Reelin' In The Years -- A Day at the Races (1937), directed by Sam Wood

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "A Day At The Races", by Jurassic 5

       I’m not going to be one of those folks that says that comedy was so much better back in the day, as often times that seems to go hand-in-hand with ‘I want to make fun of minorities but I don’t want people to make me feel bad for doing it’, but I will say that it is distinctly different. I imagine much of that has to do with the fact that the comedy stars of the day came out of vaudeville, a style of theatrical variety show that had begun in the 1880s and had been phased out with the rise of cinema. Whereas many top comedic stars today got their start as stand-up comics before transitioning to the silver screen, those coming out of vaudeville were consummate performers: Acting, singing, dancing, musicianship, you needed to be well-rounded back in those days. That emphasis on stand-up also emphasizes the performer these days, whereas comedy then was based on the act. People didn’t turn on the Colgate Comedy Hour to see Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the people, they turned on to see the characters of Abbott & Costello, if that makes sense. At least they did until they were replaced by Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, and even then Jerry Lewis wasn’t the same guy as ‘Jerry Lewis’. Just ask the French.

       I was a big 3 Stooges fan when I was a kid, in large part because TCM or whoever loved to push marathons of their stuff back in the day, and it wasn’t until I was in late high school/early college that I first heard of the Rolling Stones to the Stooges’ Beatles, the Marx Bros. Where the crux of the 3 Stooges style lied in the fact that they were stooges and thus fucked up everything they attempted, the Marx Bros. (lascivious fast-talker Groucho, Italian con artist Chico, and prop-loving, anarchi mute Harpo, occasionally joined by their straight-man brother Zeppo or Gummo in the vaudeville days) made everyone else the stooges. As soon as they stepped into a room they were three steps ahead of everyone else there, and then it was a race to see how much they can fuck with those people before the scene ended. They were still good guys at heart, helping those in need, but they were totally fine with lying, cheating and stealing whenever the situation called for it (or because they felt like it at the time). Kinda like Eddie Guerrero when he was a babyface.

       A Day at the Races was the second Marx Bros. film to be released by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer after their move from Paramount (the home of their first five full-length films) and the second in a row to be directed by Sam Wood (who you might recall from Raffles) , following A Night at the Opera. Maureen O’Sullivan plays Judy, the young and beautiful owner of a sanitarium located near the Sparkling Springs Lake summer resort which has recently fallen on hard times. It’s looking like she might have to sell the place to shady businessman Morgan, and finding out that her lover Gill (Allan Jones) has spent all the money he’s saved up as a singer in order to buy a racehorse in order to pay her debts does nothing to lift her mood. Tony (Chico), the sanitarium employee, offers a suggestion: Get Ms. Upjohn (played by Marx Bros. regular Margaret Dumont), the resident rich lady and hypochondriac to pay off the debt! Well Miss Upjohn isn’t really in the mood to break open the pocketbook, convinced as she is that something is wrong despite all the doctors saying she’s fine. So if that’s the case, then they better call in Ms. Upjohn’s favorite doctor, Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho), physician and diagnostician, but mostly a veterinarian. Then you’ve got Stuffy the jockey (Harpo) who ends up meeting Gill at the race track while running from his own troubles, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a cinematic jambalaya.

       Of course you’re not going to a Marx Bros. movie for the plot, you’re there to see them do their schtick, and in that A Day at the Races fulfills that need. I find it hard to describe what makes the Marx Bros.entertaining, because so much of it is based on the dexterity of how they perform and how they use language (probably not a good choice for an ESL class movie night) that you really need to see it to get the full effect. This is clear whenever one of the Bros. are aimed at somebody, but Races also dedicates a decent chunk of time to longform skits involving the Bros. interacting with each other, which has a different sort of energy entirely. The only one who can match a Marx Brother is another Marx Brother after all, and seeing them play off each other is a treat all on its own. The first big skit of the film in fact, when Tony unknowingly meets Hackenbush for the first time and cons him into buying a tip on a horse, which is in a code you need to buy a code book to decipher, and so on and on, feels exactly like something they pulled out a hundred times back on the vaudeville circuit. Hell, you don’t even need the rest of the film for context, it works perfectly well on its own with a definitive beginning and end. 

       Marx Bros. films are often very musical ones as well, with most if not all of their films featuring a virtuoso solo performance by Chico on the piano and Harpo on the harp (natch). Races takes this a step further by sticking two lengthy musical numbers in the second half, including a reprise at the end. Allan Jones does his Zeppo impression here, by which I mean ‘generic old-timey Hollywood ballad’, but I do enjoy the second, jazzier number. Combined with those long skits it does throw off the pace of the film, so things end up coming across as a bit chaotic by the end. A bit of a ‘we’re running out of time so let’s wrap everything up now’ kind of thing. Not bad, just different.

       Really I’ve only got two gripes with this movie. One is an unfortunate case of blackface, when the Marx Bros. are trying to escape from the villains in a crowd of Black people, but not too much attention is drawn to it and no jokes are made at the expense of Black people during the scene so it’s not as bad as it could have been. The other issue is with Harpo, or rather how he’s utilized in this film. Not only does he seem less actively chaotic than he has in other films, but he also seems kind of...superfluous, I guess is the word? As if they struggled to find something for him to do except at the very end of the film. I also must admit that I hate his ‘whistling as talking’ gimmick, and when he breaks it out here it lasts just long enough to get me in a sour mood. They get back by the next scene, but that fucking whistling is not doing it for me dude.

