City Girl

F.W. Murnau's City Girl is something of a response to and a reconfiguration of the director's earlier Sunrise, returning to that film's theme of the opposition of rural and urban values. Lem (Charles Farrell) is a farmer's son, heading to the big city to make a deal for his family's impending wheat harvest. While he's there, he isn't able to make quite the deal that his stern father (David Torrence) had been counting on, but he does meet the waitress Kate (Mary Duncan), so when he returns to the family farm, it's with a girl from the big city as his new wife. Naturally, this sets up a country/city divide, but not in the expected ways, and Murnau purposefully hints at his earlier film as a way of contrasting it against this one. At the beginning of the film, while Lem is taking the train to the city, he's sized up by a gold-digging woman who takes interest once she notices the wad of bills he's carrying. She's a callback to the vile city vamp of Sunrise, but Murnau swiftly foils her plans; thankfully, this isn't a story about the city girl corrupting the wholesome and innocent country boy, but something much more complex.

In fact, this is a film about love transcending that kind of shallow distinction between city and country. It's also about replacing romantic and artificial notions about rural purity and urban corruption with a more pragmatic and balanced view of humanity as a whole. Kate herself, unhappy in the city, romanticizes the country, looking longingly at posters of a wheat field and a pond with a couple rowing across it — an image that's not nearly as romantic as it seems to her, with Sunrise's iconic and rather grim boat ride in mind. Murnau sets the film up as though it is going to be steeped in romantic pastoralism, in shallow contrasts between city and country. "Give us this day our daily bread," the farmer says as he prepares to eat, and Murnau cuts from him slicing off a large slice of bread from a loaf to a diner in the city, where tiny slices of processed white bread roll off a conveyer belt for a waitress to serve. Lem is also something of a caricatured rural good boy, which is partly what attracts Kate to him in the first place. In a crowded, fast-paced urban restaurant where most of the guys just want to leer at her, Lem stands out as the guy who prays before he eats and writes out postcards expressing his love for his kindly mother (Edith Yorke).

It's when the couple arrives in the country that the trouble starts, though not quite immediately. Their arrival at Lem's family farm is exuberant and kinetic, Murnau's camera tracking along with the couple as they run and twirl through the fields of wheat, pausing to hold and kiss one another, excited and in love. The farmhouse in the distance, its chimney billowing smoke, promises the welcoming comfort of home and hearth. The reality, of course, is not quite as idyllic: Lem's father, with his own received ideas about the differences between city and country, views this woman as an interloper, a bad girl, a vamp who's just using his son in some way.


Once she moves to the country, Kate soon learns that it's not what she thought it would be, and that there's cruelty and nastiness everywhere, that there are even men here just as mean and manipulative as her grabby diner customers, like the harvest foreman Mac (Richard Alexander), who tries to exploit the tension between her and Lem to break them apart. Kate had gone to the country thinking that she'd be escaping the urban grind and the soul-numbing artificiality of the city. In her cramped city apartment, billboards had provided her only window into natural vistas, and she tried to approximate the allure of the natural world with a wind-up mechanical bird kept in a cage, a toy that she then brings with her to the country, where it in turn provides a connection back to the city.

Murnau, even while critiquing simplistic dichotomies between city and country, still captures the moody beauty of the countryside, the lure of the open fields, the sensuous gloom of a dark night with a pale moon hanging low in the sky above the farmhouse. The film's gorgeous imagery is especially mesmerizing during the stunning, incredibly tense climax, in which the family and their hired hands must rush to bring in the harvest before a threatening hailstorm blows in and destroys the crops. While the wind kicks into a frenzy and the men labor outside, the brewing trouble between Lem and Kate comes to a head as Mac stirs up a confrontation with Lem's father. The stormy, foreboding atmosphere constantly threatens to explode in various ways, and the tension builds with the increasingly intense wind outside. Murnau's images are loaded with drama, particularly in the way in which he frames taut two-shots in which the characters' poses are infused with their conflicted emotions. The images of Kate and Lem together, especially, are charged with their new, passionate, but fractured relationship — their postures simultaneously suggest intimacy and disconnection, as though they're both desperately pushing towards each other and pulling away, their intimacy polluted by the differences in their backgrounds and origins.

