At the Circus
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 87 m, 1939
Directed by Edward Buzzell. Stars the Marx Brothers, Kenny Baker, Florence Rice, et al.

At the Circus is the third picture the Marx Brothers made with MGM, and though it’s usually identified as the beginning of the end of the comedy team’s movie career, I’ve always found it to be the most pleasantly diverting of their post-Paramount efforts. Granted, it has its share of wearying filler, but it’s not as bogged down by the superfluous romantic subplots or pointlessly lavish, seemingly endless musical numbers that made A Night at the Opera or A Day at the Races occasionally taxing to sit through. With those two films, producer Irving Thalberg thought he could take the Marx Brothers to a greater height of popularity by making their comedy less surreal and tempering their mutinous spirit. He succeeded, but he also stripped the brothers of their wayward edge and dulled them out. (Further reading on my distaste for Thalberg’s re-tailoring of the Marx Brothers’ comic stylings can be found here.) Thalberg bought the farm well before At the Circus went into production, and being free of that unbending taskmaster (his bespectacled glazzies forever fixated on the bottom line) is probably what kept the picture from becoming just another bloated, song and dance-filled bore. The Marx Brothers were at their looniest best when they were permitted to run amok, and director Leo McCarey’s understanding of that is what helped to make Duck Soup so painfully funny. There is nothing in At the Circus that can touch the unhampered zaniness that threatened to unspool and burn up every reel of Duck Soup, but there are enough good gags (some of which were thought up by the uncanny Buster Keaton) to bring any Marx Brothers fan worthy of the name back for a third or fourth look-see.

Unlike Big Top Pee-wee or Charles Chaplin’s The Circus, At the Circus doesn’t have much fun with its titular setting. (Most of the action takes place on a train.) We don’t see any clowns or dancing hippos or bicycling bears; screenwriter Irving Brecher (Meet Me in St. Louis) and director Edward Buzzell (Go West) seem oblivious to the circus’s endless comic possibilities. Worse, the film’s exposition is mundane, slipshod: A young circus owner, Jeff Wilson (played by Kenny Baker—no, Star Wars fans, not that Kenny Baker), owes a large chunk of change to his partner, John Carter (James Burke), a grasping so-and-so who’s hoping Jeff defaults on the loan so he can take over the business. But when John learns that Jeff is about to make good on his debt, he enlists some accomplices to rip him off, putting Jeff’s future as a big top impresario in peril. Jeff’s main man, Antonio (Chico Marx), and a strongman’s assistant, Punchy (Harpo Marx), don’t want to lose their day jobs, so they hire a two-bit lawyer, J. Cheever Loophole (Groucho Marx), to help straighten the mess out. The (thankfully) threadbare plot exists just to string together a variety of nutty routines that run from the groaningly awful to the flat-out sidesplitting. Thankfully, there’s plenty of the latter: the brothers attempting to interrogate a midget (who sports a pimpish moustache and chomps on a cigar) in a room that’s scaled to accommodate only someone of his wee size; Harpo getting bum advice from a seal in a game of checkers (the gag is blown, though, when Buzzell swings his camera around to take in spectators’ crinkly-eyed reactions); Groucho regaling a box car full of grotesques with a saucy rendition of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”; Chico and Harpo flipping the strongman’s train compartment for the missing loot, but epically botching the job; Harpo playing tic-tac-toe on a giraffe’s back; etc. There are a few bits that might make contemporary audiences cringe, such as the out-of-nowhere musical number where Harpo boogies down with a gaggle of slow-witted, happy-footed African-Americans (led by Dudley Dickerson) who refer to him in song as “Swingali.” It brings to mind the unfortunate “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” hullabaloo from A Day at the Races, but at least this time we don’t have to watch the brothers debase themselves by prancing around in blackface. I don’t know which idiot at MGM thought Harpo might become more endearing to audiences if he played Pied Piper to a breadline of marble-mouthed Afro-Sheeners, but even the least urbane moviegoer is going to be put off by these racist high jinks.

Though Zeppo bid arrivederci to the thankless role of straight man after his brothers sold their souls to Thalberg, the unsinkable Margaret Dumont never shilly-shallied in her commitment to playing the team’s favorite punching bag. At the Circus marks the sixth occasion she co-starred (or tangled) with the brothers (Groucho often referred to her as “the fifth Marx Brother”), and her ability to maintain an almost regal equanimity in the face of the most pitiless ridicule is as awe-inspiring as ever. She plays Mrs. Susanna Dukesbury, a moneyed socialite (what else?) who disinherits her nephew, Jeff, after he commits his life to the circus. There’s some naughty fun in a scene where Groucho tries to finagle money out of her to cover Jeff’s debt by flummoxing her with a series of bawdy (and deeply sardonic) overtures: “Oh, Susanna, if only you knew how much I need you,” he tells her, his eyebrows dancing. “Not because you have millions. I don’t need millions. I’ll tell you how much I need. Have you got a pencil? I left my typewriter in my other pants.” Only Groucho can take dialogue like that and make it hum, and watching him fuck with poor Miss Dumont is always a high point in any Marx Brothers picture. As are Chico’s piano solos, and he gives us a doozy here. I also liked watching Harpo ride around on the back of an ostrich. But when the picture finally allows for the brothers to bring their act into the circus tent, it’s a fearsome gorilla named Gibraltar who gets all the big laughs. In an attempt to sabotage the show, Carter releases Gibraltar from his cage, but his plan backfires when the beast (who was the only eyewitness to Jeff’s mugging) follows Carter up a rope and pursues him from one trapeze to another. That supreme animal imitator, Charles Gemora, is the actor beneath Gibraltar’s fur. Not many people know Gemora’s face, but those who have seen The Gorilla, Africa Screams, or the terrific The Monster and the Girl know his waddle. Gemora gives the last ten minutes of At the Circus some much needed kick, but even he can’t compete with the sight of Margaret Dumont being fired out of a canon. 

March 28, 2009

“At the Circus” Review. © Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.