ANIMAL CRACKERS

Sitcoms are the direct descendants of theater. At closest, movies are a complete new medium which took ideas from the stage rather than its organization, a lesson filmmakers learned too late, if ever. The best movies based on plays were made by directors wise enough to forego the structure and conventions of the source material and keep the spirit alive in a new playing field.

            The first two Marx Brothers movies (made during their glory days at Paramount), which were, more or less, replicas of two of their three Broadway hits were (sometimes frustratingly so) bound to the entrapments of theater, a condition magnified by the static camera that accompanied early talkies before filmmakers learned how to silent rollers. But the best moments in these films, work like the best of TV comedy would.

            Animal Crackers, their slight but very funny second movie, is built like its original incarnation but director Victor Heerman, already well respected in comedy for his work for Mack Sennett by then, foresaw a valuable thing or two about how sitcoms would work. Animal Crackers would be his last hurrah as director before successfully reinventing himself as a screenwriter for the second half of his career, the fruit of which was winning a Best Adapted Screenplay Award with his wife Sarah Y. Mason for 1933’s Little Women. For writers, the Brothers teamed once again with Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and stage legend George S. Kaufman, all of which had authored the 1928 play. Morrie Ryskind, another of the original writers, also worked on the film’s script but his name was left off the credits, likely due to his involvement at the time with the Socialist Party of America. The best thing everyone involved did for Animal Crackers was not try to reconcile stage and screen but foresee the conventions of television at its best.

            Virtually, Animal Crackers is set on one stage much like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy would be and theater was before. It’s the Rittenhouse Manor, a ritzy house of decadence in Long Island. The uppity Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) is hosting a weekend party in honor of both the unveiling of “After the Hunt”, a valuable painting recently acquired by the pompous collector of art Roscoe Chandler (also from the play and, tellingly, a future guest star on The Honeymooners). Coinciding with the unveiling is the return of the renowned explorer Captain Spaulding (Groucho) from Africa. All this bogs down to a painting theft, resulting in multiple replicas of the original work. Involved are Mrs. Rittenhouse (Dumont is as clueless as ever), the temperamental but bumbling Chandler (his central European accent accounted for when his real name is revealed to be Abe Kabibble, an Old Country fisherman.  It’s an unmasking that amounts to little more than a mockery of Otto Kahn, a banker and art critic with a habit of denying his Jewish ancestry), Rittenhouse’s daughter Arabella (Lillian Roth) and her boyfriend John Parker (Hal Thompson), a struggling artist, Rittenhouse’s conniving rival Mrs. Whitehead (Margaret Irving), and Hives the oafish butler (stage heavy Robert Greig).

            This mix-up is already underway when Spaulding arrives and is followed by Chico and Harpo as the great music connoisseur Signor Ravelli and his assistant the Professor respectively. As with most of the Marx meshes, however, how things unfold matters little. It’s all about the individual bits. While Animal Crackers is slightly hindered by the confines of early talkies, it has many episodes of glory. Later Marx efforts, mostly their post-Paramount pictures, would draw boundaries between the world of Marx and the romantic fluff. Critics, unaware of these forthcoming boundaries at the time of Animal Crackers, voiced a few complaints about the love pains of Roth and Thompson. In retrospect, however, Animal Crackers is somewhat unique in the Marx Brothers canon in that while the Brothers remain outsiders in Rittenhouse’s world of pomp and cocktails the film, precisely because the range of locations is so tight, draws them into the fabric of the narrative more tightly than usual, resulting in a generally smooth ride.

            It makes a difference that Lillian Roth (a fine dramatic starlet of the stage and screen) and Hal Thompson are more interesting than later dud love birds and their solo scenes are kept to a minimum. Their one song together, “Why am I so Romantic?”, which was not part of the stage version, is surprisingly agreeable. Arabella, the spoiled prissy of the stage version is here rendered so sweet and innocent that we forget the personal turmoil Roth was hiding.

