Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Cracking Classic Old Fare, 2 Jul 2007
Judging by the script, you'd never believe that "Animal Crackers" is over seventy years old. Think of all the "postmodern" things that happen in this movie: Groucho directly addresses the audience to apologize for a bad joke; Harpo shoots a gun at a statue, only to see the statue come to life and return fire; and Margaret Dumont freezes in time while Groucho has a "strange interlude" and rambles to the audience about the perils of marriage and living with your folks! Of course, the absolutely ancient and decaying print will remind you that "Animal Crackers" is older than the hills, but otherwise, it's much fresher and weirder than the stuff that passes for comedy today.
Also remembered for the famous phrase,"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
|
|
|
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't sharpen your tusks, they may get loose, 29 April 2008
The depression is finally arrived and the Marx Brothers are having it easy more than ever, stealing silverware and paintings and anything they can set their fingers on. When the rich are living well, they know how to throw a party in their fancy homes and invite all kinds of funny characters that are nothing but funny and have absolutely nothing in common except their grotesqueness. But beware the musicians or artists you may invite because you may invite trouble more than music. And the four siblings are adding their touch of delirium tremens to that alco-hole which is no waterhole though there is no alcohol in this prohibition blind alley that is as dark as the wine cellar in which you keep the roof of the house for the chimneys not to get wet when it rains. And they play on the dumbness of one, I mean muteness though I do not reject dumbness for that Harpo the harpist that is as dumb as my thumb, and on the accents of the Chico who is a good pianist and mixes all kinds of linguistic idiosyncrasies, Italian, German, New Yorker, Jewish, except maybe black, and even so at times he is not that clear, especially when everything is alight and he wants to make them dark, or is it the other way round and everything is dark and he wants to make them alight, and he looks for a "flash" and gets across, right out of Harpo's pockets, the "flesh" of a cheek, a "fish", a "flask", a "flush" (of cards of course), a "flitz" of Fly-toxic fluid that will be used at the end of the film, an enchanted "flutz" with six holes that makes it a pipe, and he may even get to some more fluted or highfalutin objects, things or beings if he did not find the "flash"-light and lose it all over again at once. And we enter the labyrinth of all kinds of plays on words and puns and innuendo, of "bigamy" that is "big of me", "Uruguay" that is "going your-a-way and me mine", even the "small stakes" of the game of bridge come along with some "French-fried potatoes". And do not call three times for "three cheers" for anyone at all because the Harpo may bring you three chairs, and you may turn "colder than a Frigidaire", and if you have "quotes, unquotes, quotes," in other words three quotes, you just add "one more and you get a gallon", though that gallon may come along with "a moose", you know this little animal that "runs around on the floor, eats cheese and is chased by the cat," and you may even understand why "tusks are looser in Alabama" somewhere on the University of Alabama's campus in Tuscaloosa, which is another story. If finally you ask your own brother to provide you with "a parachute," he will probably abide by your wish if he knows "the parachute won't open," and you should think your wish over and check if you have a "pair of shoes" instead. At least these do not need to open for you to be able to walk. And the depression is completely contained in this motto: "One nickel carefully used would last a family a lifetime." And that is so because with what we today call inflation "a nickel is no longer what it used to be ten years ago," and even "fifteen years ago," to the point of the obligation we find ourselves in to invent the seven-cent nickel and even later an eight-cent nickel, which would enable a well husbanded family to buy a three cent newspaper with that eight-cent nickel and yet get the good old nickel back again to be used over and over again and again in a three-penny store, a way to rewrite the three-penny opera of some English tradition that had been revived in 1928 by Bertold Brecht in Germany. Brilliant. And at least some kind of rejuvenation for the nickel that has been in use unchanged for at least "one hundred years, since 1492" And the physical antics are just as crazy, repetitive and luminously hilarious as well as benightedly exhilarating. If you just manage to follow the rhythm of these four siblings, you will be in for a down slope going race that will look like a high dive and sound like a deep delve into the abysmal chasm of the ocean where you may find a dozen of ir-elephant elks convening for a symposium on the importance of being earnest about the true value of learning how to paint in Paris, sell fish in Czechoslovakia, or hunt tigers with a bag or a sack or a plain vanity case as for that in Africa. These Marx Brothers are more than brothers, they are a whole tribe of buffoons, clowns, fools, bunglers and blunderheads. I just stop at five not to reach Solomon's number.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
|
|
|
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bad, 16 Aug 2009
Mrs Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) holds a society party at which
Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) is the guest of honour and Roscoe
Chandler (Louis Sorin) will unveil a painting. There are 2 fake
paintings that also turn up at the house and the plot involves these 3
paintings being switched round.......the police are called as the
valuable original seems to have gone missing...
There are only 3 entertaining sections that last about 3 minutes each
in this film: 1 - Chico playing the piano; 2 - Harpo dealing the cards
at a Bridge game: 3 - Chico and Harpo hammering very loudly in the dark
while trying to subtly steal the painting from the wall. That's your
lot. The rest of the film is boring and it's too long. Margaret Dumont
sounds like Anne Widdicombe, ie, she has a terrible voice and there is
no real need for the insipid characters that play the romance story
that runs simultaneously. Harpo has always creeped me out a little and
that's what he does in this film. The brothers should have rehearsed
something funny .......more practice needed....
|
|
|
|
![Animal Crackers [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VustScigL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Marx Brothers Boxset: A Girl in Every Port/The Cocoanuts/Love Happy/Room Service/Animal Crackers/Monkey Business/Horse Feathers/Duck Soup [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/413udUZE%2BXL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Duck Soup [DVD] [1933]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PDXDVYPbL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Marx Brothers Collection: A Night At The Opera / A Day At The Races / At The Circus / Go West / The Big Store / A Night In Casablanca [DVD] [1935]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EE1HTPJ7L._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Duck Soup [DVD] [1933]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PDXDVYPbL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Groucho Marx
![Horse Feathers [DVD] [1932]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51tsjCBBUnL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Groucho Marx
![Marx Brothers Collection - Monkey Business/Horse Feathers/Duck Soup [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/615RHKjcOUL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
![Monkey Business [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517ABV8TT6L._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Groucho Marx
![Duck Soup/Monkey Business [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51fWbbPnhxL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ The Marx Brothers
