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Dalí’s "summit of the evolution of comic cinema" is a thoroughgoing derangement of Love’s Labour’s Lost, played saltando by the still-rough Marx Brothers. Margaret Dumont’s swank society party provides the proscenium, Groucho’s Captain Spaulding, "a very moral man," enters it in a native-propelled African cab, armed with pith helmet, stogie, and bottomless duffel bag of insults. ("You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and that’s not saying much for you.") Signor Ravelli (Chico) is the dubious ivory-tickler ("Say, if you get near a tune, play it"), the Professor (Harpo) arrives semi-nude under his cape ("Take the Professor’s hat and coat." "And send for the fumigators") and takes shotgun to the atrium until marble statues return fire. Groucho’s antipodal ditty "Hello, I Must Be Going" kicks off the flow of deathless routines, which includes Harpo’s wrestling match with Dumont, Chico’s stream-of-consciousness deduction of the guilt of left-handed moths, and a debate on matrimony: "But that’s bigamy." "Yeah, and it’s big o’ me, too." 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, the slumbering bourgeoisie litters the concluding image (cf. The Exterminating Angel). Directed by Victor Heerman. With Lillian Roth, Louis Sorin, Hal Thomspon, Margaret Irving, and Robert Greig. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |