ANIMAL CRACKERS
Recently, I watched Animal Crackers for the umpteenth time. Actually, I rewatched many of the Marx Brothers' comedy classics, as I have done with regularity since I was a teenager. But it was seeing Animal Crackers again that brought back this specific memory. In the late '60s and early '70s, there was a revival of interest in the comic films of Chaplin, Keaton, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers. Revival film houses were once popular and successful, and it was not uncommon for programmers to pair two film classics for a single admission. My friends and I thought nothing of packing into a car and heading for a delapidated movie house with an enticing double-bill. I remember one week when I thing my friends and I saw Singin' in the Rain every night!
Animal Crackers (1930) was the second of the Marx Brothers' films, following their debut in The Cocoanuts (1929). Both were filmed in Astoria, Queens, for Paramount before the boys were invited to Hollywood to further their cinematic careers. Both of these films were adapted from their Broadway shows of the same names, and were filmed at the very beginning of the sound period. There really had never been verbal comedy of this type on the screen before, but with the help of the likes of S. J. Perelman and George S. Kaufman, the Marx Brothers were able to forge screenplays that celebrated verbal humor to complement the traditional slapstick laughs. I knew all the Kalmar/Ruby songs from the show, notably "Hooray for Captain Spaulding", but now I would be able to see them performed! You see, the film had been yanked from circulation when we were small boys, so there had been no opportunity to screen it. We had watched all the other films made by the boys, but Animal Crackers was the Holy Grail.
When I was home from college one summer (I'm guessing 1971 or 1972), my best pal Lenie Colacino , an equally avid Marx Brothers fan, drove us to the recently opened Uniondale Mini Cinema, in Uniondale, Long Island (See above), the now closed hole-in-the-wall theater where we intended to see Animal Crackers, a film we had been unable to see prior due to contractual issues. Now, on a Tuesday night, we would finally see the long-awaited classic. The Mini-Cinema had scheduled the film for a full week, and we planned to attend each day. The Mini-Cinema not only programmed eclectically, but it offered highly popular midnight screenings of cult films. It became especially known for screening The Rocky Horror Picture Show to sold out, fully-costumed fans. Midnight Movies were very much a "thing" in the early '70s. Occasionally, it was difficult to see the screen fully at these showings given the haze of marijuana smoke that permeated the theater. THe owner looked the other way at any young criminals in the audience!
(Below: In Newsday, The Mini Cinema promotes a screening of just movie trailers.
As I recall, we thoroughly enjoyed the film on Tuesday, and then again on Wednesday. When we arrived on Thursday, we were told that the Nassau County police had arrived saying that the Mini Cinema did not have the proper authority to show the film; ownership rights were still being challenged. In effect, the Mini Cinema was showing a pirated print. We drove home dejected, but were glad we hadn't waited until the weekend to see the film.
That fall I attended a midnight screening of the film in Dayton, Ohio, with my future wife, Anne Phillips. We knew it to be a bootleg screening, but we brazenly broke the law and watched it! Of course, it was hard to see it through the dense cloud cover in the old theatre.
It took two years of pushing by Groucho and his legions of fans to get the rights-issue adjudicated, and finally Animal Crackers was released for all in 1974, where we watched it many times more. By then, Groucho had become a star again. In 1972, he presented An Evening with Groucho, a one-man show at Carnegie Hall that sold out before I could secure a ticket. I listened to the recording made of the show many times. Groucho was also a regular guest on the Dick Cavett Show, and Cavett was an important cog in bringing the Marx Brothers back to prominence.
The original film, restored in 2016, featured the tragic Lillian Roth in the ingenue role, before her career and mental health spiraled out of control. The great Margaret Dumont, comic foil to the boys, cemented her place in film history as "Mrs. Rittenhouse", the name everyone associates with her, even though she actually had a different name in all subsequent Marx Brothers classics. And the complete canon of Marx Brothers' classics can be seen regularly on Turner Classic Movies or other venues where great art is appreciated!
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