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Dalí's "summit of the evolution of comic cinema" is a thorough derangement of Love's Labour's Lost, played saltando by the still-rough Marx Brothers. Margaret Dumont's society party supplies the proscenium, Groucho's Captain Spaulding ("a very moral man") crashes it in African cab, armed with pith helmet, stogie, and bottomless duffel bag of insults. "The gates swung open and a Fig Newton entered." Signor Emanuel Ravelli (Chico) is the dubious ivory-tickler, the Professor (Harpo) arrives semi-nude under his cape ("Take the Professor's hat and coat." "And send for the fumigators") and wields a rifle in the atrium until statues return fire. The Dada ditty "Hello, I Must Be Going" kicks off the flow of deathless routines, which include Chico's wrestling match with the hostess, Chico's stream-of-consciousness deduction of the guilt of left-handed moths, and Groucho's debate on matrimony. "Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does." Stage creakiness—performers posed at 45° angles facing the audience, thunderclap in the lights-out switcheroo—is charmingly preserved, though, even before Eugene O'Neill gets a stentorian scalping ("Pardon me while I have a strange interlude"), it's clear that Marxian comedy already dwells in the spirals of postmodernism. Groucho dictating a letter to Zeppo is the kind of language-breakdown skit savored in Le Gai Savoir, Ruiz in The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting recalls the mixed canvases. "Well, all the jokes can't be good. You've got to expect that once in awhile." The slumbering bourgeoisie litters the concluding image (The Exterminating Angel). With Lillian Roth, Louis Sorin, Margaret Irving, Hal Thompson, and Robert Greig. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |