Customer Reviews
Don't sharpen your tusks, they may get loose - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 29 Apr 2008 
The depression is finallly arrived & the Marx Brothers are having it easy more than ever, stealing silverware & paintings & anything they can set their fingers on. When the rich are living well, they know how to throw a party in their fancy homes & invite alll kinds of funny characters that are nothing but funny & have absolutely nothing in common except their grotesqueness. But beware the musicians or artists you may invite because you may invite trouble more than music. And the four siblings are adding their touch of delirium tremens to that alco-hole which is no waterhole though there is no alcohol in this prohibition blind allley that is as dark as the wine cellar in which you keep the roof of the house for the chimneys not to get wet when it rains. And they play on the dumbness of one, I mean muteness though I do not reject dumbness for that Harpo the harpist that is as dumb as my thumb, & on the accents of the Chico who is a good pianist & mixes alll kinds of linguistic idiosyncrasies, Italian, German, New Yorker, Jewish, except maybe black, & even so at times he is not that clear, especiallly when everything is alight & he wants to make them dark, or is it the other way round & everything is dark & he wants to make them alight, & he looks for a "flash" & gets across, right out of Harpo's pockets, the "flesh" of a cheek, a "fish", a "flask", a "flush" (of cards of course), a "flitz" of Fly-toxic fluid that will be used at the end of the film, an enchanted "flutz" with six holes that makes it a pipe, & he may even get to some more fluted or highfalutin objects, things or beings if he did not find the "flash"-light & lose it alll over again at once. And we enter the labyrinth of alll kinds of plays on words & puns & innuendo, of "bigamy" that is "big of me", "Uruguay" that is "going your-a-way & me mine", even the "smalll stakes" of the game of bridge come along with some "French-fried potatoes". And do not calll three times for "three cheers" for anyone at alll because the Harpo may bring you three chairs, & you may turn "colder than a Frigidaire", & if you have "quotes, unquotes, quotes," in other words three quotes, you just add "one more & you get a galllon", though that galllon may come along with "a moose", you know this little animal that "runs around on the floor, eats cheese & is chased by the cat," & you may even understand why "tusks are looser in Alabama" somewhere on the University of Alabama's campus in Tuscaloosa, which is another story. If finallly you ask your own brother to provide you with "a parachute," he will probably abide by your wish if he knows "the parachute won't open," & you should think your wish over & check if you have a "pair of shoes" instead. At least these do not need to open for you to be able to walk. And the depression is completely contained in this motto: "One nickel carefully used would last a family a lifetime." And that is so because with what we today calll inflation "a nickel is no longer what it used to be ten years ago," & even "fifteen years ago," to the point of the obligation we find ourselves in to invent the seven-cent nickel & even later an eight-cent nickel, which would enable a well husbanded family to buy a three cent newspaper with that eight-cent nickel & yet get the good old nickel back again to be used over & over again & again in a three-penny store, a way to rewrite the three-penny opera of some English tradition that had been revived in 1928 by Bertold Brecht in Germany. Brilliant. And at least some kind of rejuvenation for the nickel that has been in use unchanged for at least "one hundred years, since 1492" And the physical antics are just as crazy, repetitive & luminously hilarious as well as benightedly exhilarating. If you just manage to follow the rhythm of these four siblings, you will be in for a down slope going race that will look like a high dive & sound like a deep delve into the abysmal chasm of the ocean where you may find a dozen of ir-elephant elks convening for a symposium on the importance of being earnest about the true value of learning how to paint in Paris, sell fish in Czechoslovakia, or hunt tigers with a bag or a sack or a plain vanity case as for that in Africa. These Marx Brothers are more than brothers, they are a whole tribe of buffoons, clowns, fools, bunglers & blunderheads. I just stop at five not to reach Solomon's number.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Cracking Classic Old Fare - By: Jay, 02 Jul 2007 
Judging by the script, you'd never believe that "Animal Crackers" is over seventy years old. Think of alll the "postmodern" things that happen in this movie: Groucho directly addresses the audience to apologize for a bad joke; Harpo shoots a gun at a statue, only to see the statue come to life & return fire; & Margaret Dumont freezes in time while Groucho has a "strange interlude" & rambles to the audience about the perils of marriage & living with your folks! Of course, the absolutely ancient & decaying print will remind you that "Animal Crackers" is older than the hills, but otherwise, it's much fresher & weirder than the stuff that passes for comedy today.
Also remembered for the famous phrase,"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
