[5.9/10] Comedy doesn’t travel well. I don’t know why exactly, but while dramatic stories have a certain durability to them, even the best-loved comedies can age like a grape under the couch. Far be it from me to decry the comic hit of 1932, a film that’s made its way onto various lists of great comedies, but I didn’t laugh much at Horse Feathers, which is a definite hindrance for a film that’s, you know, supposed to be funny.
The catch is that I think it could be in smaller doses, and maybe I’d enjoy it more if I went and took a walk after each blackout. The closest analogue to this sort of screwball irreverence for me is the Looney Tunes shorts, with bits of lunacy crammed into much smaller chunks. That sort of slapstick and rapid-fire wordplay can work in ten-to-fifteen minute chunks, but starts to become exhausting when stretched out to feature lengths. For so many of the gags in Horse Feathers the basic gags are the same, with a few minor variations.
Groucho makes smart remarks. Chico does some vaguely foreign-sounding play on words. Harpo clowns around. That’s all there is really. None of it's bad, but it lacks the same comic impact now when this style is no longer en vogue, and even appreciating it on a more historical level or as a time capsule starts to become difficult by the time you round out the hour mark. For a film that isn’t that long, and which moves at a frantic pace, and it can feel remarkably watch-check-worthy in places.
The one part of Horse Feathers that still sings almost ninety years later is Harpo’s clowning and mining. I don’t know why such bits are still universal, or at least able to amuse and entertain in a way the other humor doesn’t, but his routines are a total delight. The visual puns of a “sword fish” or a “seal” are worth a solid chuckle. His facial expressions when winning at slots of stealing suds sell the humor of it all. And his expressive gestures through it all add a sense of whimsy to everything. He’s far and away the film’s best asset, and the thing that gives it some lasting appeal in the modern day.
The problem is that the movie is just an avalanche of shtick. It’s less a film than a loose connection of sketches vaguely built around a theme. Theoretically there’s a couple of throughlines: beating the rival college in football and preventing the new dean’s son from shacking up with the “college widow”. But for the most part, that’s just an excuse to monkey around a campus setting or indulge in some slapstick on the gridiron.
That’s not to say that every comedy needs to have an airtight plot, but there’s nothing to latch onto here. The characters are paper thin. The plot is set dressing for the gag-work. All that leaves is the gags themselves. If those don’t work for you, through changes in taste and humor across nearly a century, the movie has nothing else to really offer.
The one exception is musical interludes. It’s too much to call Horse Feathers a musical outright, but it has some enjoyable and impressive musical moments. Groucho’s comic highlight is his opening “I’m Against It” number, replete with an impressively silly dance. Chico acquits himself well at the piano, even as he repeats a song the film crams in multiple times. And once again, Harpo steals the show with a true-to-nom-de-plume rendition on the harp that’s impressive both musically and visually. It’s not much, and a couple of these numbers stop the film dead in its tracks, but it’s interesting when *Horse Feathers essentially hits pause for a musical showcase.
When it unpauses, the most striking element here is how little Groucho’s comedy registers. He’s the Marx brother I knew the most about growing up, and seeing isolated clips of his greatest hits and legendary visage gives him a certain cache even today. Therein lies the problem of depositing him into a feature film though -- his clever one-liners start to feel ridiculous when they're packed in, one after another, over and over again. The setups feel more and more contrived and the punchlines lose more and more of their force. Really only the insults still land, with a major comic impact, as ripostes like “Why don't you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out?” are still knee-slapping verbal daggers.
Of course it wouldn’t be an old comedy if there weren’t miscellaneous harassment of women. This is one of those areas where you have to take older works as you find them and strain not to apply modern values to previous eras, but it’s hard, even in the heightened reality of Horse Feathers. Connie Bailey is treated as little more than a chew toy for the various men in the picture to slobber over, and occasionally to react to their antics. It’s foolish to expect better in 1932 (though the movie does at least poke fun at the baby talk routine), but it still makes the picture harder to enjoy.
That’s the tough part. I wanted to enjoy this. I love tons of the Looney Tunes cartoons that were clearly inspired by and pulling from this style of humor. There’s something alternatively and ambitious and trend-setting about the way that the Marx Brothers ply that same approach to ginning up laughs in live action, without the freedom that the medium of animation provides. There’s a lot of creative looniness here, even if the jokes get jammed into a handful of the same molds.
But I was socialized into the Warner Bros. cartoons at a young age, able to look back at them with affection now after absorbing them before I really had expectations for what entertainment writ large could or should be. Sadly, I have no such childhood connection to the Marx Bros., and maybe it’s just too late. Maybe you either had to watch these films in 1932 or, at a minimum, before you turned twelve, to be able to appreciate them later in life.
It may not be the movie’s fault; it may be mine or just the inevitable difficulties in truly accessing things across the expanse of time. Whatever the reason, Horse Feathers tricks worked on me about as well as hog works as a lockpick, and at some points, I was just as apt to scurry away.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-09-24T06:02:33Z
[5.9/10] Comedy doesn’t travel well. I don’t know why exactly, but while dramatic stories have a certain durability to them, even the best-loved comedies can age like a grape under the couch. Far be it from me to decry the comic hit of 1932, a film that’s made its way onto various lists of great comedies, but I didn’t laugh much at Horse Feathers, which is a definite hindrance for a film that’s, you know, supposed to be funny.
The catch is that I think it could be in smaller doses, and maybe I’d enjoy it more if I went and took a walk after each blackout. The closest analogue to this sort of screwball irreverence for me is the Looney Tunes shorts, with bits of lunacy crammed into much smaller chunks. That sort of slapstick and rapid-fire wordplay can work in ten-to-fifteen minute chunks, but starts to become exhausting when stretched out to feature lengths. For so many of the gags in Horse Feathers the basic gags are the same, with a few minor variations.
Groucho makes smart remarks. Chico does some vaguely foreign-sounding play on words. Harpo clowns around. That’s all there is really. None of it's bad, but it lacks the same comic impact now when this style is no longer en vogue, and even appreciating it on a more historical level or as a time capsule starts to become difficult by the time you round out the hour mark. For a film that isn’t that long, and which moves at a frantic pace, and it can feel remarkably watch-check-worthy in places.
The one part of Horse Feathers that still sings almost ninety years later is Harpo’s clowning and mining. I don’t know why such bits are still universal, or at least able to amuse and entertain in a way the other humor doesn’t, but his routines are a total delight. The visual puns of a “sword fish” or a “seal” are worth a solid chuckle. His facial expressions when winning at slots of stealing suds sell the humor of it all. And his expressive gestures through it all add a sense of whimsy to everything. He’s far and away the film’s best asset, and the thing that gives it some lasting appeal in the modern day.
The problem is that the movie is just an avalanche of shtick. It’s less a film than a loose connection of sketches vaguely built around a theme. Theoretically there’s a couple of throughlines: beating the rival college in football and preventing the new dean’s son from shacking up with the “college widow”. But for the most part, that’s just an excuse to monkey around a campus setting or indulge in some slapstick on the gridiron.
That’s not to say that every comedy needs to have an airtight plot, but there’s nothing to latch onto here. The characters are paper thin. The plot is set dressing for the gag-work. All that leaves is the gags themselves. If those don’t work for you, through changes in taste and humor across nearly a century, the movie has nothing else to really offer.
The one exception is musical interludes. It’s too much to call Horse Feathers a musical outright, but it has some enjoyable and impressive musical moments. Groucho’s comic highlight is his opening “I’m Against It” number, replete with an impressively silly dance. Chico acquits himself well at the piano, even as he repeats a song the film crams in multiple times. And once again, Harpo steals the show with a true-to-nom-de-plume rendition on the harp that’s impressive both musically and visually. It’s not much, and a couple of these numbers stop the film dead in its tracks, but it’s interesting when *Horse Feathers essentially hits pause for a musical showcase.
When it unpauses, the most striking element here is how little Groucho’s comedy registers. He’s the Marx brother I knew the most about growing up, and seeing isolated clips of his greatest hits and legendary visage gives him a certain cache even today. Therein lies the problem of depositing him into a feature film though -- his clever one-liners start to feel ridiculous when they're packed in, one after another, over and over again. The setups feel more and more contrived and the punchlines lose more and more of their force. Really only the insults still land, with a major comic impact, as ripostes like “Why don't you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out?” are still knee-slapping verbal daggers.
Of course it wouldn’t be an old comedy if there weren’t miscellaneous harassment of women. This is one of those areas where you have to take older works as you find them and strain not to apply modern values to previous eras, but it’s hard, even in the heightened reality of Horse Feathers. Connie Bailey is treated as little more than a chew toy for the various men in the picture to slobber over, and occasionally to react to their antics. It’s foolish to expect better in 1932 (though the movie does at least poke fun at the baby talk routine), but it still makes the picture harder to enjoy.
That’s the tough part. I wanted to enjoy this. I love tons of the Looney Tunes cartoons that were clearly inspired by and pulling from this style of humor. There’s something alternatively and ambitious and trend-setting about the way that the Marx Brothers ply that same approach to ginning up laughs in live action, without the freedom that the medium of animation provides. There’s a lot of creative looniness here, even if the jokes get jammed into a handful of the same molds.
But I was socialized into the Warner Bros. cartoons at a young age, able to look back at them with affection now after absorbing them before I really had expectations for what entertainment writ large could or should be. Sadly, I have no such childhood connection to the Marx Bros., and maybe it’s just too late. Maybe you either had to watch these films in 1932 or, at a minimum, before you turned twelve, to be able to appreciate them later in life.
It may not be the movie’s fault; it may be mine or just the inevitable difficulties in truly accessing things across the expanse of time. Whatever the reason, Horse Feathers tricks worked on me about as well as hog works as a lockpick, and at some points, I was just as apt to scurry away.