Horse Feathers (1932) - Turner Classic Movies

Brief Synopsis

In an effort to beef up his school's football team, a college president mistakenly recruits two loonies.

Cast & Crew

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Norman Mcleod

Groucho Marx

Professor [Quincy Adams] Wagstaff

Harpo Marx

Chico Marx

Zeppo Marx

Thelma Todd

Photos & Videos

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Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) Everyone Says I Love You

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) Anything Further Father?

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) Swordfish

Gridiron Glory: Horse Feathers (1932) -- Dennis Adamovich

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) I'm Against It!

Film Details

Also Known As

The Four Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers

Genre

Comedy

Release Date

Aug 19, 1932

Premiere Information

New York premiere: 10 Aug 1932

Production Company

Paramount Publix Corp.

Distribution Company

Paramount Publix Corp.

Country

United States

Technical Specs

Duration

1h 8m

Sound

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Color

Black and White

Theatrical Aspect Ratio

1.37 : 1

Film Length

8 reels

Synopsis

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff takes over as president of Huxley College in order to help his son Frank graduate, as he has been attending Huxley for twelve years. Wagstaff's inaugural speech is incoherent, and at one point, he bursts into song, after calling attention to Frank, who is sitting among the students with a girl on his lap. After the song and speech, Wagstaff admonishes his son for dating only one college "widow" in twelve years, whereas he himself dated three college widows and attended three different colleges in twelve years. Frank tells his father that Huxley has had a new college president every year since 1888, which is also the last year the school won a football game. Frank insists that the college needs a good football team to beat the opposing team from Darwin University, and informs his father that he can buy two football players at a speakeasy downtown. At the speakeasy, Jennings, a representative of Darwin, buys the two athletes. Wagstaff arrives and gains admission to the speakeasy through repartee with Baravelli the iceman and bootlegger. Pinky, who is Baravelli's mute partner as well as a dog catcher, gets into the club and makes a nuisance of himself. Wagstaff mistakes the two men for football players and hires them for the big game against Darwin, then signs them on as students at Huxley. Jennings goes to see Connie Bailey, Frank's college widow with whom he is in cahoots, and tells her to get the football plays from Frank. He leaves and Frank arrives, after which Wagstaff arrives to convince Connie to give up Frank. Pinky and Baravelli, meanwhile, try to deliver ice several times to Connie's house but continually drop the ice blocks out of the window. Wagstaff discovers he hired the wrong athletes and tells Pinky and Baravelli to kidnap the real athletes. Meanwhile, Jennings buys the football signals from Baravelli but discovers they are the wrong signals. Connie then steals the signals from Wagstaff by attempting to seduce him. Meanwhile, Baravelli and Pinky try to kidnap the athletes but wind up trapped in an apartment. They saw their way through the floor in time to rush to the field and eventually increase Huxley's score through their antics. In the end, Huxley wins, and Baravelli, Pinky and Wagstaff all marry Connie.

Director

Norman Mcleod

Cast

Groucho Marx

Professor [Quincy Adams] Wagstaff

Harpo Marx

Chico Marx

Zeppo Marx

Thelma Todd

David Landau

Florine Mckinney

Peggy Carrington

James Pierce

Nat Pendleton

Reginald Barlow

President of college

Robert Greig

Professor Hornsroge

Ben Taggart

Edward J. Lesaint

Edgar Dearing

Vince Barnett

Speakeasy customer

Crew

Charles Barton

Assistant Director

Neal Beckner

Assistant Camera

George Bourne

Assistant Camera

Francis Burgess

Assistant Camera

Daniel Fapp

Camera Operator

Gordon Head

Still Photographer

Will B. Johnstone

Ray June

Bert Kalmar

Bert Kalmar

William James Knott

Camera Operator

Fred Mayer

Camera Operator

Eugene Merritt

S. J. Perelman

Harry Ruby

Harry Ruby

Adolph Zukor

Videos

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) Anything Further Father? Maybe the best casting ever of Zeppo Marx, as a wayward college man and son of his older brother, the new president Wagstaff (Groucho Marx), conferring after induction ceremonies in Horse Feathers, 1932.

