Man With A Movie List

Director: Leo McCarey Year: 1937 Run-time: 90 min - McCarey, also the director of Duck Soup , helms this evolution of the screwball comedy that, along with the entire genre of romantic comedy, originated with It Happened One Night .  While that film maintains a lot of sweetness and heart along with its wit, The Awful Truth  doesn't really strive for any real chemistry between its leads.  It doesn't really have to, because it's very funny and it has Cary Grant.  Much of the behavior of these leads scans as cruel to a modern eye (or alternatively freeing on the woman's part) but it all somehow works with the frenetic pacing.  I liked it quite a bit.

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.