JarretCo

I can't tell you how loathsome every single person in this film is...from the "slut" to the "nerd" to the "army guy" to the "good girl" to the "perv" etc. etc. etc. It's the most masochistic movie-watching experience I've ever had -- I wanted to pick up any given actor by the feet and beat the rest of the actors to death with him, then make the writers eat what's left. That's the most horrific part -- actors could be forgiven for just picking up a check, but someone actually WROTE this pile of sh_t, thinking it was funny and/or suspenseful. Seek it out if you dare -- even the MST3000 treatment can't mitigate all of the horror.

In fact up until the climax it's unusually bad for an Our Gang from this period. The Chinese stuff is unpleasant, the bit where the girls peep on Wally is just weird, and most of all, every time the kids all have to express unscripted eagerness and enthusiasm, it's a horrible, horrible, fake cacophony of "Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!" until you want to kick every one of them through the goal posts. The chaos at the society party partially redeems it -- you can't do much to screw up monkeys throwing cream puffs at stuck-up society dames.

I get the sense that this and "Duck Soup" are the only two Marx Brothers movies that people (young people) see anymore. This film's been overpraised since it restored the Marxes' box-office clout in 1935 by critics and fans alike, as well as all the brothers. The comedy is first-rate, but how great can a film be when you're fast-forwarding through all the musical numbers (and you KNOW you are...)? Even more distressing is the softening and sanitizing of the brothers' characters from the Paramount films (Groucho hugging the girl on the boat is one particularly depressing example). Don't hesitate to see it, but if this is your first exposure to the Marx Brothers, you owe it to yourself to follow up with "Duck Soup", "Horse Feathers" and "Monkey Business" to see what they were REALLY meant to be.