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) I'm Against It! Just sworn in as the new college president, Wagstaff (Groucho Marx) states his position, with Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby's "I"m Against It," early in Horse Feathers, 1932.

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) Everyone Says I Love You A singular moment in Marx Brothers movies, Groucho as Professor Wagstaff serenading Connie (Thelma Todd), who's trying to steal the football signals, in a canoe, with screen and song writers Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby's Everyone Says I Love You, in Horse Feathers, 1932.

Horse Feathers (1932) -- (Movie Clip) Swordfish "Swordfish" is the password as new college president Wagstaff (Groucho) comes to the speakeasy seeking student-athletes, meeting Baravelli (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) in the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers, 1932.

Intro Aired: Sep 2019

Gridiron Glory: Horse Feathers (1932) -- Dennis Adamovich Introduction and comments following Horse Feathers, 1932, with Chick-fil-A College Football Hall Of Fame CEO Dennis Adamovich and TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz.

Film Details

Also Known As

The Four Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers

Genre

Comedy

Release Date

Aug 19, 1932

Premiere Information

New York premiere: 10 Aug 1932

Production Company

Paramount Publix Corp.

Distribution Company

Paramount Publix Corp.

Country

United States

Technical Specs

Duration

1h 8m

Sound

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Color

Black and White

Theatrical Aspect Ratio

1.37 : 1

Film Length

8 reels

Articles

Horse Feathers

March 24, 2005

The institution of higher education is held up for ridicule and satirized mercilessly in Horse Feathers (1932), a madcap burlesque of university life starring The Marx Brothers. In it, Groucho Marx is Professor Wagstaff, the president of Huxley College, Chico plays an ice salesman/bootlegger, Harpo stars as the local dogcatcher and girl chaser, and Zeppo, cast as Wagstaff's son, provides the love interest. The central premise - Wagstaff plots to increase the college's enrollment and boost its reputation by staging a winning football game - is really just an excuse to include pot shots at everything from pompous professors to dull-witted students to sports fanatics. Along the way, there is a parody of the boating accident from Theodore Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, wild sight gags like Harpo posing as a human coffee dispenser, and such signature songs as "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It" and "Everyone Says I Love You" (Woody Allen would pay homage to this six decades later when he chose it for the title of his 1996 musical comedy). The film continually flaunts its ramshackle structure and at one point during Chico's piano solo, Groucho breaks the wall between actor and viewer to remark candidly, "I've got to stay here but there's no reason you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby till this thing blows over."

The Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathers is usually ranked second to their surrealistic masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933), by fans and critics and has the same manic energy and anarchic, freewheeling tone as the latter film. Yet, despite Groucho's brilliant sense of comic timing and inspired clowning from Chico and Harpo, a great deal of the film's success is due to the contributions of screenwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (who also co-wrote the musical numbers) and S. J. Perelman who provided the Marx Brothers with a non-stop stream of hilarious one-liners, double entendres and literary in-jokes. Among the three, only Perelman had attended college and it is his absurdist view of academia that gives Horse Feathers its sharp, satiric edge. After all, he had suffered through four undergraduate years at Brown University where he spent most of his time attacking the university's policies in scathing editorials for the Brown Jug. In one of his attacks, he wrote "Millions for athletics, and not a cent for aesthetics" which turns out to be one of the major themes running throughout Horse Feathers.

Although Perelman is often erroneously credited with working on four of the Marx Brothers' films, he only claims credit for two collaborations - Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers - and by the time he began work on the latter, his relationship with Groucho had become combative; both men couldn't agree on what was funny with each one preferring his own material. Groucho later stated in a 1972 interview that Perelman "could write a funny line, but never a script. When he was writing for us, he was working with four other men. He thought he was the greatest writer in the world and didn't want to be identified with comedians....thought we were too low." In his own defense, Perelman once said of the Marx Brothers: "I did two films with them, which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten-minute intervals than ever work for these sons-of-bitches again." The truth is that Horse Feathers was only a success because of their collaboration along with creative input from the other Marxes, co-writers Kalmar and Ruby, director Norman Z. McLeod, producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, and co-star Thelma Todd, a versatile comedienne in her own right.

