Los hermanos Marx en el circo

Middle-of-the-road Marxes, with some good scenes and laughs unevenly weighted down by those ever-intrusive and out-of-place musical numbers that so often plagued these movies. No, I'm not referring to Groucho's spirited rendition of 'Lydia the Tattooed Lady'; I'm talking about hearing those two useless lead lovers crooning their sappy romantic tunes to each other ('Two Blind Loves', which is sung over and over at intervals throughout the picture, is especially grating on the nerves). There is also a song and dance sequence that comes out of left field later in the film that really feels out of place and gets in the way of things.

There are certainly some witty Groucho zingers, as well as vintage Harpo madness, to be found here. It's just that there's not enough consistency and too much of the fluff. It's a pity the filmmakers just didn't realize that it's the Marx Brothers we're here to see; not Kenny Baker and Florence Rice.

No, this isn't the Cecil B. De Mille big top opus, it's the Marx Brothers one. The boys were slowing down a bit when they made it, and as it came out in 1939, it kind of got buried under all the other movies of that remarkable film year, and is now somewhat neglected. This is a pity, for while it isn't their best movie, it's far from their worst. The plot isn't worth going into,--does anyone really want a synopsis of a Marx Brothers film?--and grande dame Margaret Dumont is on hand as the woman of Groucho's nightmares come to life. Kenny Baker and Florence Rice are the leads, and I've seen far worse. This isn't a belly laugh movie but it's very amusing. The production values are excellent, and the circus itself is fun, and so is the gorilla. Every comedian should encounter a gorilla at least once in his career. At the Circus is Groucho's chance, and it provides the movie with its funniest moment. This isn't a great comedy, but it's a very good movie.

Which is to say, neither the Marx Brothers' best nor their worst, but the end of their great period and the beginning of their decline. MGM was simply a studio that (with few exceptions) didn't understand comedy. After this GO WEST has its moments, but THE BIG STORE is nearly a complete waste of time (and when I say "nearly" I'm being charitable --- offhand I can't thing of a single good thing to say about it).

AT THE CIRCUS, on the other, hand, still has many things to recommend it, if you have the iron will it takes to sit through the incredibly schmaltzy and irritating "love" angle. Lots of funny one liners, Harpo riding around on an ostrich and bopping people with his horn, the problematic "Swingali" number (which offends many people but somehow only makes me reflect that Harpo transcends racial barriers), a guy in a gorilla suit, and last but very, very far from least, "Lydia the Tattooed Lady".

For that number alone you should see this movie. Of course if you're a Marx fan you've seen it anyway --- you've probably even seen LOVE HAPPY.

Ugh.

The decline of the Marx Brothers does not begin with ROOM SERVICE, which is hysterical at it's conclusion, but with AT THE CIRCUS. Groucho always insisted that had Irving Thalberg lived his care would have made the other films in the contract after A DAY AT THE RACES as good as that and A NIGHT AT THE OPERA. This meant that the film had to be taken on the road as a Vaudeville show, and the material tested carefully. But Thalberg was dead, and Louis B. Mayer was quite unsympathetic to these three clowns who were...well clowns, and who had gotten too good a sweetheart contract from Thalburg in terms of profits. Mayer thought of comedians as interchangeable, and could not care about allowing talented ones to test their material - you hand them a script and that was that: they are paid to make it funny. If they don't you fire them.

So it is traditional to blame AT THE CIRCUS, GO WEST, and THE BIG STORE on Mayer's hostility. That hostility played a major role (there is just no denying it), but in the case of AT THE CIRCUS there is another point that is frequently overlooked. In movies by comedians, it was rare for a circus comedy to be really funny. W.C.Fields, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN was an exception - a truly funny circus comedy, but it's strength was the film record of Field's radio feud with ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy. Had it been set in a movie studio or a bank or a foreign country it would have been just as successful. But other comedians were not as lucky. Charlie Chaplin worked two years on THE CIRCUS, and while a good film it was not the great film he hoped to make. The atmosphere of a circus should have been inviting to comics - after all, here clowns were really clowns. But for some reason the special needs of movie funny-men were hard to translate into the atmosphere of the big top. Possibly the best use of the big top as a comic background was in Laurel & Hardy's short film THE CHIMP. The first quarter of the film shows how they wreck the circus (which was on it's last legs anyway). But the remaining three quarters of the film deal with the boys problems with a rooming house owned by a jealous Billy Gilbert, and the title "chimp" they hope to sell to a zoo.

With the Marxes the circus just does not absorb them too much. Groucho is there, hired as a lawyer to assist Kenny Baker and his pal Chico. Harpo, as Chico's brother, is a circus roustabout. But there is little example of their involvement in the circus life of the troop or of the animals (Harpo should have been involved with circus horses, anyway). Bits of the film are actually quite good - like Chico and Harpo trying to find papers in Nat Pendleton's (the circus strongman's) room. They manage to turn it into a Christmas nightmare for poor Pendleton. And Groucho certainly has two great moments: the business of trying to get on the circus train without knowing the password (even one of the animals knows the password), and his singing "Lydia The Tattooed Lady".

There were some cuts, apparently. Groucho had a sequence where his trial skills were shown in a court presided over by Edgar Kennedy. One wishes they had kept that in the film. The poor portions, mostly tied to the sickeningly sweet and naive Kenny Baker (fighting the crooked James Burke) are overwhelming. At least Groucho was able to have another session with Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Dukesberry (Baker's aunt), and poor Margaret gets shot out of a cannon in the end. But the drab spots outnumber the good ones. Not too bad, but still just mediocre as a result.

The Marx Brothers burst onto the scene in the 1929 comedy "The Cocoanuts". Over the next few years they starred in some of the all-time classics, namely "Horse Feathers" and "Duck Soup".

Then something happened. I don't know the reason, but they left Paramount (which financed the aforementioned movies) and moved to MGM. By that point, MGM was well established as the domain of happy-go-lucky musicals, and it showed in the Marx Brothers' movies. Far from the biting satire of their earlier movies, these newer movies tended to show them performing antics in various settings: opera, horse racing, and now the circus. "At the Circus" is funny, but it's no "Duck Soup".

Ignoring all that, there's plenty of laughs to be had here (and quite a few hot babes). Enjoyable in that respect. Jerry Maren (Atom) is best known as one of the Munchkins in "The Wizard of Oz" and died only last year, making him not only the last surviving speaking cast member from TWoO, but the last surviving cast member from a Marx Brothers movie.