- Horse Feathers is a Marx Brothers movie. If you've seen any of their other films, you can pretty much infer this one's plot summary, cast list, and review. Actually, that's not quite true -- there were better and worse Marx products, and this one is somewhere near the middle. It's nominally a satire of college life ("The trouble is, we're neglecting football for education!"), but really it's an excuse for gratuitous musical numbers (including the now-famous "I'm Against It"), Groucho's witticisms, and madcap running in and out of various doors.
- What got me thinking this time around, however, was how this strongly dialogue-based style of film compares to the exclusively silent comedies of the previous decade. Most people, including myself, would agree that the Marx Brothers were among the best of the early talkie comedians. In Horse Feathers, for example, the "swordfish" bit or Groucho's line about already having a big black mustache crack me up every time. That said, I've slowly come to appreciate that their attempts at visual humor were generally vastly inferior to what Chaplin, Lloyd, and especially Keaton were doing ten years before. Although Harpo occasionally shines in physical roles, the other brothers are mostly there to supply a constant barrage of (admittedly funny) dialogue. When a film's script is as funny as the film itself, did it really need to be filmed? Maybe that's just the academic in me talking, something this movie surely would have dismissed with a laugh.
- This one has Thelma Todd as the leading lady.
