7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Mayhem and zaniness ensue when a valuable painting goes missing during a party in honor of famed African explorer Captain Spaulding.
Starring: The Marx Brothers, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo MarxComedy | 100% |
Musical | 95% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH, French
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Note: This film is available as part of The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection.
The Marx Brothers remain one of the most iconic comedy teams in the entire history of show business, including of course their film work. Years of
vaudeville experience and then Broadway stardom meant the siblings came to cinema with personas largely set and with a huge “catalog” of bits they
could utilize for their film work. That said, the movie going public had never really seen anything like the manic proclivities of this familial troupe, and
countless commentators from 1929 (when The Cocoanuts debuted on celluloid) on have attempted to analyze various elements of the
team’s completely unique comedy. While perhaps not especially “meaningful” in any overarching way, I had an unusual response to watching these
new transfers of the first five Marx Brothers feature films (all reportedly sourced from new 4K restorations done by Universal), one probably sparked
by my recent reviewing duties.
Arrow Video’s UK branch recently released
Woody Allen: Six Films 1971-1978, and in doing some background reading in preparation for my reviews of the movies in that set,
more than once I read in various articles comments along the lines of “Allen helped to define Jewish humor” or “Jewish humor simply wouldn’t be
the
same without Allen.” Allen’s patented brand of neurosis, sexual obsession and verbal acuity may indeed be at least a trifecta of Jewish
humor if not the trifecta, but one only need look a bit further back in time to the Marx Brothers for another potent example of the
“mainstreaming” of elements that could well be considered Jewish humor. I'm not suggesting this is the only way to look at the Marx Brothers'
efforts, or even that it's an "important" way, just that it struck me as "being there" for me after having just watched a bunch of Allen films.
In a way, though, the Marx Brothers’ perceived “Jewishness” is a little
more subliminal than Allen’s is in his own films, though for those with the eyes to see, the siblings represent their generation of Jews rather
iconically.
Not only is their verbal humor full of puns and other formalistic hijinks, the very subject matter of many of their jokes tends to focus on social,
political and even economic elements. The very fact that the act is comprised of family is important, with a “me and you against the world”
ambience
that speaks to outcasts (obviously including Jews) to this day. But there’s a “subtext” to many of the early Marx Brothers films, where the
brothers
are the outsiders, virtual interlopers attempting to make sense of a calamitous “new” world, whether that be a hotel, high society, a passenger
ship,
college sports or even a supposed nation in the throes of financial ruin.
What’s fascinating about the early Marx Brothers efforts is how they very
subtly display signs of the assimilative fervor that many first or second generation Jews of that time period experienced, where it became
paramount
(no pun intended, considering the studio which released the early Marx Brothers efforts) to “blend in”. That may seem positively non-intuitive,
given
the Marx Brothers’ predilection toward anarchic behavior and just outright silliness, but when seen through the prism of an early to mid 20th
century
“Jewish identity,” the first five Marx Brothers feature films offer not just laughs galore, but a rather interesting example of so-called “ethnics”
rather
brilliantly invading the American consciousness in an almost subversive way. In this respect, the Marx Brothers become one of the most potent
examples
of what might be termed cultural immigration, where their Jewishness may have been slightly cloaked but no less ingratiating in the long run.
That
“cloaking” may be nowhere more obvious than in the persona of Chico, a Marx who spoke with a faux Italian accent and who seemed to be
something of a grifter at times. Cloaked in another way but perhaps arguably more ostensibly Jewish, at least on one interpretive level, was Harpo,
the weirdly childlike mute who seemed
to
often be the hapless scapegoat in many of the films, the outsider whose very powerlessness (as evidenced by his inability or unwillingness to
speak)
created “problems,” albeit often in a comedic way. The most obvious paradigm of Jewishness is of course Groucho, with his hyperarticulate
verbal
humor and a probably more than slightly lecherous mien which may in fact be a precursor for some of Woody Allen’s more sexually charged
material.
Zeppo, the kind of “forgotten” Marx Brother, and the one whose film persona is probably the blandest, may therefore somewhat ironically be seen as
the best symbol of those
aforementioned assimilative tendences—Zeppo had “learned” how to be an American first, blending in as the troupe’s straight man and therefore
almost seeming like an outsider himself, at least within the insular world of the siblings’ relationships.
Animal Crackers is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Universal Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.35:1. As Jeffrey Vance mentions in his commentary, this transfer was culled from a 4K scan of a duplicate negative held by the British Film Institute, one which was not hobbled by the cuts that American censors forced on the film with the rise of the so-called Motion Picture Code. That means that this is the first time the complete, unexpurgated Animal Crackers has been seen by (most) American viewers since the film's original release. The look here is miles better than The Cocoanuts, with a vastly improved level of homogeneity. In fact about the only outlier in this transfer is the final sequence, which looks just slightly brighter than the bulk of the presentation. Otherwise, this is virtually damage free, other than extremely small age related items, and contrast and black levels are consistent throughout. Detail levels are very good, though again (as with The Cocoanuts) close-ups are in relatively short supply, meaning fine detail never really gets the opportunity to "pop". The dark sequence later in the film offers virtually no detail levels at all, some of which is certainly by design. There are occasional slight density fluctuations which can give rise to a kind of quasi-flicker at times. My score is 4.25.
The first two Marx Brothers films were shot on the east coast at what is now the Kaufman Astoria studios, and as the commentaries on a couple of these features mention, the sound quality of both The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers has always been substandard, especially when compared to the later, Hollywood shot, films. While Animal Crackers' DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is a bit less problematic than The Cocoanuts, with less overwhelming hiss and fewer signs of age related wear and tear like pops and cracks, the overall sound quality is still rather boxy and even muffled sounding at times. Dialogue comes through clearly enough, and while the musical elements aren't especially full sounding, there are no overly distracting issues like distortion. My score is 3.25.
Fans of Animal Crackers will no doubt delight in the fact that this is finally the complete, unexpurgated version. The film has a number of fantastic gags and is one of the more consistently hilarious of the Paramount films. Video is excellent and audio good on this release, which comes Highly recommended.
1932
1931
1929
1933
My Uncle
1958
Traffic
1971
Director's Cut
1987
1930
1967
1972
1935
1928
1933
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1931
1986
1917-1923
1972
1956