🎥 Movies of 2021, 33: A Day at the Races. Some good Marx tomfoolery in here, and an excellent Margaret Dumont turn.
With most Marx Bros movies you can ignore the musical numbers, with ther charmless tenors crooning forgetful songs. And that certainly holds true for the super-foregttable Blue Vetenitan Waters number early in the movie. Yes these scenes don’t meet our current style, but you can just check your phone for a few minutes until the music is done.
But then this movie’s second musical number starts up with Harpo leading a dancing group of ‘poor’ Black children and all the racist sterotypes come spilling out. Can’t just check your phone for this one. Nope. People try to skirt around this number by saying it doesn’t denigrate people, or that the Marx brothers only put on blackface for ‘a little bit’. I don’t buy any of that.
Yes, the number is far more engaging and fun than any other musical number in a Marx Brothers movie, but it doesn’t change that the one time Black people appear in this movie it’s to sing & dance through a parade of stereotypes. Doesn’t make it right.
