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This Film On

• Internet Movie Database (IMDB)

Horse Feathers

(1932)

68 min. Paramount. Director: Norman Z. McLeod. Cast: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Zeppo Marx, Thelma Todd, Reginald Barlow.

When Groucho Marx sang and danced "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" in Animal Crackers, his performance became indelible, iconic. For the rest of his career, the tune stuck with him as his theme song, literally in the case of his long-running quiz show You Bet Your Life. But for my money, Groucho's signature musical number comes at the start of the 1932 picture Horse Feathers. Playing newly installed Huxley College professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Groucho delivers one of his classic speeches, then launches into the double whammy "I'm Against It"/"I Always Get My Man": "I don't know what they have to say./It makes no difference anyway./Whatever it is, I'm against it./ No matter what it is or who commenced it, I'm against it!" 

Zany dancing ensues, with a chorus of stuffed-shirt professors in robes circling Wagstaff (it's probable that Busby Berkeley—who reportedly did some work on the picture—worked out the traffic patterns). Once the room has cleared out, Wagstaff lays into his son Frank Wagstaff (Zeppo, only eleven years younger than Groucho) for dating "the college widow" Connie Bailey (Thelma Todd of Monkey Business). A monologue, a song, and a crack dialogue scene, all hilarious: the opening ten minutes of Horse Feathers have more laughs than most comedy features muster in their entirety.

And there's more where that came from: Frank sends his not-so-dear old dad to a speakeasy to improperly recruit a couple of bruisers to play for Huxley's football team. Wagstaff mistakenly enlists Chico and Harpo, under their new guises of Baravelli the iceman (and bootleg liquor salesman) and Pinky, a dogcatcher. Intrigue comes in the form of Jennings (David Landau), the unscrupulous head of Huxley's rival school Darwin College who will do anything to obtain the Huxley team's signals. A kidnapping scheme gone wrong also plays into the story's rising action on the way to an all-time madcap football climax, which fully exploits the comedic potential of the game with a hugely impressive run of sight gags and ironic wit. 

Horse Feathers excels in integrating the music and lyrics provided by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Animal Crackers, Duck Soup). Mostly this means doling out variations on the whimsical "Everyone Says I Love You," which gets sung by Frank, Baravelli (accompanying himself on piano), and Professor Wagstaff (accompanying himself on guitar), whistled by Pinky to his horse, and later plucked by Pinky on a harp. Groucho marches straight to the camera to offer the audience a chance to escape Chico's piano number ("I've got to stay here, but there's no reason why you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby until this thing blows over"), but Chico's energetic take on "Collegiate" gets an added charge from having a "chick" for "Chic-o" to play to.

With the help of a screenwriting braintrust that includes Kalmar, Ruby, S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone, Horse Feathers takes the Marx Brothers way back to some of their earliest material spoofing school life. The picture—and, in particular, the anatomy classroom scene—mines sketches from the decades-earlier show Fun in Hi Skule. The essence of "Marxist" humor comes from their irreverent puncturing of institutions and individuals who overestimate their worth to society. In a depressed America, Horse Feathers' depiction of costly college lampooned the assumption that it is a necessary and intellectually righteous stepping stone on the path of every successful American; the picture also poked fun at the life-and-death seriousness with which people take their sports. Though the brothers don't do an end-zone dance after scoring multiple touchdowns, it would certainly be well justified.

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