Harpo steals the movie, shown here with Chico, Nat Pendleton and James Pierce.

The Marx Brothers take on higher education in their fourth movie, Horse Feathers. Groucho plays Professor Wagstaff the new dean of Huxley College where his son (Zeppo) is enrolled and fooling around with the college widow (Todd). Groucho disapproves. He compares his son’s actions to his own at that age. As he puts it, “A college widow stood for something in those days. In fact she stood for plenty.” Zeppo has a slightly larger part this time around. He had expressed a desire to retire from the group and his brothers wanted him to stick around. As it turned out he would appear in just one more Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup the following year.

Like she did in Monkey Business, Thelma Todd handles the Margaret Dumont chore of playing the gravitational straight person to the revolving lunacy of the brothers. All of whom try wooing her at one point or another in the movie. Her part is larger here but she was funnier in Monkey Business. She does do a great job of setting Groucho up for a laugh. At one point she exclaims, “Oh, Professor, you’re full of whimsy.” “Can you notice it from there? I’m always that way after I eat radishes.”

The silly plot involves the events leading up to the big football game between Huxley and its rival Darwin. Darwin plans to cheat by hiring two well-known local athletes to play in the game and also by trying to obtain Huxley’s game signals. Groucho counters by mistakenly hiring bootlegging misfits Chico and Harpo to play for Huxley. They later come up with a desperate scheme to kidnap the semi-pro players. Like all Marx Brothers movies the plot is not important, it is merely a tree for them to hang their laugh ornaments from.

The movie opens with Groucho performing a song called “I’m Against It” explaining his feelings about education. He does a very silly little dance step where he kicks each leg out sideways and rotates it at the knee. Later each of the brothers performs a song called “Everyone Says, I Love You” for Todd. Each version has different lyrics sung to the same melody. Chico accompanies himself on the piano while singing, Zeppo just sings it and Groucho (perhaps to show he was also a talented musician like his brothers) plays a guitar and sings it in a rowboat, while Todd does the rowing of course. Harpo whistles the tune and plays his harp.

Although this is one of their shorter pictures, clocking in at just an hour and six minutes, it squeezes in quite a few of these musical moments. In fact Groucho seems to take notice of this as he makes a disparaging comment directly to the audience before Chico begins to play the piano at one point. He says, “I’ve got to stay here but there’s no reason why you folks shouldn’t go out into the lobby until this thing blows over.” Scott, I know you’ll appreciate that line.

For once Groucho doesn’t completely dominate the movie. This one belongs to Harpo. He has many surreal bits of comedy. When a bum asks him for change to get a cup of coffee with Harpo produces a steaming cup from under his coat. When he walks past two men playing cards in a speakeasy and one of them puts the deck on the table and says “cut” Harpo does, with an ax. To get into the speakeasy you must say the password Swordfish. Harpo pulls out a fish with a sword sticking out of its mouth. And he gets to be the hero during the climactic football game where all four brothers wind up on the field.

One of the funniest scenes happens when the boys take over a classroom and Groucho begins teaching an anatomy lesson. “Now then baboons. What is a corpuscle?” Chico: “That’s easy. First there’s a captain, then there’s a lieutenant, then there’s a corpuscle.” This scene ends with Chico and Harpo attacking Groucho at his desk, first with pea shooters and then by throwing books. One of these clearly strikes Groucho in the face. He falls back on the desk and says “You got me.”

Horse Feathers tickles but it isn’t the funniest Marx Brothers movie by more than a nose.
 

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