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Imagine Groucho as the president of a college and Harpo and Chico as football players. It doesn't get much wackier than this. Horse feathers, indeed. Groucho is hilarious to watch as a hip professor. He's at his most rebellious singing "Whatever it is, I'm against it." Thelma Todd does some of her best vamping to help fix the big football game, which Harpo and Chico are supposed to throw. Naturally, the brothers have other ideas. For sheer laughter, this has to rate almost as high as
Duck Soup, with the memorable speakeasy sequence, and the funniest football finale of all time, complete with banana peels and a chariot.
--Bill Desowitz
Review
The Marx Brothers' fourth film, the version of Horse Feathers that exists today is missing several minutes, making the film choppy and occasionally jarring, but there's such an abundance of inspired lunacy that it hardly matters. Feathers makes no more sense than most of the boys' films, and that's exactly the way it should be. Ostensibly a parody of the college films that had become popular at the time, Feathers is really an attack on everything conventional -- including rational moviemaking. More technically polished than Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, it still revels in anarchy and elevates the non-sequitur as close to an art form as it can get. The movie is filled with Groucho's special brand of humor (e.g., "Why don't you go home to your wife? I'll tell you what, I'll go home to your wife and, outside of the improvement, she'll never know the difference,") and features one of his signature songs, "I'm Against It," as well as the very popular "Everyone Says I Love You." Other highlights include the classic exchange involving the password "swordfish," a delightfully silly classroom shoot-out and a deliciously zany football game send-up featuring the boys in a sanitation wagon disguised as a Roman chariot. Director Norman Z. McLeod keeps the camera trained on the boys and then gets out of the way, but he does manage some well staged moments in the finale. Most importantly, he keeps the pace from flagging, even during the Zeppo sequences, with the result that there's hardly a wasted moment in the film. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
