Horse Feathers

The fourth Marx brothers movie, Horse
Feathers, is a typically loopy outing for Groucho, Chico,
Harpo and Zeppo. Here, Groucho is Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the
new president of Huxley College — not that it matters, since as usual in
a Marx film the plot is strictly a secondary concern. The Marx brothers
cut to the chase right from the beginning: in the first scene
Wagstaff's new presidency is announced, and his introductory speech
quickly becomes just a thin excuse for Groucho to keep riffing on all
sorts of jokes that have little or no connection to the supposed
situation. And he caps it all off with a musical number dedicated to
nihilism. "Whatever it is/ I'm against it," he sings, and leads a group
of professors in a swirling dance as he leaps up on a table, promising
to oppose whatever's normal and ordinary. And they're off, eventually
throwing Chico and Harpo into the mix as a pair of goofballs who
Wagstaff somehow manages to mistake for football players, bringing them
in as ringers to help his school defeat their rivals in the big game.

Director
Norman McLeod, who also directed the brothers in Monkey Business,
has a good handle on the quartet's manic sense of pacing and their
near-perfect interplay with one another. The film moves crisply,
careening along with barely a pause for breath. As usual, the brothers
take a variety show approach, disregarding the narrative and instead
just indulging whatever gags and performances they feel like doing:
Harpo doing one of his usual harp performances, Zeppo earnestly wooing a
vampy widow (Thelma Todd), or all four of the brothers taking turns
putting their own spin on "Everyone Says I Love You," each one offering
up their own lyrics, ranging from Zeppo's crooning balladry to Groucho's
cynical take on this romantic tune. And of course, the film is packed
with the brothers' signature wordplay, particularly between Groucho and
Chico, whose verbal dexterity always drives the Marx brothers' films.
Chico's the one who informs us that a sturgeon cuts you open when you're
sick, or that you cure a haddock with aspirin, or that he used to teach
a woman with a false set of teeth but now he teaches a falsetto, or
that you can't sleep on a football.

Chico's humor, based on such
mispronunciations and verbal puns — like a fast-paced absurdist
exchange with Harpo about hogs, pigs, hugs and picks — is a sharp
contrast to Groucho's non-sequiturs and one-liners. Whereas Chico and
Harpo seem to be perpetually caught in loops of misunderstanding and
repetitive silliness, Groucho is constantly reacting, bouncing off of
the people and things all around him, riffing on whatever he sees and
whatever anyone else says, offering up his own wry commentary on the
goofiness of others. He even makes this explicit in this film by
actually walking up the camera at one point and directly addressing the
audience, telling the viewers that they should go wait out in the
theater's lobby during what Groucho deems a tedious section, as Chico
plays the piano and sings. That's the way it always seems to work:
Groucho's the conspirator with the audience, the one who seems to be
winking at all the lunacy going on all around him, even as he gleefully
contributes to it. That's why he's perfect as the ostensible authority
figure, the university president, who actually winds up destabilizing
everything and adding to the general anarchic breakdown of order and
stability.


This is the general form of the Marx
brothers' humor: infiltrating authority and prestige with their
absurdity and their total lack of respect for the rules. In the football
game at the end of the film, Harpo gleefully subverts the mechanics of
the game at every point. There are countless shaggy-dog sports movies
where a group of misfits play a game by their own rules and come out on
top, but the Marxes exist somewhere outside that tradition, at right
angles even to that conventional depiction of anarchy. Instead, Harpo
throws banana peels at the opposing team to make them slip, which for a
while helps his team get ahead, but then he just as gleefully throws
banana peels under the feet of his own teammate before he can get a
touchdown: he's not breaking the rules to win, in other words, but
breaking the rules because that's just what he does. It's as innate as
breathing, and if sometimes his total disregard for order results in his
team coming out ahead, at other times he'll just as obliviously
contribute to his own team's setbacks and losses. Harpo, like his
brothers, isn't on any team but his own. So throughout the game he
repeatedly runs the wrong way, then leaps into a horse-drawn chariot to
take him into the end zone, then pulls out multiple footballs to pile up
the scores: he's not just breaking the rules, he's acting as if they
don't even exist, and indeed they don't seem to. No one ever questions
this absurdity; it's just accepted as the natural outgrowth of the
brothers' personalities. Nothing behaves as it should when they're
around.

At times, the anarchy of the brothers threatens to
overwhelm good taste itself, and this film includes an unfortunate
moment that betrays a more sinister undercurrent in Groucho's perpetual
quipping and joking. In one scene, Thelma Todd's character, a vamp who's
trying to seduce the brothers to get ahold of some football plays,
speaks in a squeaky baby voice to Groucho, trying to play the part of
the weak little femme to trick him into giving up his secrets. Groucho
responds by viciously mocking her, telling her that if she keeps talking
like that he'll kick her teeth down her throat. It's a startling moment
in such a lighthearted film, an ugly burst of violence and nastiness
that completely undercuts the supposedly comic tone of the surrounding
material. It exposes, too, the darker shadings of Groucho's anarchic
persona, which sometimes comes through in his cavalier disregard for
propriety and taste — like the dismal way he treats Zeppo, who plays his
son here. There are times when Groucho's wit and patter reveal that
when you strip away order and stability, some rather ugly things escape
along with all the humorous absurdity.

But that's the essence of a
Marx brothers film: the breakdown of order. Even the film itself often
seems to be breaking down around them. The film was censored and chopped
of its bawdiest lines, and in its existing form it's a patchwork
assembly that only exacerbates the anarchy and roughness that generally
characterized the Marx movies. There are inexplicable cuts and splices
in the film, the visible remnants of excised sequences or lines, and
this splicing lends a herky-jerky quality to the film at points. In one
scene, the ragged cutting makes Groucho seem to move without regard for
the laws of physics, leaping across time and space as though he had been
cut loose from reality as we know it. Groucho kicks Zeppo out, and as
the door slams shut, there's a cut that replaces the slamming door,
making the door shut on its own and Zeppo disappear. Before this
disjunction can even be processed, the camera is following Groucho as he
hunches down and runs across the room, grabbing a lantern from a nearby
table. Then he's abruptly at the window, making a quip before another
jump cut leads into him running towards the camera. Then he's leaping
over a couch to stand next to Thelma Todd, and another jump cut
transitions into him hopping into her lap.

This disjunctive
editing is a sign of the film's looseness and roughness, its casual lack
of concern for continuity or reality. Groucho especially seems to exist
somewhere outside of reality as he catapults across the room, the jerky
rhythms of the cuts enhancing his naturally stylized movements. As he
duck-walks and stutter-steps, the film seems to be syncopating off of
Groucho's own inbuilt rhythms, erasing whatever's not strictly
necessary, stripping away everything but the essence of Groucho. At one
point, he starts to say "where were we" but only gets out the "where"
before the rest of the frames are elided, and he seems to instantly leap
onto the couch again, answering himself, "oh yeah." That's it in a
nutshell: there's only as much as is needed for the gag, and the rest is
crudely sliced away. It's an accident of the film's troubled censorship
history and the corrupted form in which it has survived, but it only
enhances the film's lackadaisical economy. Horse Feathers is a
typically nutty, loose-limbed effort from the Marx brothers, capturing
their antics at their most hilarious and profane.