A Day at the Races (1937)

A Day at the Races

Tony: Have you got a woman in here?
Dr. Hackenbush: If I haven’t, I’ve wasted thirty minutes of valuable time.

Although I thought a lot of the many, many musical sequences dragged down the pace of this, the Marx Brothers continued to score with me in the comedy department.

Judy (Maureen O’Sullivan) runs a health sanitarium she has inherited from her father.  She is deeply in debt and stands to lose the place if she cannot pay off evil developer Morgan (Douglas Dumbrille) pronto.  Judy and her pals Tony (Chico) and Stuffy (Harpo) enlist the help of Dr. Hackenbush (Groucho) to persuade wealthy hypochondriac patient Mrs. Upjohn (Margaret Dumont) to front the money.  Unbeknownst to Mrs. Upjohn, Hackenbush is actually a veterinarian.

In the meantime, Judy’s singer boyfriend Gil (Allan Jones) buys a racehorse which he hopes will bring in money.  But Gil can’t pay the horse’s feed or stable bills and the sheriff is constantly on his trail.

 This is the one with the “get your tootsy frootsy ice cream” sketch at the race track. There are some other great gags and Groucho continues to get in some good zingers, but the rough edges have been knocked off a bit too much by MGM.  Of course, Margaret Dumont continues to be perfection in my book.

Dave Gould was nominated for an Academy Award for Dance Direction for the number “All God’s Children Got Rhythm”, making this the only Marx Brothers film to be recognized by the Academy.

Trailer