Animal Crackers (G, 1930)

A vehicle for the slapstick and verbal comedy of the Marx Brothers, ANIMAL CRACKERS kicks off when Wealthy Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) decides to throw a party for the unveiling of her pricey new painting. Her fun-loving niece (Lillian Roth) and her associates steal the painting and replace it with a forgery. Then the forgery is stolen and replaced with another forgery. Two of the riffraff involved are Emanuel Raveli (Chico Marx) and the mute, mischievous Professor (Harpo Marx). Enter Rittenhouse's guest, eccentric explorer Capt. Spaulding (Groucho Marx), whose uproarious monologues segue into an attempt to identify the culprits, then plenty of Marx Brothers' hi-jinks.

While movie historians and classic-comedy fans practically worship ANIMAL CRACKERS as a high point of the Marx Brothers career, it's a rickety, primitive talkie with an insubstantial plot. The Marx Brothers were famous vaudevillians, and this is pretty much a filmed version of a play they did. You get the impression the director just left the camera running and went for coffee while the comics did their verbal gymnastics and slapstick unattended.

While much of the antics are hilarious, some will fly right over the heads of modern viewers. For example: When Groucho goes into "strange interludes," talking to the camera in gloomy, poetic terms, he's mocking an avant-garde Eugene O'Neill drama that was a recent Broadway hit. There are a lot of spoofy touches and asides, and viewers who don't have a strong grasp on the time period -- or patience for a static lens POV -- might find Animal Crackers far from the king of the comedy jungle, despite its "classic" status.