This is one of Murnau's very best films, a deeply moving and passionate film, a poignant romance that's tested but ultimately strengthened by the film's clearheaded skewering of the idealization that often goes along with such romances.

The Blue Angel

Marlene Dietrich's performance as the burlesque singer Lola Lola is one of the most iconic screen incarnations of the dangerous woman who lures a man to his destruction. This role in The Blue Angel was Dietrich's breakthrough; director Josef von Sternberg discovered her here and would make her his muse in many subsequent films. She radiates sex as the singer who wins the heart of the stuffy, sexless Professor Rath (Emil Jannings), an aging bachelor whose sheltered existence makes him especially susceptible to Lola's womanly charms. Rath initially only goes to the club the Blue Angel because he's outraged to learn that his students have been going there at night, but he keeps returning because of Lola.

The professor's fascination with the singer is charming and almost childlike; he becomes flustered and foolish in her presence, very unlike the stern disciplinarian he is with his students. This was an early venture in sound filmmaking for everyone involved, and it shows in the broad, physical performances, especially Jannings' turn as the professor. He blushes — it's obvious even in black-and-white — and sputters, his eloquence totally gone. Sternberg stages numerous deliciously naughty scenes that play up the professor's total helplessness before the spectacle of Lola. She drops her cigarette case and he goes scurrying under the table, fumbling around to recover the spilled cigarettes, but getting distracted by her long stockinged legs splayed out next to his head. "Send me a postcard," she says, her voice dripping with insinuation. Later, Rath gets drunk and wakes up in Lola's bed, clutching a doll, which he examines quizzically, like a child with a new toy. That's how he is with Lola in general, as though he's discovering women and sex for the first time, which of course he is.


The film then relentlessly, pitilessly follows Rath's downfall, his sad descent from respected professor to pathetic clown. Rath's boyish pursuit of a notorious woman like Lola causes him to lose the respect of his students and his colleagues, and he's soon drummed out of the college. In the scene where he loses his job, he sits at the front of the class, toying with a flower that Lola had given him, surrounded by mocking chalk drawings that his students had drawn on the blackboards behind him. The camera tracks back, leaving him isolated there, receding into the distance, and Sternberg repeats this unforgettable, simple but effective shot at the very end of the film. Rath then marries Lola and joins the traveling revue run by the magician Kiepert (Kurt Gerron). When Rath discovers, on his wedding night, a pile of risque pictures of his new wife, he demands that she stop selling these souvenirs. Her deadpan response is telling, and chilling, as she tells him they better hold onto them in case he's ever poor. Sure enough, Sternberg immediately cuts to a shot of Rath, some time later, shuffling through the postcards, waiting for Lola's performance to end so he can walk around from table to table, selling them to the club patrons.

The film reaches a heartbreaking, absolutely shattering climax when the revue returns, after five years away, to the Blue Angel in Rath's hometown, the first time he's been back since his disgrace. In the meantime, his relationship with Lola has deteriorated, and the childlike bliss he once felt with her has long since vanished, along with his dignity. The man who once virulently defended her virtue, calling Kiepert "a pimp" for convincing Lola to drink with club patrons, now finds himself in the same position, living off of her beauty and seductiveness, living off of her appeal to other men. Worse, Kiepert sells the Blue Angel show on Rath's name, knowing that his former friends and students and neighbors will flock to the club in order to see the disgraced old man perform as a clown alongside his sexy, provocative wife. This is the final assault on Rath's dignity, though he's perhaps even more shaken up by Lola's blatant infidelity, her flaunting of her new dalliance with a strongman who's also performing at the club.

