VERSE

...The world that No antique this we see the Marx Brothers attack on the screen in film Neighbor to the damp after film provides not only a pretext for their shenani- Autumn of grass gans, but also a context-a context in which those shenanigans can seem funny rather than vicious...

...The condition of have at least potentially crueler, more destructive con- the print I saw at a preview was atrocious...

...ful lab work could hide the inadequacies of the Astor The injury the Marx Brothers might have done as a Studios on Long Island where the brothers converted result would ultimately have been to their own comedy...

...film, Monkey Business, which was made in Hollywood, Sarris appeared to have a point since the plot and mise that they really hit their peak in movies...

...Only then did en scene of the Marx Brothers' films seem only to pro- the production equipment and directors get good enough vide a pretext for them to do their gag routines...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...At the beginning of Ani- to dissolve, making all things mal Crackers, as Groucho is carried on in a litter chair, new with water...

...It is a look that says, in effect...

...It would help if Uniworld is the victim...

...That is, in essence, its purpose: to insulate the Marx Brothers' recklessness from any contact with real You will teach deserts problems or genuine emotions...

...I've the night with flames, never seen such a bunch of phonies in all my life," and believing they are stars...

...their hit Broadway shows into their first two films...

...Even when the film was new, this song, celebrating the love of a poor boy Who could imagine and a rich girl must have struck a false note with audi- A new creation ences...

...Even Baby Leroy and Charlie McCarthy ("My no one we care about will be hurt because there won't Little Whispering Pine," as Fields refers to him spitefully be anyone we care about...

...when you consider that many of the gags-for example, Harpo's dropping an entire silver service from the sleeve 00000000000000 of his infamous coat in Animal Crackers-originated in the brothers' vaudeville act before the stage or screen plays ever existed...

...Commonweal: 333...

...It wasn't until the Marx Brothers' next stories sometimes threaten to take over the scenario...

...Anarchy The sun's footprints isn't comical in a real world, so their films have to pose Staining the dark and sustain a noticeably artificial one, a world peopled Roots of shadow with theatrical conventions like Margaret Dumont's stuffy dowager rather than real human beings who might win Face of the crucified our sympathy for the abuse they suffer from the film's His brown shroud stars...

...The to keep up with them, and did they become really sensinegligibility of the films' scripts and settings seems clear tive to the medium...

...at one point), seem out to get Fields...

...But no caresequences than bis...

...AlThis is a possibility that Andrew Sarris failed to appre- though many lines are inaudible, every footfall in the ciate in The American Cinema when he complained film can be heard reverberating on a sound stage floor about the invariably "mediocre mise en scene" of the thoughtlessly built with hollow underpinnings like a Marx Brothers' films and about the way that the insipid theater stage...

...While they may not have sour in- versal Pictures, which now owns the film, would spend tentions for their antics, as Fields often does, those antics a few thousand on refurbished prints...

...Fields is embroiled If the comedy of Animal Crackers appears to have in a world so antagonizing that his own nastiness seems paled with age, it is only because its production techmere self-defense...

...he surveys the other weekend guests assembled at Margaret Dumont's mansion with an insolently ungracious, At your command, mountains will shatter unimpressed look...

...MICHAEL CUDDIHY But I think Sarris missed an important consideration when he talked as if this hokey world created for the Mapleleal Marx Brothers to operate in was somehow inappropriate, or unworthy of their inspired madness...

...But in the Marx Brothers' films, it is niques as a movie are now badly out of date, not because they who are the antagonists, the aggressors, and the the Marx Brothers' own work is...

...Woven of the world In The Coconuts, whatever affecting songs might have been in the original George S. Kaufman-Irving Berlin Tiny leaf holes musical, the only song retained by the moviemakers is Inviting the wild air an icky duet called "When My Dreams Come True," To kneel which is sung by the romantic leads...