Cuatro del mismo palo

To anyone who has never seen a Marx Brothers film, it's hard to describe. "Horse Feathers" just may be the wackiest, corniest, dumbest, funniest and just plain craziest movie you've ever seen. It could be any one of those adjectives. In my opinion, it's all of them. It's my favorite film of these guys.

Perhaps no film has so many of the above-listed descriptions, in spades, as this one does. It just leaves you shaking your head. Some of the lines in here are some of the best I've ever heard and some of the scenes and jokes are the dumbest I've ever seen. One thing for sure: they come at you at a machine-gun pace. You barely have time to digest what you just saw and heard and there's another joke coming at you. You can barely keep up with it all. The football scenes at the end of the film are the most outrageous I have ever seen. They, like much of the movie, have to be seen to be believed. Yes, the latter is a little too ridiculous but, hey, that''s the Marx Brothers.

The only breaks from the non-stop jokes comes when one of the brothers decides to sing a song or play the piano or harp. Those tunes are so-so. The long harp solo by Harpo is too long. I read once where the brothers were opposed to having that in this movie...and they were proved right; it didn't fit. Other than that, this is 67 minutes of pure insanity.

Plot (or should I say plan of attack)— Entering a college campus, the gang gets to deconstruct the whole idea of higher education.

The gags fly faster than speeding bullets. There's no real let-up, not even for hasty romantic interludes with Zeppo and Todd. It's like the boys have a hundred pages of material to squeeze into 70-minutes. Harpo's got more to do than usual, even a harp solo, while Groucho is at his caustic best with a zillion one-liners. I did miss his usual foil, Margaret Dumont, who should have been lurking somewhere in the faculty lounge. Instead, as a college president, he gets to insult anything collegiate, including America's unofficial national religion-- football. And check out that big game that looks more like Ben Hur than a sports contest. But what I really liked was Thelma Todd in the slinkiest gowns this side of Jean Harlow. And what a fine comedienne she was; too bad her life ended as several probing pages in Hollywood Babylon. All in all, this is the chaos brothers at their liveliest, and may cause highschoolers to rethink the whole idea of higher education.

HORSE FEATHERS, the fourth of the five Paramount Marx Brother Movies, is one of their best - tackling the world of higher education in America. Groucho is the latest of the Presidents of Huxley College, which is doing very badly (apparently) not because of poor scholastic standards but due to not having a successful football team. His son (Zeppo!) steers him toward solving this issue, but with typical Groucho ineptness he thinks the two semi-professional football players he is looking for are Harpo and Chico. He proceeds to regret his own mistake, until the climactic football game.

The music numbers of this film are well remembered, particularly Groucho's introduction ("I'M AGAINST IT!") and "Everyone Says I love you". The latter was sung to the anti-heroine of the story, Thelma Todd in her second and last film with the brothers. Thelma plays the "college widow", a popular fictional figure in early 20th Century American humor - a euphemism for an ever-ready widow of a college professor who was there to have sex with students or the staff. George Ade, the humorist who wrote FABLES IN SLANG, wrote a play called "THE COLLEGE WIDOW" in the teens of the 20th Century. Thelma is certainly effective as the vamp trying to help David Landau (President of Darwin College) get the football signals of Huxley College. Her scenes with Groucho and Chico are quite funny. Chico is playing the piano and she sings. She says she has a falsetto voice. Chico says that's all right, his aunt has a false set of teeth. And Groucho, when taking Thelma for a boat trip throws her a lifesaver (literally), while returning with a duck who interrupted his singing.

The final football game is the second best spoof of college football on film (the one in Harold Lloyd's THE FRESHMAN is a better one). In the end we see the boys demolish football huddles, football signals, even hot dogs (poor Nat Pendleton).

A delightful antique, it is well worth watching. This is one film I'm not against.

Don't watch HORSE FEATHERS expecting anything like a coherent plot, developed characterization or sophisticated filming technique. Shot on a shoestring by Paramount, with more than its fair share of stock footage, it has the feel of a quickie; a more up-market version of the Hal Roach two-reelers that were released at the same time with Laurel and Hardy. On the other hand HORSE FEATHERS does preserve for posterity some of the Marx Brothers' finest routines. Groucho has never been better as a crazy professor charged with the responsibility of rescuing a poor school; his dialog fairly crackles with one-liners, and he is a past master at handling mock-love scenes. Harpo has his fair share of visual set-pieces, notably when he leads a police officer a merry dance in and around his dog-catcher's van. He also has the chance for one of his harp solos. Chico enjoys himself most during a speakeasy scene, when he and the other two brothers have great fun with the so-called 'secret' password. He gets to play the piano in another specialty number. The ending is a bit weak, with a crazy football game stretching the audiences' credibility to the limit, but all in all the film is great fun; the humor stands up well eight decades later.

I was challenged by a reader, because I wrote that a movie was funny. His belief was that the movie wasn't funny, that it couldn't be because the comedians were too old, and I wouldn't know in any case because I was also too old. So I turned to the good old Marx Brothers.

Fortunately, some other unhappy soul had deleted my comment for this movie, so I can write a replacement.

I think this is funny. It shouldn't really matter to me whether anyone else does, except insofar as they support the market forces that guarantee I can access it. But as it happens, lots of other people also think it funny and I wonder why.

"Horse Feathers," if you do not know, was the frontier term for split boards about two feet long that were nailed on barns in an overlapping fashion like shingles. These were primitive, but had the advantage of keeping your major investment, your horse, warm. They are themselves ad hoc, somewhat random with some order, and an effective container. Such a barn was wholly man-made, but clearly the mind finds it handy to make the joke that if the barn looked like a chicken, then its name should follow.

Lexicographers know that language often naturally grows from these jokes. The older the term gets, the deeper the joke: "horsefeathers" probably originated in the 1870-80's homesteading era, and gained popularity as farm boys from those areas were mixed into the WW I army, the term used as a substitute for one whose use would have been punished for insubordination. It subsequently entered the print world when used in Wilson's second presidential campaign.

A youngster with no knowledge of its origin would simply hear "nonsense." but a wizened farmer would recall the image of a building that looks ridiculous, like a chicken. He would have recalled chuckling when thinking what part of the chicken he would enter and exit each day when doing his chores. It would contribute to giving his life enough richness to keep going.

I believe that the best humor is humor like this. It combines small twists of language with implied bigger twists of incited images. And it gets warmer and deeper (and funnier) the more you live with it.

The first (language and image), is what the Marx brothers invented in cinema. These guys had honed a stage act based on clever language — timing, twists, perspectives implied by stereotypes. Its all in the words. But they were able to bring it to us in a frantic, ad hoc visual manner, so that we could have a blizzard of images like the feathered barn, the images themselves feathered together in a sort of story.

Eye and mind played with, and played through practice. These masters were not kids. Groucho by the time this was made was 43. He got funnier every year after that in working with these sorts of ad libbed word images. His "secret word" bit in "You Bet your Life," was even a part of this.

These, I think, are basic to the both the notion of what makes cinema work (folded images and narrative) and what makes humor attractive (naming enriched by ambiguous image). If you want to know yourself, you navigate through your cupboard of these that you have collected. You go to school. You play the game. You can only do this and truly laugh if you are old enough (or young and aggressive enough in collecting) to have something to rumble around in.

Marx brothers: old school funny. At least to me.

This is one of their Paramount projects before being reinvented again by MGM. More random; more eggs.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.