin Quale tries to fund a ticket by bilking Chico and Harpo at the train depot and is instead cleaned up by their all-strings-attached $10 bill strategy. "There's something corrupt going on around my pants, and I can't seem to locate it." The plot—prairie lovebirds (John Carroll, Diana Lewis) need their land deed recovered from rotters (Robert Barrat, Walter Woolf King) before the railroad passes through—takes entirely too much time and space. Still, there's Harpo's 20-gallon hat, June MacCloy's basso profundo at the saloon, and the purposeful phoniness of Edward Buzzell's Old West. ("This is 1870, Don Ameche hasn't invented the telephone yet.") The totem pole at the Indian reservation sports a familiar greasepaint mustache, Groucho lists the white man's injustices to the august chief. "Who put your head on a nickel and then took the nickel away?" "Slot machine." Then, to the buckskin maiden: "You get a canoe later, and I'll paddle you." Duel with prospector and gunfighter, duet with harp and flute. "Vamoose, you goose." "Nice piece of poetry." The great attraction is the runaway locomotive that leaps off the rails and cannibalizes itself for furnace lumber, in the process revealing Buster Keaton's hand behind the scenes and planting an idea in Buñuel's brain (Illusion Travels by Streetcar). With George Lessey, Iris Adrian, and Tully Marshall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |