Go West (1940)

(On Cable TV, August 2020) Good but not great, the Marx Brothers comedy Go West is typical of their MGM years. Structurally sound, it has the extraneous romance for supporting characters, it has musical numbers we don’t need, it has Harpo on the piano and the harp, and it takes a very specific environment (in this case the Wild West, or perhaps more accurately the western genre) as an excuse to line up thematic gags. As usual, the plot summary is irrelevant – The Marx Brothers go west! While well assembled by director Edward Buzzell, the film as a whole remains a sedate affair for a very, very long time: amusing but not hilarious. Having the brothers not being pure agents of chaos is a disappointment, as is an iffy sequence with a Native American character (the patter is progressive, but the portrayal is regressive). But then comes the climactic scene, in which the frantic brothers must dismantle their train in order to keep feeding the engine (a comic device used in prior and later films, but still quite funny here) – that scene is clearly the highlight of Go West. Unfortunately… I had just watched it a few days earlier as part of The Big Parade of Comedy anthology film. While funny, this is weak stuff compared to the better Marx Brothers movie – but if you’re intent on watching their whole filmography, then this one is in the lower tier, but still wrings out a few more bits of comedy.

(On Cable TV, June 2021) You would think that unleashing the Marx Brothers on the Western genre would have been a sure-fire recipe for comedy, but the Brothers’ MGM years weren’t all equally good, and Go West is often blander than their other movies. Typical to the MGM formula imposed on the Brothers, their antics are interrupted by straight romantic-drama stuff and musical numbers — some of them fun, like “Ridin’ the Range,” but others bland and forgettable. The moments that we best remember from the Marx movies are fewer. The opening is a classic interplay between the brothers and the final twenty minutes are a great deal of fun, but what’s in the middle is dull and hardly deserving of the Marxes. There’s a sadly stereotypical sequence with native characters that feels more obnoxious than funny (although it does get a few pot-shots at white colonizers in between the more racist material), but otherwise the film doesn’t quite know what to do with its vaudevillians invading the western frontier. I actually had to watch the film twice to form a coherent impression of it, having fallen asleep in the middle section the first time. (And that’s after having forgotten that I had seen it last year.) A second viewing did not necessarily improve my opinion of it much. Go West was clearly made in the descending era of the Brothers’ filmography – you can still see the bits of genius that made them famous, but there’s not much left once you remove the spirited final train sequence.