The actual filming of Horse Feathers had its ups and downs with Chico causing a two month delay due to a major traffic accident that shattered his knee and broke several ribs. The original ending - which had a victory bonfire blazing out of control across the campus - was scrapped for budgetary reasons and substituted with the now famous wedding ceremony between Thelma Todd and her THREE grooms - Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. Off screen, Groucho amorously pursued Todd but the actress managed to successfully elude him. At one point during the production, Shirley Temple visited the set (she made her film debut the same year in The Red-Haired Alibi) and it was rumored that Harpo approached her parents and offered to adopt her as his own child for $50,000!!! When Horse Feathers went into general release, it proved to be a box-office smash and prompted Time magazine to place them on its front cover. The film also inspired the surrealistic artist, Salvador Dali, to write a script called "The Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad" and when he later met Harpo at a Hollywood party, he presented him with a barbed wire harp tuned with spoons. Almost everywhere, Horse Feathers received rave reviews from the critics, particularly in France, where the Marxes were embraced by the intelligentsia and the art crowd. It would be their last major success for Paramount Studios who would drop their contract after the disastrous box-office performance of Duck Soup, their fifth feature, now considered their peak achievement.

Producer: Herman J. Mankiewicz
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Screenplay: Bert Kalmar, S.J. Perelman, Harry Ruby
Cinematography: Ray June
Original Music: Harry Ruby
Cast: Groucho Marx (Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff), Chico Marx (Baravelli), Harpo Marx (Pinky), Zeppo Marx (Frank Wagstaff), Thelma Todd (Connie Bailey), David Landau (Jennings).
BW-67m. Closed captioning.

