Director: Leo McCarey
It’s been far too many years since I last saw this (David Stratton’s Continuing Education Course back in 2000, evidently), and I’m happy to report it hasn’t lost anything over that time; it is still one of the most screamingly funny films ever made. And yet McCarey wanted nothing to do with it, even though the Marx Brothers specifically requested he direct it; they got their way eventually but McCarey evidently found them as impossible to manage as their previous directors had. Audiences of the time seem to have been kind of freaked out by them, too—undeniably popular (previous Marx comedy Horse Feathers was apparently Paramount’s highest-grossing film of 1932) but maybe a bit too weird and extreme for most tastes—and while it wasn’t the box office bomb it’s been called, it still didn’t do the expected business, and I gather neither Paramount nor the Marxes were overly sorry to see the back of each other afterwards. Now, of course, it’s much more highly regarded, and with good reason, cos it is fucking brilliant; I’d actually forgotten just how aggressively comic it is, too, it really doesn’t let up much over 68 minutes… basically, Groucho gets appointed the leader of Freedonia and manages to declare war on the neighbouring country for whom Chico and Harpo are spying, but the story is not what you watch this for; you’re here for the barrage of puns and the outstanding slapstick, the hapless Margaret Dumont and the sorely beset Edgar Kennedy, “All God’s Chillun Got Guns”, Groucho’s famously inconsistent uniform… And whatever McCarey’s ill will about having to make this bloody thing, he kept it off-screen, this is not one of those films where the production difficulties are visible in the finished work (apart from a few continuity errors big enough for me to notice them). Stunning.
The Cameraman's Revenge 
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