Well, gentle reader, I suppose since I just watched a couple episodes of You Bet Your Life on DVD, it was inevitable that I would watch this videocassette shortly thereafter. It’s been almost exactly two years since I watched Horse Feathers and Duck Soup which I liked so much that I bought this film the next spring. And it’s likely I will buy all three of them again when I find them for fifty cents or a quarter just to make sure I have them. And backup copies thereof.
But enough about the reification of my related watching and purchase activity. This is a movie report, ainna?
Groucho Marx plays Groucho Marx Otis Driftwood, a grifter working as a… manager? for a rich woman (played by Margaret Dumont) who wants him to introduce her to the heights of New York society. They open in Italy, where Driftwood introduces her to the leader of a New York Opera company director who is in Italy to bring Italy’s greatest tenor to New York. The tenor, Lassparri, insists that the New York Opera company also sign his female co-star whom he’s trying to woo. She agrees, parting with her lover, Ricardo Baroni, who is also a tenor. When Driftwood discovers how much opera singers make, he signs Baroni to a dubious contract to serve as his manager as well. Instead of waiting for his lover, though, Baroni and two Marx brothers stow away on the ship to New York and hijinks ensue, including what was apparently an iconic stateroom scene and a near-destruction of the opera house.
It’s an amusing film, probably moreso for me because I was an old soul even before I got old, and I lived in the Before times and even then had a bit of a predilection for old movies and whatnot. But perhaps the Marx brothers’ slapstick is more universal than that, especially as the film relies on a thin base plot and archetypes.
I’ve mentioned before that Marx’s impact carried on into the 21st century, in so far as you can still (or could still as of six years ago) find Marx glasses in the party store to put into elementary school birthday party gift bags. When I was watching You Bet Your Life, the following Facebook memory came up:
I told him I loved his work and asked for his autograph. Which he spelled like the plural of mark because he had not yet gone to a public school or university.
Six years? But my youngest is still that boy. He’s all of the boys he was and the young man he is now. Simultaneously. I am not sure how that works.