by Jeff Stafford

Horse Feathers

Horse Feathers

The institution of higher education is held up for ridicule and satirized mercilessly in Horse Feathers (1932), a madcap burlesque of university life starring The Marx Brothers. In it, Groucho Marx is Professor Wagstaff, the president of Huxley College, Chico plays an ice salesman/bootlegger, Harpo stars as the local dogcatcher and girl chaser, and Zeppo, cast as Wagstaff's son, provides the love interest. The central premise - Wagstaff plots to increase the college's enrollment and boost its reputation by staging a winning football game - is really just an excuse to include pot shots at everything from pompous professors to dull-witted students to sports fanatics. Along the way, there is a parody of the boating accident from Theodore Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, wild sight gags like Harpo posing as a human coffee dispenser, and such signature songs as "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It" and "Everyone Says I Love You" (Woody Allen would pay homage to this six decades later when he chose it for the title of his 1996 musical comedy). The film continually flaunts its ramshackle structure and at one point during Chico's piano solo, Groucho breaks the wall between actor and viewer to remark candidly, "I've got to stay here but there's no reason you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby till this thing blows over." The Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathers is usually ranked second to their surrealistic masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933), by fans and critics and has the same manic energy and anarchic, freewheeling tone as the latter film. Yet, despite Groucho's brilliant sense of comic timing and inspired clowning from Chico and Harpo, a great deal of the film's success is due to the contributions of screenwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (who also co-wrote the musical numbers) and S. J. Perelman who provided the Marx Brothers with a non-stop stream of hilarious one-liners, double entendres and literary in-jokes. Among the three, only Perelman had attended college and it is his absurdist view of academia that gives Horse Feathers its sharp, satiric edge. After all, he had suffered through four undergraduate years at Brown University where he spent most of his time attacking the university's policies in scathing editorials for the Brown Jug. In one of his attacks, he wrote "Millions for athletics, and not a cent for aesthetics" which turns out to be one of the major themes running throughout Horse Feathers. Although Perelman is often erroneously credited with working on four of the Marx Brothers' films, he only claims credit for two collaborations - Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers - and by the time he began work on the latter, his relationship with Groucho had become combative; both men couldn't agree on what was funny with each one preferring his own material. Groucho later stated in a 1972 interview that Perelman "could write a funny line, but never a script. When he was writing for us, he was working with four other men. He thought he was the greatest writer in the world and didn't want to be identified with comedians....thought we were too low." In his own defense, Perelman once said of the Marx Brothers: "I did two films with them, which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten-minute intervals than ever work for these sons-of-bitches again." The truth is that Horse Feathers was only a success because of their collaboration along with creative input from the other Marxes, co-writers Kalmar and Ruby, director Norman Z. McLeod, producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, and co-star Thelma Todd, a versatile comedienne in her own right. The actual filming of Horse Feathers had its ups and downs with Chico causing a two month delay due to a major traffic accident that shattered his knee and broke several ribs. The original ending - which had a victory bonfire blazing out of control across the campus - was scrapped for budgetary reasons and substituted with the now famous wedding ceremony between Thelma Todd and her THREE grooms - Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. Off screen, Groucho amorously pursued Todd but the actress managed to successfully elude him. At one point during the production, Shirley Temple visited the set (she made her film debut the same year in The Red-Haired Alibi) and it was rumored that Harpo approached her parents and offered to adopt her as his own child for $50,000!!! When Horse Feathers went into general release, it proved to be a box-office smash and prompted Time magazine to place them on its front cover. The film also inspired the surrealistic artist, Salvador Dali, to write a script called "The Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad" and when he later met Harpo at a Hollywood party, he presented him with a barbed wire harp tuned with spoons. Almost everywhere, Horse Feathers received rave reviews from the critics, particularly in France, where the Marxes were embraced by the intelligentsia and the art crowd. It would be their last major success for Paramount Studios who would drop their contract after the disastrous box-office performance of Duck Soup, their fifth feature, now considered their peak achievement. Producer: Herman J. Mankiewicz Director: Norman Z. McLeod Screenplay: Bert Kalmar, S.J. Perelman, Harry Ruby Cinematography: Ray June Original Music: Harry Ruby Cast: Groucho Marx (Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff), Chico Marx (Baravelli), Harpo Marx (Pinky), Zeppo Marx (Frank Wagstaff), Thelma Todd (Connie Bailey), David Landau (Jennings). BW-67m. Closed captioning. by Jeff Stafford

The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection on DVD

December 8, 2004

The Marx Brothers could turn any word into a bit of zany wordplay and create the most madcap of visual gags, but their comedy is more than that. It often contains sly digs at social and political issues and is based on real observations of human behavior, qualities which keep their comedies timeless. Universal Home Video's six-disc DVD release The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection comprises the five films the Brothers made at Paramount in the early 1930s - which includes most of their best work.

While the movies are superb, enough reason to make this a must-own, Universal's presentation is somewhat lacking. They've taken the time to create a pleasing fold-out package with gorgeous photos and a small booklet attached to the spine, but the information therein is pretty sparse and the extras are, in a word, lame. Incredibly, the studio has included a stand-alone bonus disc with a whopping 15 minutes of material. Since most of the films run a little over an hour, this material could easily have been added to one of the other discs. Furthermore, the extra material just isn't that interesting - two interviews with Groucho and Harpo (no, he doesn't talk) on The Today Show from the 1960s, and one with Harpo's son William from the 1980s. The latter interview includes some snippets of Marx Brother home movies, but they're not terribly revealing. Obviously, since NBC owns Universal, these clips required little effort to secure.

By contrast, the Warner Home Video set of Marx Brothers MGM films, released last spring, had tons of extras including commentaries, documentaries, outtakes and cartoons, and they were interesting. More importantly, those movies were cleaned up and in terrific shape. Universal's titles, which are better films, are visibly in need of restoration, and it seems likely that Universal simply rushed out this collection in order to take advantage of the attention lavished on the Warner set. In the end, even though the prints are far from pristine, they do look and sound decent enough to be enjoyable. Here is a rundown by title:

THE COCOANUTS

Groucho:

"The first musical number on the program will be a piccolo solo, which we will skip."

