[4]

Groucho, Chico, Zeppo, and Harpo are back for their second big-screen soire. This one hangs loosely on a stolen painting plot, with Groucho playing a returning safari hunter at a rich aristocrat woman’s house where all the action takes place. Like The Cocoanuts before it, Animal Crackers still suffers from being an un-cinematic Broadway stage adaptation. It’s just hard for vaudeville acts like these to hold up 85 years later. It’s especially challenging when none of the Marx Brothers are on-screen, during the odd musical number (there are thankfully fewer here than in The Cocoanuts), or when Harpo plays the harp. For a whole scene. He just plays the harp. You get the idea.

The best parts of Animal Crackers belong to Groucho and Harpo, though. The mute Harpo is never better than when he’s momentarily obsessed with wrapping his leg around everyone, or when he’s caught stealing all the silverware as it cascades out of his baggy coat. Groucho’s best moments are when he’s engaged in one-sided witty repartee with dullards. Admittedly, there are times when Groucho speaks so quickly, the jokes are lost on me. But my favorite mini-monologue is this one:

“One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know. Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks. That’s not so easy to say, tusks. You try that some time…As I say, we tried to remove the tusks, but they were embedded in so firmly that we couldn’t budge them. Of course, in Alabama, the Tusk-a-loosa. But, uh, that’s entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about. We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren’t developed. But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks.”

With Margaret Dumont and Lillian Roth.