Into_The_West

To say you don't like A Day at the Races is blasphemous. You can note it as the first sign of their decline, or the last film they made that actually clicked, but that it doesn't work, that's taking your life in your hands. Yet, I will.

I cannot call A Day at the Races a movie with no great comic moments. I can't say that about any Marx Bros. movie, even the execrable Big Store. The question is how often do they come, and how often do you find yourself clicking the "skip" button on the DVD remote.

The film has three unequivocally great bits: Tootsie-Frootsie Ice Cream, Chico and Harpo keeping Groucho from being found in flagrante delicto by Margaret Dumont, and Margaret Dumont's medical examination. What surrounds these, at least up to the 1 hr., 20 min point, is lesser Marx, but generally good excepting those scenes when Jack Jones's father and Mureen O'Sullivan are present, or ballets, or songs, or spirituals or....

A lot of it isn't the material or the brothers' delivery of it. We have another gooey and extensive Allan Jones romantic subplot, this time featuring Tarzan's mate (and Mia Farrow's mother), Maureen O'Sullivan. And the musical bits outside of Harpo and Chico's solos are just too long and don't seem to have a real function in the film except to satisfy what was assumed to be the public's thirst for MGM musical numbers.

But a lot of it is how the brothers are used. Groucho is much too much an avuncular type, going for pathos with lines to O'Sullivan like, "What if I'm not the doctor you think I am?" (Groucho is a vet when everyone thinks he's a renowned M.D.) It's not that Groucho can't do pathos. It's just that Groucho doesn't demean his abilities even if one would think he should. Can you imagine him saying, "I'm not the explorer you think I am" to Margaret Dumont in Animal Crackers?? What's more, Harpo seems unusually underused here. He has lots of scenes with Chico, or with Chico and Groucho, but virtually nothing alone, unlike in A Night at the Opera, or any of the Paramount films. When you don't have Harpo with his own bits, even briefly, that takes a lot away from a Marx Bros. film, too.

One plus to note in the film, however, is Margaret Dumont. On a web page, as evidence of Ms. Dumont's legendary inability to understand any of the material she ever acted in, it quotes Maureen O'Sullivan as saying that Dumont had referred to Mrs. Upjohn (her character in Races) as a "serious part, not like the others." Well, it is serious in the sense it's a far more three dimensional character than Mrs. Potter, Rittenhouse, Teasdale and Claypool. In those roles, the material basically gave Dumont the opportunity to play straight man to Groucho, no mean feat, and no one could have done it better. But Mrs. Upjohn is not merely stuffy, or snooty, or naive--she's neurotic. Her need to be reassured she's sick when she isn't is a grand comic bit on its own, as is her attraction, then disaffection, then attraction again to Groucho (it's the only film where Groucho proposes to her seriously and she accepts). She won a Screen Actors Guild award for this and it's not too difficult to understand why.

As stated before, there's no Marx Bros. film that's worth total rejection, and there's plenty of good Groucho insults and Chico con games here. It just would have been nice had the film been shorter, had less plot, less music, more comedy, and above all, more Harpo.

So I say watch until the examination screen, skip the musical numbers (except Groucho dancing with Esther Muir), mute it whenever Irene Hervey's ex and John Farrow's wife are present, turn it off and be happy