       When talking about the best Marx Bros. movies, I imagine folk with more cinema experience than I do likely lean towards their output with Paramount (that Zeppo tho). Honestly I’d probably agree, although it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to watch their early stuff. However I think A Day at the Races (as well as A Night at the Opera) works as a good showcase of their stuff, and showed that they still had plenty left in the tank. At least until they reached A Night in Casablanca, by which time the wheels were definitely falling off the car. 1937 though? Still good, and so it gets the recommendation.

       This year’s potential inductions included Disney’s landmark animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Leo McCarey’s family drama Make Way For Tomorrow, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage. We’re heading closer and closer to some dark times on the timeline, so how about for our next stop we get into some heavier fare?

Raffles (1939), directed by Sam Wood

The Trailer
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The Appropriate Tune: "Thief", by The Fratellis

       If you ever went through a Victorian literature phase as a child or spent a weekend binging on Benedict Cumberbatch vehicles, then chances are you’ve probably heard of Arthur Conan Doyle and his infamously intelligent detective Sherlock Holmes. What you might not know however is that Sir Doyle had a relative who was also a famous published author, at least at the time. Ernest William Hornung was his name, Doyle’s brother-in-law, and although his writing career began in 1887, it wasn’t until 1899 that he literary world got its first glimpse of what would ultimately be his most enduring creation: Ananias Justice Raffles, a charming, well-to-do cricketeer with more than a passing similarity to Hornung’s friend and fellow wordsmith Oscar Wilde who moonlighted as a gentleman thief known as The Amateur Cracksman, stealing hearts and valuables while dodging the bumbling bobbies of Scotland Yard. Raffles proved to be rather popular during the early part of the 20th century, spawning several more books, a couple of plays and of course several films in both the silent and sound era, but interest in the character seemed to wane after the 1930s. A film in 1958 and a short-lived TV series in ‘77, and that’s been about it for ol’ A.J. in the pop culture sphere ever since, aside from a cameo in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and maybe a Philip José Farmer book. I’ve not read the books, so I can’t claim this is some great oversight or anything, but it is surprising just how obscure Hornung and Raffles have become given that connection to Arthur Conan Doyle. You’d think that we would have already seen a big budget film where Tom Hiddleston Sherlock has to try and catch Idris Elba Raffles from stealing the crown jewels or something at this point. I mean if the Power Rangers can cross over with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles then anything is possible, am I right?

       By the way netflix, if you want to throw me a couple million dollars for that pitch, I won’t mind.

       Released in 1939 and produced by Samuel Goldwyn (who you might know from some shit film studio called MGM), the simply titled Raffles turned out to be not only the last film to star Hornung’s character for over a decade, but the second-to-last film to star him to date. David Niven, about a decade away from his award-winning performance in Separate Tables, plays the titular A.J. Raffles,  a cricketing star who happens to be the master thief known as The Amateur Cracksman. Or at least he was, until a meeting with his lady love Gwen Manders (Olivia de Havilland, herself a few years away from Academy gold for To Each His Own) convinces him to give up a life of crime. Or at least it might have, if his old school chum and Gwen’s brother Bunny didn’t come to him begging for a thousand pounds in order to settle some gambling debts. Reluctantly Raffles decides to pull out The Amateur Cracksman for one last job, figuring the Lord and Lady Melrose are easy enough marks, only to discover that Scotland Yard has somehow gotten wind of a future robbery at the Melrose Manor and now have eyes and ears on the place. With the deck stacked against him on multiple fronts, can Raffles make it out with the loot and pay off Bunny’s debt, or will London’s greatest thief finally see in the inside of a prison cell? And will it involve wickets of any kind, sticky or otherwise?

       At times Raffles can be fairly interesting. The actual scene of the Melrose theft is actually rather tense, done as it is in almost complete silence, and the cat & mouse interplay between Raffles and Inspector Mackenzie is the most entertaining dialogue in the film. However, as a story meant to introduce audiences to the character it falls flat. Why did Raffles become The Amateur Cracksman? No idea, aside from the implication that cricketing doesn’t pay the bills. Is being old school chums with Bunny really worth Raffles risking arrest and imprisonment? Apparently so,  since Bunny is barely a character in the damn movie and he’s too much of a milksop to endear himself to an audience. And most important of all, why should I care that if he’s caught or not? I mean this guy isn’t Robin Hood after all, there’s no theme of social injustice  or combating corruption here, he’s a member of the idle rich who plays a sport that’s only popular in about three countries and who steals from other idle rich to pay his bills. That’s not relatable, at least to me, and although there are moments where they try to make Raffles seem compassionate, more often than not he came across as smarmy and manipulative. Which could also be said of Sherlock Holmes, but then Holmes stories not only have Watson as the humanizing element, but they have a mystery for the audience to focus on. Not so for this film, and I feel like it suffers for it.

Of course the main purpose of this film was likely to be a vehicle for David Niven and Olivia de Havilland, and as far as that goes they’re not too bad when they’re not trying to be romantic. Maybe it’s because the most dialogue they ever share with each other at once might be an expository scene where they explain why these two characters are supposedly in love, but every time they try to do a romantic moment it comes across as slightly awkward to me. It would have likely helped if Gwen was more of a character and less of an object devoted to Raffles, but I’m guessing that was too radical for 1930s Hollywood. Olivia de Havilland looked pretty nice though, I’ve gotta say. 

Combine all that with a middle of the road score and a setting that consisted mostly of various rooms and you’ve got yourself a by-the-books average kind of movie in Raffles. If you’re into Victorian literature and you were looking for something beyond the surface level, or you’re looking for something to double feature with your Basil Rathbone Holmes movies, then this might be worth a watch. If not, then there are plenty of other movies in the sea. Probably not that many that involve cricket though.