With the same director as its predecessor "A Night at the Opera", and the same cast (down to I don't know how many bit players), "A Day at the Races" is decidedly the better of the two movies - if you ask me, the main reason it's considered less of a classic is that it was made second rather than first.
Groucho is at his best when he's riding high, lodged in a cosy sinecure and exploiting it outrageously. Too much of the opening act of "A Night at the Opera" is spent getting him there; here, he's swiftly made director of the sanatorium in the opening scene, which leaves more time for fun afterwards.
And the fun is more fun this time. The musical numbers are less intrusive, both because they're inserted into scenes where the narrative would naturally pause to take a breath, and because they're inherently better and more inventive. This is surely Chico's best piano-playing scene. Harpo's harp schtick always bores me a little (nothing else about him does), but at least it arises naturally out of the destruction of the piano, so that even if it were positively tedious the tedium would be a price worth paying. And Harpo's flute-playing scene in the black ghetto has as much genuine, living fantasy in it as anything in "The Wizard of Oz". (If you think you can detect any of the racism of the 1930s in what we see on the screen, may I suggest you become a dowser, where you'll be paid to walk over dry land and "detect" the underground water which everyone knows to be there but which reasonable people don't claim to be able to sense.)
I think the jokes are funnier this time, too - marginally. It could be that the Marx brothers are better organised relative to one another, with the right proportion of skits involving all three together, Groucho alone, Groucho playing against Chico, etc. And there's no denying that, in the end, the three are able to wreak more havoc at a race track than they ever could in an opera house. I don't want to knock "A Night at the Opera"; I love that film, too; but this one is more inspired.
Groucho is at his best when he's riding high, lodged in a cosy sinecure and exploiting it outrageously. Too much of the opening act of "A Night at the Opera" is spent getting him there; here, he's swiftly made director of the sanatorium in the opening scene, which leaves more time for fun afterwards.
And the fun is more fun this time. The musical numbers are less intrusive, both because they're inserted into scenes where the narrative would naturally pause to take a breath, and because they're inherently better and more inventive. This is surely Chico's best piano-playing scene. Harpo's harp schtick always bores me a little (nothing else about him does), but at least it arises naturally out of the destruction of the piano, so that even if it were positively tedious the tedium would be a price worth paying. And Harpo's flute-playing scene in the black ghetto has as much genuine, living fantasy in it as anything in "The Wizard of Oz". (If you think you can detect any of the racism of the 1930s in what we see on the screen, may I suggest you become a dowser, where you'll be paid to walk over dry land and "detect" the underground water which everyone knows to be there but which reasonable people don't claim to be able to sense.)
I think the jokes are funnier this time, too - marginally. It could be that the Marx brothers are better organised relative to one another, with the right proportion of skits involving all three together, Groucho alone, Groucho playing against Chico, etc. And there's no denying that, in the end, the three are able to wreak more havoc at a race track than they ever could in an opera house. I don't want to knock "A Night at the Opera"; I love that film, too; but this one is more inspired.