Rath's stage act is harrowing to watch: he stumbles onstage in a daze, pulled along by Kiepert, standing utterly still, his posture slumped and his face frozen, while the magician performs his tricks and gets laughs by smashing eggs on Rath's head. The show, it's clear, is only successful to the extent that it humiliates the professor: that's what everyone is there to see, and they laugh uproariously at anything at Rath's expense, while remaining silent for Kiepert's magic tricks. At a key moment, Rath is supposed to crow like a chicken while Kiepert makes eggs appear from thin air in front of the professor's face, but Rath stays silent until he sees Lola, backstage, kissing and embracing another man. Kiepert pulls him back onstage, telling him to crow, and he does, letting out an anguished, horrifying sound, a sob of fury and despair ripped from his very soul. He cries like a chicken, for the delight of the audience, but it's a heartrending sound, a sound of such raw emotion that it provides all the justification that could ever be needed for the switch from silents to talkies.


Dietrich's songs are also unforgettable, and another big reason why this was one of the very first major sound pictures. Her dry, deep delivery makes her ribald songs seem offhanded, as though she's so blasé about her own sexiness that she can simply drawl out these naughty come-on tunes. She stalks about the stage as she sings, not wiggling or dancing; there's something almost mannish and unfeminine about her stage manner, but only because she knows damn well that she doesn't have to oversell. She just has to stand there, stretching those long legs, singing those songs, and the men will helplessly fall all over her. That's why her signature song includes the oft-repeated phrase, "I can't help it," because she really can't. There's just something naturally seductive about her, a force of nature that's beyond her power to control. She really does have some feelings for Rath, it seems, and she thinks he's sweet and charming when he defends her from the caresses of other men. But everything she liked about him is worn away by the reality of living with her lifestyle, so their relationship is doomed to failure.

The Blue Angel is a tremendous film, a classic that endures for far more reasons than its undeniable historical relevance. It was the film that made Dietrich a star, and that forged the Dietrich/Sternberg partnership that would yield six more collaborations in the next five years. It also helped Sternberg transition from silents to talkies. The Blue Angel occasionally betrays its transitional nature, especially in the way sound from outside is abruptly cut off whenever a door shuts, a device Sternberg makes a bit of a gag out of during the backstage scenes. It's also notable that much of the action, particularly Jannings' comedic bits, plays out without dialogue, getting across the substance of a scene through the actors' body language and facial expressions. It's a film with one foot still in the silent era, and yet its use of sound can also be explosive and powerful, which is a big part of what makes the film so dazzling. It's the best of both worlds, straddling two very different modes of filmmaking, ushering in the new era while reaching back for some choice tricks from the old. The Blue Angel has it all: it's sexy, funny, gorgeously shot, and above all, deeply tragic.

Murder!

[This post is a contribution to the third annual For the Love of Film blogathon and fundraiser, which will be running from May 13-18. This year, hosts Marilyn Ferdinand, Farran Smith Nehme and Roderick Heath have dedicated the week to Alfred Hitchcock, whose early (non-directorial) work "The White Shadow" will be the beneficiary of any money earned during the event. Be sure to donate!]

Murder! was Alfred Hitchcock's third sound film, and it bears plentiful evidence of the young director experimenting with form and style, livening up what's otherwise a routine and glacially paced murder mystery. The theater actress Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is found one night sitting beside the corpse of one of her fellow actresses, swearing that she doesn't remember killing the girl. Nevertheless, it seems to be an open-and-shut case, and she's promptly convicted and placed on death row. Only after the trial is over does one of the jurors, Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), have second thoughts about letting himself get talked into going along with the guilty verdict. He begins investigating the case himself, hoping to uncover evidence of Diana's innocence. The film's plot is simple and schematic, and the pace is almost painfully plodding, with one inert scene after another walking Sir John closer to the solution. The performances are mostly not bad, but it's Hitchcock's budding visual imagination and subtle sense of humor that really elevates this pedestrian material.

