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For Depression times, Marxism on deck. "State your business, I've got to shiver my timbers." Yesteryear's stockholders and today's stowaways, the brothers emerge from kippered herring barrels to slip and slide around the liner. Gangsters abound, as befits the middle year of the Little Caesar-Public Enemy-Scarface troika, Groucho comes for a tango with the hot-to-trot moll (Thelma Todd) and stays for bodyguard duty. "Afraid? Me? A man who's licked his weight in caterpillars?" Chico meanwhile contemplates his ancestry to Columbus, Harpo adds a third visage to a Punch and Judy theater, and Zeppo courts the racketeer's daughter (Ruth Hall). Underworld disputes and kidnapped ingénues, "old-fashioned piece of melodrama" and avant-garde burlesque. "You have the advantage of me." "Not yet, but wait till I get you outside." Steering the gang's first jaunt written directly for the screen, Norman Z. McLeod knows when to move the camera and, for the impromptu band in the passenger lounge, when to sustain a long-shot. A Dalían fixation on beards and mustaches, Maurice Chevalier refracted for his passport, the only nightingale that can sing is the mute one. (The hand-cranked photograph behind the trenchcoat does the trick, until it doesn't.) Blake Edwards benefits mightily from the shift from high-seas game of tag to high-society costume bash, Groucho meowing on a balcony is just a bonus. The frog under the top hat, the roulette over the haystack, above all the iron club wrapped inside the feather. "And as for me, I'm going back in the closet, where men are empty overcoats." The climactic scuffle with hoodlums is no competition—in the feral turf of a barn, the Marxes are in their element. With Rockliffe Fellowes, Harry Woods, and Tom Kennedy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |