Movie Reviews for A Day at the Races

A Day at the Races

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Movie Reviews of A Day at the Races

Movie Review: One of their best
Summary: 4 Stars

Not as packed with routines as A Night at The Opera, but up there with their top films. With The Coconuts and Duck Soup, it completes a Marx Brothers collection.

Movie Review: bought as a gift
Summary: 4 Stars

Was as seller promised, Thank you.
Bought as a gift, receiver was happy!

Movie Review: A collection of very funny skits, but never quite gels.
Summary: 3 Stars

A Day at the Races (Sam Wood, 1937)

As long as I've been a movie fan, I've been hearing about A Day at the Races and how incredible it is. Many critics refer to it in the kind of tone one expects to hear when discussing, say, Orson Welles or The Godfather. I spent most of my life not really liking older comedy, having only really been exposed to the Three Stooges and that sort of thing, and have only recently discovered the genius of folks like Keaton and Chaplin, so I figured now was the time to try the Marx Brothers, and with my affinity for horse racing, this seemed like the movie to start with.

Hugo Hackenbush (Groucho) is a vet posing as the head of a mental institution. (Why? Who knows?) He gets himself tangled up with a racetrack tout (Chico), a happy-go-lucky jockey (Harpo), and a racehorse owner (Allan Jones, who got his start in this movie's companion piece, A Night at the Opera), trying to keep the sanitarium open with the help of a racehorse who's actually not much of a racehorse.

One of the things that I really like about Keaton, Chaplin, et al. is that their movies actually play out like movies, whereas my problem with acts like the Three Stooges is that the movies had a paper-thin plot whose sole reason for existence was to showcase the standup bits. That is also an exact description of A Day at the Races, though it also pauses for a number of musical bits in between the standup. And while some of those standup bits are funny, it's still a collection of bits mashed together to resemble a movie. Not bad, but I don't really get all the fuss. ***

Movie Review: Diluted Marxian Madness
Summary: 3 Stars

For all of its classic comedy, "A Day at the Races" (1937) signals the beginning of the Marx Brothers' creative decline after the death of producer Irving Thalberg. What clicked in "A Night at the Opera" doesn't gel nearly as well in this uneven MGM production. Running almost two hours, "A Day at the Races" suffers from excessive musical numbers and subplots that dilute some of the Marxes' best material. This film cries for some major editing - preferably a deletion of the "Water Carnival" ballet and the ludicrous "All God's Children Got Rhythm" number. If Thalberg had lived, "A Day at the Races" might have been a worthy follow-up to "A Night at the Opera." Instead, the brilliance of Groucho, Chico and particularly Harpo is undermined by obvious studio tampering.