The film opens in a quaint, patently artificial village that looks like it belongs in a German Expressionist silent: an appropriate place for a murder. In the opening scenes, Hitchcock cleverly builds tension sonically, starting with a scream that wakes up the neighborhood, sends birds fluttering away, and sets the dogs to howling. The soundtrack becomes noisy and cluttered: barking, people chattering, the banging noises of the police knocking on the door of the house that's causing all this disturbance. Hitchcock defuses the suspense slightly with the humor of one couple who stick their heads out their window, the wooden frame continually sliding down on their necks, but they're so intent on seeing what's happening that they let it push them down into the flower bed, craning their necks to see. At the site of all the clamor, Hitchcock further elongates the tension by focusing on the reactions of the people at the scene, shooting the backs of the heads of the people crowding around the door.

By this point, it's obvious that there's been a murder, but rather than just unveiling the body, Hitchcock employs a precise, elegant, slow camera move that retains the influence of the silent cinema in its ability to trace a whole narrative in the angle of the camera' arc. The camera moves from Diana's haunted, staring profile, down her arm, to the splatter of blood on the hem of her dress and her hand dangling just above the floor, then moving perpendicularly along the floor, parallel to a fire poker, the murder weapon, which lays pointing directly at the head of the dead woman who now, finally, appears within the frame.

Diana doesn't appear much in the film, but she still instantly makes an impression with her intense stare and shell-shocked demeanor. She barely even says much, mostly just staring blankly off into the distance, haunted by the secrets she's hiding and won't reveal even to save her own life or help her case. Her expressive silent movie actress face carries a lot of weight for what is otherwise an underwritten character; she serves as the trigger for the plot but is only vaguely defined even though the whole story revolves around her. Her most compelling moment is a wordless montage in which Hitchcock alternates overhead shots of her pacing around her cell with a foreboding image of the shadow of a noose reflected on a wall, creeping slowly up the wall as the sun changes position, a cleverly grim way of suggesting the passage of time.


Hitchcock also has some fun with a quirky little scene in which two gossipy women prepare tea while talking about the murder. This long scene plays out in a single shot that repeatedly tracks back and forth between two adjacent rooms as one of the women putters around, preparing the tea and laying out cups. Each time she walks from one room to the next, the camera tracks with her, and her friend scurries after her, sitting down, then almost immediately getting up again to return to the other room. The back-and-forth tracking of the camera brings out the deadpan comedy of this otherwise mundane scene, building an entirely cinematic and formal humor that's distinct from the banal content of the scene.

Hitchcock puts a little verve into moments like that whenever he can, because he doesn't have a whole lot to work with here. Once the trial is over and Sir John begins his investigation, the film is dominated by a series of stagey dialogues with witnesses and suspects, and there's not much Hitchcock can do to make these lifelessly written scenes pop. There are hints, here and there, of a buried homosexual subtext that was more explicit in the Clemence Dane novel the film is based on, but here it's mostly replaced by an undercooked racial theme. The film's theater milieu is full of crossdressing actors, and gradually the investigation begins to focus on the trapeze artist Handel Fane (Esme Percy), who dresses up as a glamorous woman and flies through the air, wowing the crowds with his grace. Fane's feminine artistry plays into the shocking circus climax, which Hitchcock stages by putting the focus on the horrified reactions of the crowd, just as he had during the opening scenes.

He then follows this, almost perfunctorily, with a letter that explains the film's whole plot, because after a climax like that, there's not much to do but quickly wrap things up and call it a day. As Sir John reads this letter, the shadows of the circus crowd flit by on the wall behind him, giving the scene a weird, disconnected feeling, as though the hero has quietly tucked himself off in a corner, isolated from the chaos, to resolve the plot. It's fitting, too, that the film then ends with a curtain coming down on a theater's stage, a last playful touch that accentuates the artificiality of these dramatics.