The Marx Brothers made a one-reel short in 1926 called Humor Risk, but it was never released and is now a lost film. (Groucho claimed it wasn't very good.) This makes The Cocoanuts their earliest surviving movie, and it's the creakiest of the bunch. It finds Groucho running a Florida hotel and auctioning off parcels of land, and all four boys getting mixed up with jewel robbers. While not an essential Marx Bros. film, it certainly has its moments, like Chico continually raising his own bid at an auction, the "viaduct/why-a-duck" wordplay between Groucho and Chico, and a hilarious version of the theme from Carmen sung as "I want my shirt!" While all these pictures are full of music, The Cocoanuts is a full-blown musical with elaborate numbers. Typical of the first Hollywood sound films, the story (such as it is) stops in its tracks every time a number begins, and one number, "Monkey Doodle Do" is so ludicrous that it must be seen to be believed. It includes one camera angle which pretty much exists solely to look up Mary Eaton's skirt.

Margaret Dumont, the woman born to play the straight woman to Groucho Marx on stage and screen, does so here in their first feature, and she would continue to do so for many years ahead. Also in the cast, strangely enough, is Kay Francis, offering little hint of the sophisticated major star she would soon become. Harpo is a quite aggressive presence in The Cocoanuts, more amoral and devious than in the other movies, though no less funny. Zeppo has less to do here than in any other film, and that's saying something!

The Cocoanut was adapted from a George S. Kaufman hit play that the Marxes had performed on Broadway and on the road for nearly two years. This massive amount of performing allowed them to refine the timing of their gags perfectly and was a technique they would continue to use for future films. In fact, while shooting this film by day in New York, the Marx Brothers were performing Animal Crackers on stage at night, a play which would become their second film.

Technically, The Cocoanuts is in the worst shape of the five movies in this collection, with scratches, glitches, soft-focus, and rough spots galore. The elements are clearly in bad shape, and this does not help the stagy, static camerawork go down any easier.

ANIMAL CRACKERS

Groucho talking with two ladies:

"What do you say? Are we all gonna get married?"

"But that's bigamy."

"Yes and that's big of me too. That's big of all of us."

The second Marx Brothers film is a winner, with Groucho playing Capt. Spaulding, a famous explorer just returned from Africa whom Margaret Dumont is honoring with a party. Eventually the plot turns on stolen artwork and the efforts of the boys to retrieve it. Along the way, Harpo tries to produce a "flash" (i.e. flashlight) from his pocket, and instead pulls out a flask, a flute, a flush of cards, a fish, etc. General madcap choas abounds. Though also adapted from a play, Animal Crackers is less stagy than its predecessor. The transfer is better, too, but some reels look soft in focus and portions are quite scratchy. An original trailer is included.

MONKEY BUSINESS

Groucho to ship's captain:

"I want to register a complaint. Do you know who sneaked into my stateroom at 3:00 this morning?"

"Who did that?"

"Nobody, and that's my complaint."

Here, the boys are stowaways on a ship, a setting that prefigures their later MGM masterpiece A Night at the Opera (1935). While constantly evading capture, two get hired by a mobster to be his bodyguards, while the other two are hired by another. The plot is thin even for a Marx Bros film, but the movie never slows down due to hilarious bits of business like Harpo putting on a puppet show for a room full of kids, and all four brothers trying to sing like Maurice Chevalier in order to get off the ship (even Harpo, in a manner of speaking.) Monkey Business is in relatively good shape technically, with fewer glitches and scratches than the previous films.

HORSE FEATHERS

Groucho to Zeppo:

"What's all this talk I hear about you fooling around with a college widow? No wonder you can't get out of college. Twelve years in one college. I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows."

