A Day at the Races Reviews

Groucho Marx considered A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races to be the best films that the Marx Brothers ever made. I’ll grant that Opera is probably their last masterpiece, but A Day at the Races is the first film in which the cracks begin to show in their formula.

Their run of films at Paramount, beginning with The Cocoanuts and ending with Duck Soup, were a stunning display of anarchic glee, gleefully leaving behind typical narrative structure in favor of a series of gags and tricky word play. Once they transferred to MGM, they were forced to play second-fiddle to bland romantic leads and lost their brother Zeppo along the way. Zeppo’s winking performance as the bland romantic lead was in perfect alignment with his brother’s various forms of anarchy, and replacing him cause the group to lose a bit of its magic.

It sounds like I hated A Day at the Races, and I didn’t. It’s perfectly winning, even if it doesn’t hold up quite as well as Duck Soup or Horse Feathers. What I noticed while watching this film is that the routine formula of the films they made at MGM were solidifying.

Irving Thalberg brought the Marx Brothers to MGM and told them that their assault on propriety in all of its various forms made them unlikable to general audiences, and they needed to realign their brand. Enter in his bright idea to make them supporting players in their own films, despite being billed as the main act. They would help pretty, conventional leads, typically lower-level players in MGM’s pantheon of stars, and obtain happiness and romance. These films weren’t bad, but they were limiting in highlighting the best of what the Marx Brothers had to offer.

None of the other films they made were bad, but they weren’t as magical. A Day at the Races is the last film they made that could be considered a classic. For me, it’s definitely second-tier, but it’s still damn enjoyable. Except for a scene in which the brothers perform a routine in blackface, an ugly reminder of things that were once considered perfectly fine in mass entertainments.

A Day at the Races tells a swirling and complicated story about the brothers helping out Maureen O’Sullivan (one of their best leading ladies in the post-Paramount years) obtain the money to keep her sanitarium open by betting on horse racing. Granted, Allan Jones is a bit of a lead-balloon, but Margaret Dumont is back in fine form and gets to be highly animated in several sequences. A particularly hilarious medical examination involving the Marx Brothers and Dumont is an absolute standout. And when A Day at the Races ends, it feels like the closing chapter of the classic years. The films after this would contain sparkling moments, but pound-for-pound they wouldn’t reach the comedic heights of these earlier years.