[5]

Groucho Marx plays the dean of a university in desperate need of a football win. His son (Zeppo) convinces him to recruit two football players at a local bar, but of course, Groucho recruits the wrong people (Chico and Harpo). When the rival university hires the real football players, Groucho responds by sending his new recruits to kidnap theirs, and everything ends in a big, silly football game.

I don’t know if a Marx Brothers movie is ever going to really excite me. This one is marginally more entertaining than the three before it (The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business), mostly because it finally breaks free of the troup’s vaudeville roots and feels more cinematic. But Groucho’s fast-talking witticism just isn’t my cup of tea. I find these movies are always at their best when the mute Harpo is allowed to take control of the narrative, like when he evades and traps a police officer in his dog catcher cage, or when the brothers are looking for the dean’s presidential seal and Harpo plops a sea mammal on the desk.

The movie’s best sequence is one in which Groucho, Harpo, and Chico take over a professor’s science classroom, intermixing references to a vivisected human, a horse, and a pin-up girl. Groucho also has a nice moment where he comes toward the camera, breaking down the fourth wall, and tells us — the audience — that we may as well go hang out in the lobby until a mundane section of the movie is over.