Groucho is the newly elected president of Huxley College who tries to hire two football players to help his team win, but he ends up hiring Harpo and Chico instead. The climactic football game is an inspired bit of lunacy, and the picture as a whole is much more cinematic than the first three - it moves. Includes the classic bit of Groucho and Chico trying to enter the bar by saying the password. The print is somewhat scratchy with some sound skips, splices, frame jitter and speckling, but these problems come and go - one reel is especially bad, while others are quite good. For some reason, Universal has included a trailer made for a video release of the movie in the 1980s. It adds absolutely nothing.

DUCK SOUP

Zeppo to Groucho, in war zone:

"General Smith reports a gas attack. He wants to know what to do."

"Tell him to take a teaspoon full of bicarbonate of soda and a half a glass of water."

"Yes, sir."

The Marx Brothers' final Paramount film is a bona fide masterpiece and is technically in the best shape of all the movies in this set. Directed by Leo McCarey, it is brilliant political satire, especially the final sequence where the Marx Brothers are in combat. Groucho is president of Freedonia and declares war on a neighboring country in order to defend the honor of Freedonia and Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont). The sequence with three brothers dressed as Groucho, culminating in the famous mirror scene, is hysterical no matter how many times you see it.

Duck Soup was famously a flop upon release and nearly sank Paramount Pictures. Now it's hailed not just as the best Marx Brothers movie of all but as one of the finest comedies ever made, and it is listed in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. (It was one of the first 50 titles to be inducted.) The film was a turning point for the brothers. Zeppo retired to become a talent manager afterwards, and Paramount stopped producing Marx Brothers movies, clearing the way for MGM's Irving Thalberg to step in, sign the boys to a new contract, and significantly re-shape their films narratively. This resulted in one indisputable gem, A Night at the Opera, and then other films of steadily decreasing quality (though they all have their moments).

Thalberg thought the Paramount productions too madcap and unfocused, but in hindsight, that was not a problem. Seen today, these pictures are fresh and hilariously funny, whether you're 9 or 90, and this DVD set, despite its shortcomings, is one of the more notable releases of the year.