            But the classic moments belong to the Brothers alone. Best of all is a central sequence, which is one of the closest things the Marxes ever did to traditional comedy. It’s so impeccably timed and played so well, though, that it comes off as unusual genius. Harpo and Chico have been assigned to replace the original painting with a replica. Sneaking into the room when everyone is fast asleep they attempt the swap when a storm breaks out and the power goes off. From here on much of the sequence is in darkness so the emphasis is on dialogue, but Harpo’s visual gags are among his best. Chico asks for a ‘flash’. From his wardrobe of a trenchcoat Harpo pulls out a flask, a flush, and a fish before finally pulling out a flashlight. Their frantic humor is balanced off when Groucho and Dumont (seen in silhouettes) appear on the scene, unaware of the mischief makers in the room. Dumont is frightened of the storm, Groucho hurls verbal mudslings back. But he is suspicious of the smell of fish. But the real brilliance is that the fish is referred to once again during a subsequent blackout as if it had been an in-joke all along. This sequence also exemplifies the correlation between theater and the situation comedies TV is so fond of and could easily have been the central point of a sitcom episode.

            Groucho holds his own in his solo bits. His wit starts almost upon his arrival on the scene in his little bamboo box carried by stoic Africans (though racial humor, a blot on future Marx projects, is blessedly mum). After expressing outrage over the charge of $1.85 for transfer from Africa to New York he breaks down into a charmingly random song and dance. It’s a beautiful little number played well. Spaulding wants nothing more than to boast of his bravery, but each time he opens his mouth the chorus of party guests interrupt him with a “Hooray for Captain Spaulding”.

            When he does manage to start story time, his claims are highly suspect. His immortalized elephant joke being the most plausible of stories. His tales of encounters with a polar bear, moose, and elk in the African plains mark him as something of a teller of tall tales, a sort of Baron Munchausen with Roosevelt’s safari helmet. If his stories are to be believed, the beasts he speaks of must be as lifelike as the cartoon animals that decorated the film’s posters and title cards. Misplacing wildlife was, after all, a common practice in both the comedies and cartoons of the 30s, such as the 1933 Popeye cartoon Wild Elephinks, in which Popeye fights off a menagerie of animals in the jungle, including a moose, and Disney’s shorts Jungle Rhythm (1929), where Mickey Mouse battles a lion and a bear, and The Castaway (1931), where gorillas live side by side with tigers. But this liberty with nature was part of the charm of early comic fun. It was a time when zany comedies worked on the same level as cartoons, a bond rooted back in the days of vaudeville, before Walt Disney and Max Fleischer brought drawings to life but when comedians like the Marx Brothers discovered a new sort of humor that lied beyond the realm of the plausible and natural.

            In Animal Crackers Harpo and Chico are offered less fun than usual, but Groucho brightens their material. Everyone’s best moment is the glorious dark room heist, but even Chico’s piano interlude, usually a buzz kill showstopper, is turned into a delight by Groucho’s heckling and disgruntled jabs. It works because he is agreeing with the audience that the interlude is a bore. In a film in which he breaks the fourth wall more than usual even for him (at one point satirizing heavy-handed monologues), this subtle understanding with the audience may be the most effective.

            Even as early as Animal Crackers, however, it is easy to foresee Zeppo splitting ways after the Brothers left Paramount. He would have his moment in the sun in Horse Feathers, but in Animal Crackers, playing Spaulding’s long suffering secretary Jamison, he is practically out of sight. But even he is granted a happy scene by association with Groucho, the nonsensical dictation of a letter to the ‘Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and McCormack’ law firm.

            Groucho may have unwillingly hurt Zeppo’s reputation after they parted ways, claiming the team “twice as funny without Zeppo” when a studio threatened to cut their salary, but he often spoke of his brother’s comedic talent with admiration, going as far as calling him, “the funniest one of us” and was even willing to let him play Captain Spaulding. But after all the quintessential Groucho-isms associated with Animal Crackers (the elephant joke and the song “Hello, I Must be Going”, etc.), no one else but Groucho will do. Hooray for Captain Spaulding.