Review: Go West

Chico and Harpo venture west and hook up with con man Groucho, despite the latter previously having been duped at the train station by the former two (even though he initially set out to con them- confused?). Together they get caught up in a land claim struggle over a place called Dead Man’s Gulch. Chico and Harpo acquire the land deed fair and square, but scheming John Beecher (Walter Woolf King) and Red Baxter (Robert Barrat) have nefarious plans to grab it for themselves. John Carroll plays the grandson of the old prospector who gave the land deed to Harpo and Chico, with Diana Lewis playing his intended.

 

Even Marx Brothers fans usually concede that this 1940 film from director Edward Buzzell (the previous “At the Circus”, which was at least not awful) is a dud, and boy is it ever. The second worst of the five Marx Brothers films I’ve seen by far, it’s boring, unfunny, and as has been consistently the case, the humour is counter-productive to getting into the story. Once again, Groucho isn’t so much a comedic actor as he is a smart-arse sideline commentator who just so happens to also be the main star playing the main character. Given that Groucho himself is a character being played by the real-life Julius Henry Marx, it feels even more like a put-on. Whilst Chico and Harpo have a purpose for travelling west here, I swear Groucho has absolutely no character in this film at all. He’s just Groucho and there he is…because stuff. And whilst I know the characters they play are coming from the East, I still think it’s ridiculous that Chico keeps his ‘a-pizza-pie, mamma mia! Spaghetti-O!’ green grocer accent in this. He’s not meant to be from East Italy, for chrissakes.

 

At some point, even in a comedy, there needs to be some kind of reality, even if it’s only within the confines of the film’s fictional world that has been set up. The Marx Brothers, at least in the five films I’ve seen of theirs, don’t give a shit about any of that, and neither the director nor screenwriter Irving Brecher (“At the Circus”, “Meet Me in St. Louis”) help much, either. It’s not just Groucho, though, Harpo and Chico are also so bad here that they might as well be in a TV comedy sketch with a fake western background (And indeed, the backgrounds here do look fake). At least Chaplin and Keaton made ‘real’ movies. This is amateurish and not remotely concerned with being an actual movie. Sure, we get a railroad being built, something called Dead Man’s Gulch (Is that where Stinky Pete lives?), and a Hatfield-McCoy style feud getting in the way of young (middle-aged, really) love, but those are the oldest clichés in a genre full of seriously old clichés. It’s really just a gag reel though, and sadly the gags suck, I doubt Buster Keaton (who worked on the screenplay, in terms of the gags) had all that much input to be honest. The train-bound finale has a bit of a Keaton vibe to it, but certainly isn’t anywhere near as clever as the usual Keaton standard (It ain’t “The General”, that’s for damn sure). We get an eye-rolling gag where Groucho is trying to make money off of the other two, that is really just a replay of the awful gambling routine in “A Day at the Races”, but with Groucho switching places with Chico this time, and not being as successful at the duping as Chico was in the earlier film. For the most part, this is just a bunch of so-called comedians acting too cool for the room (something that perhaps won’t annoy fans, I concede), and the room is the movie itself. Add to that far too many musical interludes with a songstress (an unfortunate June MacCloy) who sounds distressingly masculine and can’t effing sing, and you’ve got yourself one helluva bad time.

 

Clichéd, catastrophically flippant, this was almost unendurably bad for me. With all the schticky moments and musical interludes (all of which are pretty rank), there’s practically no room for plot and character. What plot and character we do get is ancient, even for the period, and The Marx’s just act above it all anyway. Terrible, though as always with comedy, your tastes may wildly differ.

 

Rating: D