To order The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold

The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection on DVD

The Marx Brothers could turn any word into a bit of zany wordplay and create the most madcap of visual gags, but their comedy is more than that. It often contains sly digs at social and political issues and is based on real observations of human behavior, qualities which keep their comedies timeless. Universal Home Video's six-disc DVD release The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection comprises the five films the Brothers made at Paramount in the early 1930s - which includes most of their best work. While the movies are superb, enough reason to make this a must-own, Universal's presentation is somewhat lacking. They've taken the time to create a pleasing fold-out package with gorgeous photos and a small booklet attached to the spine, but the information therein is pretty sparse and the extras are, in a word, lame. Incredibly, the studio has included a stand-alone bonus disc with a whopping 15 minutes of material. Since most of the films run a little over an hour, this material could easily have been added to one of the other discs. Furthermore, the extra material just isn't that interesting - two interviews with Groucho and Harpo (no, he doesn't talk) on The Today Show from the 1960s, and one with Harpo's son William from the 1980s. The latter interview includes some snippets of Marx Brother home movies, but they're not terribly revealing. Obviously, since NBC owns Universal, these clips required little effort to secure. By contrast, the Warner Home Video set of Marx Brothers MGM films, released last spring, had tons of extras including commentaries, documentaries, outtakes and cartoons, and they were interesting. More importantly, those movies were cleaned up and in terrific shape. Universal's titles, which are better films, are visibly in need of restoration, and it seems likely that Universal simply rushed out this collection in order to take advantage of the attention lavished on the Warner set. In the end, even though the prints are far from pristine, they do look and sound decent enough to be enjoyable. Here is a rundown by title: THE COCOANUTS Groucho: "The first musical number on the program will be a piccolo solo, which we will skip." The Marx Brothers made a one-reel short in 1926 called Humor Risk, but it was never released and is now a lost film. (Groucho claimed it wasn't very good.) This makes The Cocoanuts their earliest surviving movie, and it's the creakiest of the bunch. It finds Groucho running a Florida hotel and auctioning off parcels of land, and all four boys getting mixed up with jewel robbers. While not an essential Marx Bros. film, it certainly has its moments, like Chico continually raising his own bid at an auction, the "viaduct/why-a-duck" wordplay between Groucho and Chico, and a hilarious version of the theme from Carmen sung as "I want my shirt!" While all these pictures are full of music, The Cocoanuts is a full-blown musical with elaborate numbers. Typical of the first Hollywood sound films, the story (such as it is) stops in its tracks every time a number begins, and one number, "Monkey Doodle Do" is so ludicrous that it must be seen to be believed. It includes one camera angle which pretty much exists solely to look up Mary Eaton's skirt. Margaret Dumont, the woman born to play the straight woman to Groucho Marx on stage and screen, does so here in their first feature, and she would continue to do so for many years ahead. Also in the cast, strangely enough, is Kay Francis, offering little hint of the sophisticated major star she would soon become. Harpo is a quite aggressive presence in The Cocoanuts, more amoral and devious than in the other movies, though no less funny. Zeppo has less to do here than in any other film, and that's saying something! The Cocoanut was adapted from a George S. Kaufman hit play that the Marxes had performed on Broadway and on the road for nearly two years. This massive amount of performing allowed them to refine the timing of their gags perfectly and was a technique they would continue to use for future films. In fact, while shooting this film by day in New York, the Marx Brothers were performing Animal Crackers on stage at night, a play which would become their second film. Technically, The Cocoanuts is in the worst shape of the five movies in this collection, with scratches, glitches, soft-focus, and rough spots galore. The elements are clearly in bad shape, and this does not help the stagy, static camerawork go down any easier. ANIMAL CRACKERS Groucho talking with two ladies: "What do you say? Are we all gonna get married?" "But that's bigamy." "Yes and that's big of me too. That's big of all of us." The second Marx Brothers film is a winner, with Groucho playing Capt. Spaulding, a famous explorer just returned from Africa whom Margaret Dumont is honoring with a party. Eventually the plot turns on stolen artwork and the efforts of the boys to retrieve it. Along the way, Harpo tries to produce a "flash" (i.e. flashlight) from his pocket, and instead pulls out a flask, a flute, a flush of cards, a fish, etc. General madcap choas abounds. Though also adapted from a play, Animal Crackers is less stagy than its predecessor. The transfer is better, too, but some reels look soft in focus and portions are quite scratchy. An original trailer is included. MONKEY BUSINESS Groucho to ship's captain: "I want to register a complaint. Do you know who sneaked into my stateroom at 3:00 this morning?" "Who did that?" "Nobody, and that's my complaint." Here, the boys are stowaways on a ship, a setting that prefigures their later MGM masterpiece A Night at the Opera (1935). While constantly evading capture, two get hired by a mobster to be his bodyguards, while the other two are hired by another. The plot is thin even for a Marx Bros film, but the movie never slows down due to hilarious bits of business like Harpo putting on a puppet show for a room full of kids, and all four brothers trying to sing like Maurice Chevalier in order to get off the ship (even Harpo, in a manner of speaking.) Monkey Business is in relatively good shape technically, with fewer glitches and scratches than the previous films. HORSE FEATHERS Groucho to Zeppo: "What's all this talk I hear about you fooling around with a college widow? No wonder you can't get out of college. Twelve years in one college. I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows." Groucho is the newly elected president of Huxley College who tries to hire two football players to help his team win, but he ends up hiring Harpo and Chico instead. The climactic football game is an inspired bit of lunacy, and the picture as a whole is much more cinematic than the first three - it moves. Includes the classic bit of Groucho and Chico trying to enter the bar by saying the password. The print is somewhat scratchy with some sound skips, splices, frame jitter and speckling, but these problems come and go - one reel is especially bad, while others are quite good. For some reason, Universal has included a trailer made for a video release of the movie in the 1980s. It adds absolutely nothing. DUCK SOUP Zeppo to Groucho, in war zone: "General Smith reports a gas attack. He wants to know what to do." "Tell him to take a teaspoon full of bicarbonate of soda and a half a glass of water." "Yes, sir." The Marx Brothers' final Paramount film is a bona fide masterpiece and is technically in the best shape of all the movies in this set. Directed by Leo McCarey, it is brilliant political satire, especially the final sequence where the Marx Brothers are in combat. Groucho is president of Freedonia and declares war on a neighboring country in order to defend the honor of Freedonia and Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont). The sequence with three brothers dressed as Groucho, culminating in the famous mirror scene, is hysterical no matter how many times you see it. Duck Soup was famously a flop upon release and nearly sank Paramount Pictures. Now it's hailed not just as the best Marx Brothers movie of all but as one of the finest comedies ever made, and it is listed in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. (It was one of the first 50 titles to be inducted.) The film was a turning point for the brothers. Zeppo retired to become a talent manager afterwards, and Paramount stopped producing Marx Brothers movies, clearing the way for MGM's Irving Thalberg to step in, sign the boys to a new contract, and significantly re-shape their films narratively. This resulted in one indisputable gem, A Night at the Opera, and then other films of steadily decreasing quality (though they all have their moments). Thalberg thought the Paramount productions too madcap and unfocused, but in hindsight, that was not a problem. Seen today, these pictures are fresh and hilariously funny, whether you're 9 or 90, and this DVD set, despite its shortcomings, is one of the more notable releases of the year. To order The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection, go to TCM Shopping. by Jeremy Arnold

