World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

REVIEW OF REVIEWS Edited by h. e. Biyth Review of the Month A Day at the Races (Sam Wood — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) The Marx Brothers. There was a time when Harpo, his strangely soulful face made grotesque by his wig, would pick up the nearest telephone and thoughtfully start eating it. Those were the days when the Marx Brothers were the emotional escapologists of comedy, when they took you to an unhampered world where the only reason was complete lunacy. There is no comparison, in my submission, between the Marx boys as they were then, and the trio as they are now. When Groucho talked so fast that you could not understand him until your second or third visit, he was doing more than wisecracking. He was talking for the benefit of every talker who had sometimes nattered himself that he was a wit. Everyone with a tongue in his head must have wanted an option on Groucho's conversation — if only for the pleasure of refusing it. When Harpo, having eaten his telephone and munched a couple of flowers by way of savoury, dashed like a madman after every blonde in the picture, always pulling out that priceless gag of lifting up his leg so that other people would save him the trouble of having to hold it, he was lifting an audience to a crazy world of life without a libido. I think Harpo was one of the greatest clowns in the world. Chico, the little man, with his absurd hat and his rich Bowery accent, stood between the two high apostles of imbecility, downtrodden, always making mistakes, finding relief in thumping a piano while Harpo paused in the madness to strum a harp. Behind them all, necessary counterpoint to their humour, was Zeppo, now retired to the agency business, the good-looking fellow who did nothing but pull the leading lady towards him every once in a while as much as to say "This is where the scenario gives me a love scene." Zeppo was important to the brethren ; he was the mooring mast to their airship humour, bumping them back to earth. Now in A Day at the Races, the new Marx team, humanised with infinite skill by the clever Metro studios, the comedians are not, to me, the Marx Brothers, except in snatches. Groucho still prattles incessantly, sometimes with his old fire. But Harpo, key man of the combination, is subdued. This is a frustrated Harpo, who cannot yelp after the first blonde he sees, who can only chew medical thermometers, a man devoid of a succulent telephone or a tasteful piece of furniture. Chico, perhaps, comes out the best of them now, bewildered Chico who sells a racing tip so thoroughly that by the time he has completed the deal the race is over. Metro have, as it were, translated the Marx Brothers. They are now slapstick comedians of rare ability, doing their work better than almost any other screen team. But they are not those irresponsible maniacs who spun around like tops in a world where Freud came in at the window as Harpo went out eating the door. Harpo, Groucho and Chico ... "A Day at the Races" 26 From an audience point of view there is no doubt that Metro are right. Dead right. Cocoanuts and the earlier pictures were not big successes. The brethren were not many people's kettle of fish so much as most people's red herrings. In their new film, which deals with a sanatorium and a racehorse which must win to pay the family mortgage, they have dived into a world of slapstick burlesque, extremely funny stuff which will make you laugh even if you have never previously creased a smile out of a Marx film. To the real Marx admirers the film will be a landmark denoting the position beyond which it was no longer commercially possible for them to make films for a small minority. To cinema-goers as a whole the comedy is a pippin. — Connery Chappell, The Sunday Dispatch King Solomon's Mines (Robert Stevenson — Gaumont-British.) Cedric Hardwicke, Paul Robeson, Anna Lee, Roland Young. King Solomon's Mines is described as "from the novel by Rider Haggard." "From" is the word, though to make its meaning more explicit the phrase "a long way away" ought to have preceded it. Now one cannot complain at the mutilation of Rider Haggard's work in the same way as one complains of the mutilation of the life of Parnell. The book, after all, was a mere thriller, not a classic, and the producer is therefore entitled to add to it or subtract from it anything that he wishes. But at least one is entitled to insist that this cinematic arithmetic should result in an improvement. The producers of King Soloman's Mines have improved nothing. They have subtracted much that was good, and added a great deal of nonsense. That the film remains exciting at all is not their fault but Rider Haggard's, since it is the surviving relics of his book that form all the climaxes. — Truth The film of King Solomon's Mines is not so exciting as the book used to be. This is partly due to its age and partly too, no doubt, to jaded taste, but all the same the film has weaknesses from which the book was free. The original story is not so valuable that minor departures from it are necessarily damaging. And in what is anyway fantastic, one is not entitled to grumble about small inaccuracies of custom and language — such as, for example, the convention by which the black men speak decent English but no recognisable Bantu dialect. But it would be insulting to Mr. Robeson to think of him as a small inaccuracy. His fundamentally gentle nature is out of place in the proud and warlike Umbopa as is his velvety Mississippi bass on South Africa's dry and stony tracks. Once Mr. Robeson is engaged for a part, singing becomes inevitable. And King Solomon's Alines responds a little ludicrously to operatic treatment. Ungenerous though it seems to say so, this film would probably have been better with a lesser artist in Mr. Robeson's place, and if the interest had been focused more directly on his adventures. — The New Statesman and Nation