Horse Feathers Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 16, 2016
Note: This film is available as part of
The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection.
The Marx Brothers remain one of the most iconic comedy teams in the entire history of show business, including of course their film work. Years of
vaudeville experience and then Broadway stardom meant the siblings came to cinema with personas largely set and with a huge "catalog" of bits they
could utilize for their film work. That said, the movie going public had never really seen anything like the manic proclivities of this familial troupe, and
countless commentators from 1929 (when
The Cocoanuts debuted on celluloid) on have attempted to analyze various elements of the
team's completely unique comedy. While perhaps not especially "meaningful" in any overarching way, I had an unusual response to watching these
new transfers of the first five Marx Brothers feature films (all reportedly sourced from new 4K restorations done by Universal), one probably sparked
by my recent reviewing duties.
Arrow Video's UK branch recently released
Woody Allen: Six Films 1971-1978, and in doing some background reading in preparation for my reviews of the movies in that set,
more than once I read in various articles comments along the lines of "Allen helped to define Jewish humor" or "Jewish humor simply wouldn't be
the
same without Allen." Allen's patented brand of neurosis, sexual obsession and verbal acuity may indeed be at least
a trifecta of Jewish
humor if not
the trifecta, but one only need look a bit further back in time to the Marx Brothers for another potent example of the
"mainstreaming" of elements that could well be considered Jewish humor. I'm not suggesting this is the only way to look at the Marx Brothers'
efforts, or even that it's an "important" way, just that it struck me as "being there" for me after having just watched a bunch of Allen films.
In a way, though, the Marx Brothers' perceived "Jewishness" is a little
more subliminal than Allen's is in his own films, though for those with the eyes to see, the siblings represent their generation of Jews rather
iconically.
Not only is their verbal humor full of puns and other formalistic hijinks, the very subject matter of many of their jokes tends to focus on social,
political and even economic elements. The very fact that the act is comprised of family is important, with a "me and you against the world"
ambience
that speaks to outcasts (obviously including Jews) to this day. But there's a "subtext" to many of the early Marx Brothers films, where the
brothers
are the outsiders, virtual interlopers attempting to make sense of a calamitous "new" world, whether that be a hotel, high society, a passenger
ship,
college sports or even a supposed nation in the throes of financial ruin.
What's fascinating about the early Marx Brothers efforts is how they very
subtly display signs of the assimilative fervor that many first or second generation Jews of that time period experienced, where it became
paramount
(no pun intended, considering the studio which released the early Marx Brothers efforts) to "blend in". That may seem positively non-intuitive,
given
the Marx Brothers' predilection toward anarchic behavior and just outright silliness, but when seen through the prism of an early to mid 20th
century
"Jewish identity," the first five Marx Brothers feature films offer not just laughs galore, but a rather interesting example of so-called "ethnics"
rather
brilliantly invading the American consciousness in an almost subversive way. In this respect, the Marx Brothers become one of the most potent
examples
of what might be termed cultural immigration, where their Jewishness may have been slightly cloaked but no less ingratiating in the long run.
That
"cloaking" may be nowhere more obvious than in the persona of Chico, a Marx who spoke with a faux Italian accent and who seemed to be
something of a grifter at times. Cloaked in another way but perhaps arguably more ostensibly Jewish, at least on one interpretive level, was Harpo,
the weirdly childlike mute who seemed
to
often be the hapless scapegoat in many of the films, the outsider whose very powerlessness (as evidenced by his inability or unwillingness to
speak)
created "problems," albeit often in a comedic way. The most obvious paradigm of Jewishness is of course Groucho, with his hyperarticulate
verbal
humor and a probably more than slightly lecherous mien which may in fact be a precursor for some of Woody Allen's more sexually charged
material.
Zeppo, the kind of "forgotten" Marx Brother, and the one whose film persona is probably the blandest, may therefore somewhat ironically be seen as
the best symbol of those
aforementioned assimilative tendences—Zeppo had "learned" how to be an American first, blending in as the troupe's straight man and therefore
almost seeming like an outsider himself, at least within the insular world of the siblings' relationships.
You might be excused for thinking that
Horse Feathers would revolve around, well, horses, but, no, that's the later Marx Brothers effort
A Day at the Races (to be fair, horses
do show up a couple of times
in this film).
Horse Feathers actually skewers higher
education
and specifically the world of college football. Groucho portrays Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, a not exactly scholarly type who has been hired
(some
might allege illogically) to rescue Huxley College, an academic establishment teetering on the edge of extinction. Wagstaff employs his son Frank
(Zeppo
Marx) to help beef up the college's football team (with professional players), in the hopes that that might help turn around the college's fortunes.
Of course, Wagstaff's plans soon go completely haywire, and two unlikely suspects, Baravelli (Chico Marx) and Pinky (Harpo Marx), end up as students
and football players. Meanwhile, Frank is pining after pretty Connie Bailey (Thelma Todd).
Horse Feathers is in some ways the most dated of
the Marx Brothers' Paramount outings, at least in terms of its subtext about Prohibition and elements like a Speakeasy. But the film is often
ingeniously hilarious, including the justly famous final scene which sees Harpo "invading" a football field in what amounts to a Marx Brothers version
of the chariot race from
Ben-Hur.
While this is still an ostensible ensemble comedy, there's little doubt that Groucho assumes a more important central role in
Horse Feathers,
and some might see this film as the moment when he tended to subsume his brothers as the "star" Marx. Still, Chico and Harpo at least have their
moments in the sun, even if Zeppo is kind of shunted off to the sidelines, as often tended to be the case.
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