Word: grouchos
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Margaret Dumont has returned to Boston, only to find herself roundly insulted by Mr. Groucho Marx, who is currently flaunting his right of primogeniture as Mrs. Marx's eldest son. Rolling in the aisles of the Laffmovie, shuddering as Hub men laughed in the wrong places and gasped at the low cut dresses of pre-Will Hays days, our hearts went out to Mother Marx, who, patiently and understandingly reared and molded four heterogeneous scions into a quartet of the laugh-makingest zanies ever to be rolled onto the American scene. The scene is "Duck Soup...
...Kennedy, who, for the first and last time finds himself on humorous celluloid. The Marx Brothers, happily caught in the revival cycle, have been racing through a cinematic renaissance. No serious student of Comparative Comedy can afford to finesse this eighty-minute demonstration of diplomatic rompings and political perambulating. Groucho, as Rufus J. Firefly, premier of Freedonia, involves himself in an international embroglio from which not even a rapier-keen cigar can extricate him. His butt is Louis Calhern--since elevated to tonier company as "The Magnificent Yankee"--an embassy villain who early in the film loses his coattails...
...students of Marxiana, even the uninspired face of Zeppe, the vestigal remnant, should help to recapture the "good old days" when the Brothers' only comedy competition was Cal Coolidge. Chico, who triples as peanut-vendor, confidential agent and Minister of War in Groucho's parlor cabinet, shows the verve and talent for pantomime that has, in later productions, been drowned in a flood of dialogue and cute piano-peeking. Margaret Dumont, accused by Groucho of looking like an old tenement, is the perfect foil through bedroom to parlor to bedroom. If S.J. Perelman did not invent the gags there...
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...