Man With A Movie List

Director: Leo McCarey Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 8 min Source: Amazon Video - This is the first Marx Brothers film on the list, and the most famous.  I'd never seen a Marx Brothers film before, and at first my wife and I found it a little offputting in its kitchen-sink approach to comedy.  Duck Soup  is exactly the sum of its parts, and some of those parts aren't going to land as well.  Some of the physical gags are still timeless, and there's no denying the simple perfection of the mirror scene, but most of Groucho's rat-a-tat gags go by too quickly to really register in my book. - The satire of nationalism and war is fascinating and undoubtedly pretty bold - according to Wikipedia, it probably hurt the film's box office coming as it did during the Depression - but like most of the movie, it's too frenetic to carry anything like a coherent message.  Of course, the same criticism was leveled at South Park in its heyday. - Harpo Marx is a comedic genius.

Director: Frank Borzage Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 6 min Source: Youtube - This is, I think, the last Borzage film on the list.  It sticks with the general theme of a romance under assault from the world.  However, the Spencer Tracy character breaks the general archetype, straining the limits of the audience's sympathy with the way he treats his doting lover in a way that a modern audience would find uncomfortable, but he does mostly redeem himself in the end.  In a way, the tension between the Borzage melodramatic style and Tracy's wit and shenanigans make this film more "accessible" than Borzage's earlier work. - However, audiences didn't seem to think so.  This wasn't Tracy's breakout role, although he had been slowly gaining traction for a few years.  Loretta Young is in my opinion the real star here.  The way that she devotes herself to the hardened Spencer Tracy could come off as weak in a lesser actress, but I think Young pulls it off in a...