Alphabetical film festival: 2 "A" comedies

ANIMAL CRACKERS: I grew up watching comedy teams like Abbott & Costello (I liked them, especially their horror movie spoofs), Laurel & Hardy (so-so, but a bit slow for my tastes), Martin & Lewis (didn't really get them), and the Three Stooges (never liked them at all), but it wasn't until I was in college that I saw a Marx Brothers movie and I fell in love with them. Animal Crackers, made in 1930, was out of circulation for many years due to rights issues, but in 1974 it was re-issued in theaters and that's when I saw it. I was practically alone in the theater, and usually comedies are more enjoyable with a big audience, but I laughed myself silly and immediately wanted more Marx. In those pre-home video days, that was easier said than done, but luckily between the re-release of Animal Crackers and Groucho's recent concert tour, the Marxes were back in the media spotlight, and I managed to see many of their films at revival houses and campus showings.

Though casual fans probably best know and like their later MGM movies (such as A Night at the Opera), I prefer their earlier Paramount comedies, which were more whimsically anarchic and relied much less on the MGM formula that always involved a bland romantic couple which the Marxes help out. There is a plot in Animal Crackers--a famous painting is stolen at a weekend house party and the Marxes help (and hinder) the investigation--but it is cheerfully subverted constantly with extended comedy bits that have no relation to any plot thread at all: Harpo and Chico playing a crazy bridge game, Chico pestering a rich guy whom he knew years ago as Abie the Fishman, Groucho as an explorer telling his audience that he shot an elephant in his pajamas (and how the elephant got in Groucho's pajamas, he'll never know). Chico's musical bit at the piano, in which he starts a piece with a plodding melody but can't ever get around to finishing it, is his best solo bit in any of the brothers' films

The three brothers rule the film; Zeppo, the straight-man brother, fades into the background, but Margaret Dumont as the rich and stuffy Mrs. Rittenhouse is memorable as Groucho's best straight "man" ever (and she's even better in their later film Duck Soup). This was theoretically a musical, and two songs from it, "Hurray for Captain Spaulding" and "Hello, I Must Be Going," remained identified with Groucho for the rest of his career. The ending is so strange and almost surreal, I couldn't believe it made it into a major studio film: with the mystery more or less solved and all the characters gathered in one room, Harpo, who has been chasing lovely young blondes all along, sprays knockout gas at everyone, positions himself next to a pretty girl, then sprays himself unconscious. It's a weird but lovely way to bring the manic proceedings to an end. Duck Soup is a shorter, tighter movie, and has more famous lines and bits, but I still think this is my favorite

AUNTIE MAME: Rosalind Russell plays the rich madcap Mame Dennis who alters her partying life when she becomes legal guardian of her late brother's son Patrick. Her friends think that Patrick, like so many other things in her life, will be just a temporary distraction or passing fad, but she devotes herself to the boy, trying to expand his horizons and make him a free-thinker. When he becomes engaged to a stuffy, stupid high-class college girl, she holds a party which exposes her and her parents as asses. The plot is important, but it is Russell's movie all the way and she makes the most of a wonderful character. Though there is no gay content (except for a oddly-highlighted lesbian couple in an early party scene), the film has a high camp factor, not in a bad-movie way, but in the exaggerated humor and the almost over-the-top personality of Mame Dennis. Russell knows just how far to go and when to ease up so she doesn't lose the human touch and become just a drag queen caricature.

The young Roger Smith (pictured above, best known as a private eye on TV's 77 Sunset Strip) is excellent as the college-age Dennis, Coral Browne is fine as a pompous actress who is Mame's best friend, and Peggy Cass steals all of her scenes as the naive Agnes Gooch who is hired to transcribe Mame's memoir ("I'm her *sponge*," she growls). The movie is long and deliberately stagy, with blackouts and fade-ups just as in a Broadway play, and oddly, the one time the film is opened up, when Mame visits a Southern plantation with her boyfriend (Forrest Tucker), it loses steam. Maybe Mame is such a creature of the "stage," turning her everyday life into a performance, that she suffocates when given too much "reality." Russell was nominated for an Oscar and should have won. This is one of my comfort movies that I can put on to banish the blues or to make a snowbound weekend more bearable.