The Dawn Patrol (1930)

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' first sound film after a string of silents, The Dawn Patrol is as technically rough, ragged, and uneven as one expects an early talkie to be. And yet the film is undeniably potent and enthralling, as well as displaying many of the characteristics that we have come to think of as Hawksian: it seems that the director's aesthetic and signature concerns were forged relatively early. The aviation film is of course perfectly suited to Hawks, and he would return to this subject many times over the course of his career, including for one of his most successful slightly later works, Only Angels Have Wings. The flying milieu provides Hawks, readymade, with all the elements he needs to craft his aesthetic: the tough, manly men facing death with bravado; the constant threat of mortality hanging over everything; the responsibility of leadership; the aerial adventures and daring of the fliers. As in his later aviation films, Hawks primarily uses this genre to explore the behavior of men who are continually confronted with their own mortality and the mortality of their friends and loved ones.

The film centers around a squadron of World War I bomber pilots located not far from the German lines, and therefore repeatedly called upon to undertake incredibly dangerous missions at or even across the enemy lines. The constants of this squadron are Dick Courtney (Richard Barthelmess) and Doug Scott (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), two ace pilots who have earned veteran status simply by surviving for the longest amount of time, as their squad mates cyclically die and get replaced by new recruits. The two are inseparable friends, united in their defiance of death, though as the head of the seven-man A-flight, Courtney has the heavier load, feeling personal responsibility for each man he loses in battle. This responsibility weighs even heavier on their superior officer, Major Brand (Neil Hamilton), who receives his endless supply of near-suicidal orders with a heavy heart, knowing that his protests will do no good, and he'll have to keep ordering his men into danger. He does this with regret, but with a stoic dedication to duty that earns him the ire of Courtney, who needs to transfer his own rage somewhere.


The film's central theme is the cyclical nature of war, de-emphasizing the individual in order to show the constant stream of bodies, young men being thrust into positions opened up by their now-dead predecessors. The film's structure ingeniously displays the repetitive nature of combat, with certain key scenes reappearing at intervals like recurring motifs in a piece of music, slightly altered each time to accentuate the changes that have occurred in between repetitions. One such scene is the one where the squad's commander sits in his office listening to the sound of the planes returning from their latest mission: he counts the number of motors he hears and can therefore tell how many of his men have returned, and how many died in battle. Hawks places the audience in the position of the commander, listening to the motors swooping in on the soundtrack, trying to count the number of planes. There are many scenes in which Hawks does show the aerial combat, but he almost always cuts away from the battle before its conclusion, so that he can return to the base for that tense, uncertain moment, the commander wondering how many men he has sent to their deaths this time. Many a war film has focused the audience's sympathy squarely on the lower ranks, depicting the higher-ups as craven, careless desk jockeys with no knowledge of the risks their subordinates are taking. Not so for Hawks, who not only understands the commander's horrible burden but makes him the audience's surrogate, waiting with a pit in his stomach to hear what has happened next.

Hawks also continually returns to the scene in which the commander — first Brand, then later Courtney, assuming command when Brand is promoted — delivers his orders to a reluctant subordinate, who accepts each dangerous assignment with a hate-filled glare. This is a film in which nearly every line is delivered with gritted teeth, as though each man was being forced to swallow a horrible poison and then grin afterward. The actors, still adjusting to sound, are not always up to the task, but Barthelmess at least is fantastic at playing dark and glowering. He has a fiery intensity to his stare that seems to radiate throughout his hard-set face.

In other ways, however, the acting is often melodramatic, and the delivery of the dialogue stiff and surprisingly formal, qualities that mesh awkwardly with rugged displays of Hawksian masculinity. It is obvious that the actors are transitioning uncomfortably into the demands of the sound film, and that the primitive sound equipment does them no favors. There is virtually no soundtrack music in the film — other than periodic blasts from the base phonograph — and the dialogue scenes consequently play out in an eerie, unnatural silence that emphasizes each stilted line and uneasy stab at camaraderie. Barthelmess mostly fares okay, other than a few over-the-top speeches, but the fresh-faced Fairbanks can't shake a kind of gee-whiz naiveté, and William Janney, playing Scott's younger brother Donny, is even more overwound.


