Post by George ShelpsDAY AT THE RACES has wonderful
comedy scenes, but the Allan Jones-
Maureen O'Sullivan romance was cardboard (as I mentioned, Allan himself
disliked the part).
To me the weakest thing about RACES is not the romance (though it
certainly is weak), but the way the Brothers' characters are made more
generic.
In OPERA, the Brothers are more sympathetic than previously, but they
are still given the basic characterizations that we expect from them:
Groucho is the guy trying to "get into society" but unable to resist
insulting everyone he wants to mooch off of and hanging around with
rifraff like Chico and Harpo; Chico is the con man; Harpo steals
and/or eats everything in sight and likes nothing better than to cut
off guys' beards or tie them up. Because OPERA was written by the
authors of COCONAUTS and ANIMAL CRACKERS, Kaufman and Ryskind, the
writing is very appropriate to the characters; the difference is that
their character traits are pointed in more socially acceptable
directions; they're now trying to help young lovers get together
(there was a little bit of this in ANIMAL CRACKERS with Chico and
Harpo stealing the painting on Lillian Roth's request, but it's more
central here).
RACES, which was written by writers who'd never written for the Marxes
before (including George Seaton), seems to me to soften the Brothers
up quite a bit more; Groucho's less of a *schnorrer*, Chico has a job
(working at the sanitarium), as does Harpo (jockey?!), and their goals
are even nobler (they don't just want to help out young lovers, they
want to save a failing sanitarium from the evil businessman). Many of
the comedy routines are more generic too: the final race scene could
have been done by any comedians; same with the scene with Groucho
pretending to be various people on the phone (though it's a very funny
scene), and even the "examination" scene is pretty bland because it's
just disorganized wackiness (whereas the best Marx scenes involve them
slowly taking apart something that everyone else takes seriously, like
the professor's lecture on HORSE FEATHERS). The comedy content of
RACES is still good because the writers were good comedy writers --
the later MGM Marxes were assigned to second-level writers -- but a
lot of it doesn't feel like the Marx Brothers. NIGHT IN CASABLANCA is
enjoyable precisely because it's something of a return to the "real"
Marx Bros. style of humor, even if the material itself isn't always
the best.
BTW, it wasn't just Thalberg who thought the Marxes needed to be more
sympathetic and the stories more structured. I once saw an interview
with Nat Perrin, one of the writers on DUCK SOUP (Kalmar and Ruby, the
songwriters, got screenplay credit but I think there were a number of
writers), and he was surprisingly lukewarm about the film; he felt it
was so relentlessly unstructured and pointless that there was nothing
to hold the viewer's interest between jokes, and no one to sympathize
with. I'm not saying he was right to consider DUCK SOUP a
disappointment, because I certainly don't agree with him -- but it was
a prevailing opinion at the time that the Brothers' films were failing
for a lack of story interest, of something to hold the jokes together.
An interesting comparison is an interview I read with David Zucker,
of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker; he seemed bemused by the cult success of
TOP SECRET! (ZAZ's biggest flop), and compared it to DUCK SOUP: TOP
SECRET! flopped, he says, because there wasn't a real story or a
reason to sympathize with the Val Kilmer character, whereas AIRPLANE!
had an old but effective story and a clear goal for the hero. He went
on to say that he basically agreed with Thalberg: A comedy with a
strong story and someone to sympathize with will be a bigger success
than a disorganized comedy with more jokes. Again, I don't really
agree with his evaluation of his own work, because I think TOP SECRET!
is the best of the ZAZ films (and far funnier than anything they've
done since), but the point is that Thalberg's re-positioning of the
Marxes was based on a legitimate, and largely accurate, evaluation of
what makes a comedy successful with a mass audience.
What would have happened with the Brothers had Thalberg lived, I don't
know. I think they would have still slid further into generic comedy
-- RACES certainly suggests that -- but Thalberg would have at least
gotten them better writers than they had on GO WEST or BIG STORE.