Word: groucho
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Philosopher in Twang. Even when receiving old friends and pupils like Philosophers Irwin Edman and Sidney Hook, shy John Dewey shuffles his slippers, pulls at his Groucho Marx mustache, or musses his yellowing white hair in embarrassment. He speaks hesitantly in a soft Vermont twang, and is apt to preface his thoughts with a "seems like. . . ." (Says he: "My ancestry is free from all blemish. All my forefathers* earned an honest living as farmers, wheelwrights and coopers. I was absolutely the first one in seven generations to fall from grace...
...three charges into fumbling sleuths, who, finally, get their man, if not their woman. Such concern over villains and their "just deserts' cuts the Marx Brothers out of much of the fun, giving Sig Rumann-labelled for future generations as the typical National Socialist-as many scenes as Groucho, Chico and Harpo together. And unlike Margaret Dumont, the gracious Mrs. Rittenhouse of earlier Marx Brothers triumphs, Rumann is not content to remain a foil, and Groucho must contend with him as both a Nazi and a gag-stealer. Harpo, with a new wig and a slightly more fashionable, belt-trailing...
...forces of evil are eager, for no very memorable reason, to liquidate Groucho, Their finger-woman is a sort of marked-down Mata Hari (Lisette Verea). The powers of good, most intelligently represented by Chico and Harpo, are out to frustrate dastardy and. raise all possible hell in the process...
Nice scenes and bits: the Brothers cramping more & more tables onto the already crowded dance-floor of a supper club; the extraction, from a de luxe wine bottle, of a cork so gigantic that it leaves no room for wine; Groucho's love scenes with the femme fatale, interrupted by innumerable moves from room to room, and as gruesomely encumbered (with roses, iced champagne and all the paraphernalia of sophisticated seduction) as an old-fashioned family picnic...
...piano, obliges on that instrument as pleasantly as ever. Harpo, who once was dangerously close to artiness, still has the best of his old wildness, plus new restraint, sadness and subtlety. He is used more centrally than before, and this is on the whole his finest performance. Groucho still carries the weight of the show and the woes of the world somewhere in the kidney region and walks, accordingly, with the famous sway-backed stoop. He still fires off his lines in the voice of a baying hound, with such irrefutable conviction that even the outrageously bad ones are funny...