If the film occasionally falters in its rough early dialogue scenes, Hawks more than compensates with the gritty brilliance of his aerial combat staging. The film was remade in 1938 as an Errol Flynn vehicle, but director Edmund Goulding retained much of Hawks' aerial footage; it's easy to see why. The flying scenes, accomplished with a great deal of grainy rear projection and scale modeling and just a minimum of real flying, are far from realistic, but they have a raw, straightforward intensity that is often as involving as the best that much more realistic effects can produce almost eighty years later. Hawks, always a master at translating the efficiency of his productions into a powerful directness onscreen, captures the essence of flying in the broadest strokes possible: a few striking shots of dot-like planes streaking across a cloud bank, along with tight in-the-cockpit closeups against rear projection backdrops. When Courtney and Scott go off on their own for a midnight bombing raid against a German encampment, Hawks turns it into an exhilarating tour de force, capturing the adrenaline rush of the fliers as they swoop and dive in their strafing assaults on the enemy.

The film is remarkable, in scenes like this, for capturing the emotional atmosphere of war rather than its concrete details. The whole war, for these men, seems to take place in this hazy rear projection universe with a relatively constant backdrop of sky and clouds, and only occasional glimpses of enemy combatants on the ground below. There is little sense of physical location, little sense of the broader picture of the war's progress; the fliers are given only tidbits of information, just enough fragmentary knowledge to identify their targets and carry through their immediate mission. Hawks passes only this information on to the audience in turn, keeping the film locked into the tunnel vision of the fliers, who in the cockpit can see only as much of the sky as they can crane their necks to take in. One is reminded of the fog-drenched atmosphere of Only Angels Have Wings, which achieves with the greater visual sophistication of a decade later roughly the same effect that Hawks already sketched out here with the limited means of the time.

Hawks also of course has a feel for the brighter emotions of these fliers, their joy in a particularly bravura maneuver, their playful camaraderie (at times hampered by the stiff acting, though the idea comes across anyway), their soulful music, singing songs intended to ward off the sadness of losing a friend. As in many of Hawks' films, coming to terms with the masculine world means masking one's emotions beneath a surface toughness and laughing off danger with a song and a grin. It also means maintaining a healthy respect for one's enemy, as shown in the extraordinary scene — virtually unimaginable in later, more propagandistic war films — in which the fliers capture a shot-down German pilot and wind up grudgingly inviting him to drink and sing with them. The same impulse is there in the enemy pilots who exchange salutes even as they gun each other out of the sky. The film suggests that all these men, on either side, are unified in their nobility and bravery, that war is not so much a necessary conflict between diametrically opposed sides, but a game, a proving ground for brave young men to test their mettle against those who, by pure chance, have been placed on the other team.

Animal Crackers

Animal Crackers was the second film starring the Marx Brothers, an adaptation of their popular Broadway musical of the same name, and it's a sporadically entertaining comedy with only flashes of the inspired genius the group was capable of at their peak. The film is burdened with too much extraneous material: sappy musical numbers, a leaden romantic subplot, and long stretches of gag-free dead time. The brothers are at their best when they're able to interact with one another, playing off of the unique comedic personae that they'd each crafted, and the possibilities opened up by different on-screen combinations. Pairing Groucho's leering patter with Chico's faux-Italian accent and penchant for puns yields a plenitude of particularly pungent wordplay, while Harpo's mimed perversity and coat-full of props plays especially well off the easily exasperated Chico.

