BEFORE: The Marx Brothers carry over, they'll be here all of this week and next. They should get me to big movie #2,000 if all goes well. Hey, I covered Mae West both at the circus and in the Old West, and now I'm doing the same with the Marx Brothers. This was released the same year as "My Little Chickadee", so comedy westerns were clearly in vogue.
THE PLOT: The Marx Brothers come to the rescue in the Wild West when a young man, trying to settle an old family feud so he can marry the girl he loves, runs afoul of crooks.
AFTER: I don't have a lot of time tonight, I have to head over to the theater that's screening CHEATIN' in New York, just in case I'm needed. OK, really I have to head over to the bar across the street where the production team and the publicity team will be hanging out. Same thing.
The best part of this film is probably at the beginning, when Groucho's character, S. Quentin Quale, is $10 short for a train ticket west - so he tries to con it out of a pair of brothers (Chico and Harpo) but they end up conning him with the aid of a $10 bill on a string. And every time he thinks he's been paid a $10 bill, they take it back and also demand their nine dollars change. It runs a little long, but as long as it's still funny, it warrants repetition.
The middle is your standard plot about the railroad coming to town, and getting (and losing) the deed to the typical Western gulch that could be worth a lot of money in the near future. And it culminates with an exciting chase via train that (literally and figuratively) runs right off the rails. They end up running out of fuel for the train, and our heroes get the bright idea to break apart the wooden cars of the train to stoke the engine. It was bugging me - where have I seen that same idea used in a film, recently? I went up and down my blog entries and I couldn't find it - ah, that's because it was a film I re-watched when I was sick in February, "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution". You wouldn't expect a Sherlock Holmes film to borrow ideas from the Marx Brothers, but that one did.
This was the last major release for this famous comedy team, and it sort of feels like their shtick was getting a little worn out - even though it's only the second one I've seen. They announced their retirement after this film was released, but before the release of "The Big Store" in 1941, though they later made two more films, "A Night in Casablanca" and "Love Happy" in order to cover Chico's gambling debts.
Yes, I've been reading up on the Marx Brothers on Wikipedia, so some of my questions have been answered already. I'll try to pepper little nuggets of trivia into my reviews over the next week.
Also starring John Carroll, Diana Lewis, Walter Woolf King, Robert Barrat, June MacCloy.
RATING: 4 out of 10 beer mugs
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