Quotes

Who are you?
- Baravelli

I'm fine, thanks, who are you?
- Professor Wagstaff

I'm fine too, but you can't come in unless you give the password.
- Baravelli

Well, what is the password?
- Professor Wagstaff

Aw, no. You gotta tell me. Hey, I tell what I do. I give you three guesses. It's the name of a fish.
- Baravelli

You gotta brother?
- Baravelli

No.
- Mullen

You gotta sister?
- Baravelli

Yeah.
- Mullen

Well-a, you sister, she's a very sick man, you better come with us.
- Baravelli

What do you think of that slide?
- Biology teacher

Well, I think he was safe at second, but it was very close.
- Professor Wagstaff

Oh, Professor, you're full of whimsy.
- Connie

Can you notice it from there? I'm always that way after I eat radishes.
- Professor Wagstaff

Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
- Professor Wagstaff

But Professor. Where will the students sleep?
- The Professors

Where they always sleep. In the classroom.
- Professor Wagstaff

Trivia

When Groucho Marx is broadcasting on the radio, the man next to him at the typewriter is Groucho's friend/writer Arthur Sheekman.

In the last half of the movie Chico is limping. During the making of the movie, Chico was in a car accident and his kneecap was shattered.

Notes

The title card to the film reads "Adolph Zukor presents The Four Marx Brothers in Horse Feathers." According to pre-release news items in Film Daily, Arthur Sheekman was signed to the writing team, and dance director Harold Hecht was signed to direct two dances in the film, however, their contribution to the final film is undetermined. An August 1932 news item in Hollywood Reporter notes that writer Will B. Johnstone sued for writing credit because a scene from his 1924 play I'll Say She Is, which he wrote for the Marx Bros., appeared in the film. News items in Film Daily report that production was halted for approximately six weeks while Chico Marx recuperated from an injury he sustained in an automobile accident. Production was halted in late April 1932 and resumed in late June 1932. A August 3, 1932 Hollywood Reporter news item reported that director Norman McLeod shot a new ending for the film. Modern sources name the song that interrupts "I'm Against It" as "I Always Get My Man," which is a line in the song. Modern sources include E. H. Calvert (Professor) in the cast and note that the title of the film derived from a Barney Google cartoon of 1928. In addition, modern sources note that some scenes were filmed at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA.

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States 1932

Released in United States March 1976

Released in United States on Video February 23, 1989

Released in United States 1932

Released in United States on Video February 23, 1989

Released in United States March 1976 (Shown at FILMEX: Los Angeles International Film Exposition (Special Programs: Classic American Clowns) March 18-31, 1976.)

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