A Film Canon

 

 

This is the first Marx Brothers film in which Groucho fully hits his stride, exploiting a source of institutionalised authority ripe for his particular brand of linguistic parody - academia. As Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff, he subjects his peers and students to a series of insane, meaningless monologues, most memorably in the opening address, in which he states his intellectual philosophy ("Whatever it is, I'm against it"), as well as the delivery of an anatomy lecture, which takes his and Chico's taste for homonyms and synonyms to its logical conclusion. The former is also testament to a much more sophisticated conception and integration of the (increasingly grating) musical number, which achieves a surreal hyperbole reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as the more recent rise of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. But the greatest scene is undoubtedly the final football match which, unlike such generic predecessors as The Freshman and College, refuses to grant any redemptive power to sport and, more generally, to the collegiality that Zeppo's conspicuously peripheral performance represents. Instead, Harpo plays dirty, turning the game into a mere pretext for violence, while Groucho simply refuses to engage in any constructive way, lying on the turf with a paper and cigar when he should be in the scrum.