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Cocoanut Manor, "glorifying the American sewer and the Florida sucker," the ideal china shop for introducing the Marx bulls. Running a hotel of empty floors, Groucho confronts an uprising of unpaid bellhops and quickly has them dancing, the shyster's tongue like the musketeer's blade: "One for all and all for me and me for you and three for five and six for a quarter." His courtship of Margaret Dumont almost ends with him wrestling the grand dowager to the ground, but he hits a snag with Chico the immigrant obfuscator, language tends to break down when they get together. ("And here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland." "Why a duck?" "I'm all right, how are you?") Harpo at his most undomesticated breezes into the lobby to chase girls, filch handkerchiefs, rip letters, drink ink and hump the register, Zeppo at the front desk is already invisible. It looks exactly like what it is, a scratchy record of a Broadway play and a raw vision of white-telephone conventionality corkscrewed by Dada modernism. Robert Florey has just the Parisian appreciation for such shenanigans (he frontally frames figures running in and out of connecting rooms and, voilà, a split-screen), Joseph Santley showcases the Busby Berkeley camera one year before Berkeley himself, high for the geometry of huddled chorines and low for a peek up the ingénue's skirt. "When Our Dreams Come True" for the aspiring architect (Oscar Shaw), his fiancée (Mary Eaton) gets "The Monkey-Doodle-Doo" while the grumpy detective (Basil Ruysdael) lightens up with a mock-Bizet aria. (As the scheming necklace thieves, Kay Francis and Cyril Ring are around to give Lubitsch an idea or two.) The land boom on the verge of the market crash ("Wrap that lot, and put some poison ivy in it"), the new vaudeville of sound cinema and no mistake. "That might be a wisecrack, but I doubt it." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |