Iconoclassics!
Cult Comedy Stars of the 1930s
From January 4 through 28, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents Iconoclassics!:
Cult Comedy Stars of the 1930s, a series of ten classic comedies featuring the iconic and iconoclastic talents of W.C. Fields, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers.
This series highlights a group of performers who arose from a particular historical moment. Fields, West, and the Marxes all developed their craft in the demanding school of vaudeville in the 1910s. They enjoyed stardom on Broadway in the 1920s, Fields fronting revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies, West co-authoring a series of scandalous plays (Sex, Diamond Lil) that brought her both fame and legal prosecution, and the Marx Brothers collecting their skits into haphazardly constructed, hugely popular shows such as The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers.
Although Fields had starred in several movies in the 1920s, the arrival of the talkies gave these verbally distinctive performers a new arena in which to shine. They pioneered the subgenre that film historian Steve Seidman has called “comedian comedy,” in which the pre-established persona of the star comedian transcends the constraints of narrative and realism.
The resurgent (if embattled) anti-puritanical forces of the 1920s combined with the Depression-tinged skepticism of the early 1930s to provide a receptive context for the unusually iconoclastic visions of these performers: Fields’s misanthropic assaults on the sacred institutions of marriage and family, West’s challenge to conventional sexual mores and gender roles, and the Marxes’s scattershot assaults on authority, high culture, and decorum. Or, as these enduring icons themselves have said: “I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally” (Fields); “My fight has been against depression, repression, and suppression” (West); and “Whatever it is, I’m against it!” (Groucho).
Special thanks to Paul Ginsburg, NBC Universal Distribution; Brian Andreotti, Music Box Theatre.
-- Martin Rubin
Two-film discount!
Buy a ticket for an Iconoclassics film and get a ticket for any other film in the series at this discount rate (tickets must be purchased at the same time): General Admission $7; Students $5; Members $4.
ANIMAL CRACKERS
1930, Victor Heerman, USA., 98 min.
With The Marx Brothers, Lillian Roth
Another Broadway adaptation, the Marxes’ second film stars Groucho as the African explorer Captain Spaulding, who enters with the song “Hello, I Must Be Going.” Chico is a musician and Harpo, mysteriously, a professor. A high society gala, ripe for ribbing, is the main event, with a forged painting, Groucho’s classic “Africa is God’s country” monologue, Chico and Harpo’s silverware routine, and ill-fated ingénue Lillian Roth thrown into the mix. 35mm. (MR)
Friday, January 18, 6:00 pm
Monday, January 21, 7:45 pm
THE BANK DICK
1940, Eddie Cline, USA, 72 min.
With W.C. Fields, Una Merkel
This late classic (Fields’s next-to-last starring role) is probably his most famous film. He plays Egbert Sousé, henpecked, inebriated, and unemployed, until he bluffs his way into a temp job as movie director and accidentally captures a couple of bank robbers. He is rewarded with a job as bank guard, but his troubles are only beginning, thanks to a little excursion in embezzlement. THE BANK DICK was Fields’s first film at Universal, and the studio gave him unprecedented control over the production, resulting in box-office success and the best reviews of his career. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, January 20, 3:00 pm
Wednesday, January 23, 8:30 pm
THE COCOANUTS
1929, Robert Florey and Joseph Santley, USA, 96 min.
With The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont
The Marx Brothers’ first movie is a transposition of their Broadway smash and preserves the undiluted anarchy of their vaudeville style. Groucho plays a Florida hotel owner eager to cash in on the land boom; Harpo and Chico are con men who specialize in fleecing hotels; Margaret Dumont is Groucho’s long-suffering inamorata. Highlights include the land auction and Groucho and Chico’s classic “Why a duck?” routine. It’s a musical, too, with catchy Irving Berlin tunes and pre-Busby Berkeley overhead shots. 35mm. (MR)
>Friday, January 4, 6:00 pm
Monday, January 7, 7:30 pm
DUCK SOUP
1933, Leo McCarey, USA, 68 min.
With The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont
Responding to rising fascism and a falling economy, the Marx Brothers produced one of the movies’ greatest political satires. With Groucho as the war-mongering president of Fredonia, and Harpo and Chico as incompetent enemy spies, the classic sequences are almost non-stop, including the Edgar Kennedy lemonade-stand routine, the mirror scene, the rousing “We’re Going to War” number, and the flagrantly absurdist war-room climax. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, January 13, 2:30 pm
Tuesday, January 15, 8:15 pm
Wednesday, January 16, 6:00 pm
HORSE FEATHERS
1932, Norman McLeod, USA, 68 min.