The film's best scenes come when this trio pairs off for extended gags. There's a delightful sequence where Chico and Harpo try to steal a painting, and Chico's simple request for a flash (as in flashlight) prompts Harpo into producing a dazzling array of items: a fish, a flask, and most ingeniously an oversized hand of cards ("a flush," of course). In another scene, Groucho and Chico begin by discussing the stolen painting and somehow wind up talking about building a house next door, the conversation proceeding through the typically torturous maze of Groucho's clever wordplay. Groucho is at his best when he can play off one of his brothers, particularly Chico. When he's performing with a straight man — as he does here in scenes with Margaret Dumont and Louis Sorin — he has to propel the dialogue alone, and though he still gets off some great one-liners ("I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know"), the rhythms of the conversation aren't as fast and comfortable as they are with Chico. Dumont and Sorin, when acting opposite Groucho, mostly just mug broadly and roll their eyes a lot, smiling condescendingly at the jokes to indicate their stuffiness. Sorin in particular seems lost when he has to spar with Groucho, simply gesturing a lot with his hands, shrugging and looking around in confusion. It's not nearly as satisfying as the rapid-fire interplay the brothers have with each other.

Even Zeppo, as always playing the straight man to his three outrageous partners, provides a better foil for his brothers, and a scene where he takes dictation from Groucho is hilarious and perfectly timed. This scene demonstrates, more than any other, exactly what's lacking when Groucho faces off against a more straight-laced actor. Zeppo doesn't have many overtly funny lines here, but he sets up Groucho with precision and an acute sense of comic timing, feeding his brother the prompts he needs to keep the scene flowing. As funny as the verbal dexterity of Groucho and Chico can be when set against someone who doesn't know how to handle it, their humor really only crystallizes when they're interacting. They know each other's rhythms and styles perfectly, and they know exactly how to integrate their personalities with one another in interesting and often hilarious ways.


Unfortunately, the film's funniest scenes are diluted by the frequent diversions into musical interludes or unfunny bits with side characters. The minimal plot is really just an excuse for gags, but why then is there so much time wasted on developing bit characters who don't figure into the humor at all? The story centers on a party being thrown by the glamorous Mrs. Rittenhouse (Dumont), at which she and her suitor Roscoe Chandler (Sorin) will honor the African explorer Captain Spaulding (Groucho) by unveiling a rare and expensive painting. Of course, the painting gets stolen, and in fact it gets stolen several times, replaced with a series of fakes, which in turn are stolen themselves. This provides a fine opportunity for some madcap farce, but the film stalls whenever it detours too long into subplots involving the romance of Mrs. Rittenhouse's daughter (Lillian Roth) and her dull boyfriend (Hal Thompson), or a pair of society ladies who wish to embarrass the party's hostess. This stuff is dull and pointless, a distraction from the inspired lunacy of the Marx quartet, who barely interact with any of these characters.

Most of the musical numbers are equally flat, though there's a lot to like about the scene where Chico and Harpo take turns at a piano. Chico mostly plays it straight, but invests all his humor into his hands, playfully running them across the keyboard, his finger pointing at the key he's about to touch as though scolding it or shooting it, his thumb pulling an imaginary trigger as he hits the note. A later scene where Harpo plays a harp isn't quite as amusing, mainly providing an excuse for the silent brother to display his musical virtuosity instead of his humorous antics. As self-indulgences go, it's not bad. The less said about the straight-up musical numbers, though, the better. They're chanted by the cast with so little feeling that everyone looks like they're on the verge of falling asleep.

The film also has little to offer as cinema, since the adaptation makes no attempt to truly transfer the material from stage to screen. The direction, by Victor Heerman, is routine at best and inept at worst, and there are frequent jarring transitions, even in the middle of scenes, where multiple takes are shoved together without any regard for matching the position or poses of the actors in the frame. This isn't a graceful or well-made film by any means, and the fact that at its best moments it can still reach such heights of entertainment is a testament solely to the peculiar, irrepressible charm of the Marx Brothers.