With The Marx Brothers, Thelma Todd
One of the Marxes’ most consistently funny films, as well as one of their biggest hits, HORSE FEATHERS features Groucho as college president Quincey Adams Wagstaff, who defines his credo with the opening-scene song “I’m Against It.” Chico and Harpo are college students, even though Harpo signs his name with an X, and Chico defines “corpuscle” as the rank below captain and lieutenant. Groucho has to produce a winning football team in order to keep his job, leading to the slapstick gridiron climax. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, January 6, 3:00 pm
Tuesday, January 8, 7:45 pm
I’M NO ANGEL
1933, Wesley Ruggles, USA, 85 min.
With Mae West, Cary Grant
West’s second film of 1933 was even more successful than SHE DONE HIM WRONG and marked the peak of her all-too-brief heyday before the reinforced Production Code cut her larger-than-life lustiness down to size. An exercise in self-mythologizing, ANGEL incorporates numerous elements from West’s own life to tell the story of a carnival shimmy dancer who rises to fame as a circus lion-tamer and becomes embroiled in a breach-of-promise suit with Park Avenue beau Cary Grant. The courtroom climax, with Mae in glorious command, can be read as wish-fulfillment revision of her various obscenity trials. 35mm. (MR)
Saturday, January 26, 6:15 pm
Monday, January 28, 8:00 pm
IT’S A GIFT
1934, Norman McLeod, USA, 73 min.
With W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard
IT’S A GIFT is considered by many to be Fields’s best film, his most sustained exercise in sheer, undiluted misanthropy. As grocer Harold Bissonette (pronounced, at his wife’s insistence, Bisso-nay), he is subjected to a perpetual stream of annoyances, including nagging wife, whining offspring, obnoxious customers, and noisy neighbors. He sets out for California in search of the American Dream, with doubly ironic results. This is the film with the famous, taste-challenging blind-man routine, but even funnier is the scene in which W.C. tries to take a nap on his porch. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, January 6, 4:30 pm
Thursday, January 10, 6:00 pm
THE MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE
1935, Clyde Bruckman, USA, 65 min.
With W.C. Fields, Mary Brian
Though not as well-known as IT’S A GIFT or THE BANK DICK, this acerbic gem belongs alongside them in the top rank of Fields classics. As Ambrose Wolfinger, henpecked husband par excellence, he has to contend with a shrewish wife, sponging in-laws, obtuse boss, ticket-happy traffic cops, and singing (!) burglars, all of whom stand between him and his seemingly reasonable desire to see his favorite wrestling star, Hookalakah Meshobbab. Fields’s grandson and biographer Ronald Fields considers MAN the comedian’s most personal film: “It mirrored his own life--his likes, his displeasures, his hurts and his triumphs.” 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, January 13, 4:00 pm
Thursday, January 17, 7:45 pm
MONKEY BUSINESS
1931, Norman McLeod, USA, 77 min.
With The Marx Brothers, Thelma Todd
MONKEY BUSINESS was the first Marx Brothers film conceived for the screen, resulting in more freewheeling comic action to accompany the puns, honed to excruciating perfection by S.J. Perelman, perhaps the best of the Marxes’ writers. First seen as stowaways on an ocean liner, the Brothers are on the run throughout the film, whether chased by bootleggers or chasing dames, notably sexy-funny Thelma Todd as the object of Groucho’s lascivious affections. 35mm. (MR)
Sunday, January 20, 4:30 pm
Tuesday, January 22, 7:30 pm
SHE DONE HIM WRONG
1933, Lowell Sherman, USA, 66 min.
With Mae West, Cary Grant
West’s first starring vehicle remains her best film. She plays Lady Lou, the queen of a Gay Nineties Bowery saloon, who collects diamonds and men (including mysterious missionary Cary Grant) with equal aplomb. The plot is a pretext for West’s charismatic presence: her sumptuous costumes, her suggestive songs (especially the censor-goading “A Guy What Takes His Time”), and her bawdy zingers, including several variants on her signature “Come up and see me” line. 35mm. (MR).