At the Circus (1939)

Film: At the Circus (1939)

Stars: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Kenny Baker, Florence Rice, Eve Arden, Margaret Dumont

Director: Edward Buzzell

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Eve Arden: click here to learn more about Ms. Arden (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Eve Arden's film career, as I mentioned when I kicked off our month devoted to her, is an unusual one for this series that poses some challenges.  Over the past three years & two months, we've devoted our series exclusively to headliners.  Though sometimes we've had them in smaller parts (Lena Horne comes to mind), by-and-large I've been able to pick out films that were significant to these actors' careers or at least picked films where they dominated the picture.  But Arden was never a traditional headliner in movies the way she ended up being in television.  Instead, especially in the earlier days of her career, she was a scene-stealing character actor, and so it's difficult to find movies where she had a significant part without royally spoiling the movie for myself (which I'm not going to do as that's half the fun of watching movies-finding out what comes next).  During the period between Stage Door and Mildred Pierce (which would win her her only Oscar nomination), in particular, she was in a lot of movies but not all of them were signature parts.  So we're going to instead hedge our bets as we start out this month by picking a movie where Arden had significant costars, three to be precise: Groucho, Harpo, & Chico Marx in At the Circus.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Jeff Wilson (Baker), a man who is hopelessly in love with his circus performer girlfriend Julie (Rice), who has been disinherited by his aunt Susanna Dukesbury (Dumont) for disgracing the family name by pursuing a woman not of their family's stature.  Jeff owns the circus Julie works at, and is about to lose the circus to a ruthless businessman, and the only way he can keep it is by getting back $10,000 that was stolen from a gorilla cage (it sounds stupid, it mostly works in the confines of the script, though).  Jeff, of course, enlists the help of the Marx brothers: Attorney Cheever Loophole (Groucho), circus employee Tony Pirelli (Chico), and performer Punchy (Harpo).  This involves them eventually swindling the money out of Jeff's aunt, and a standoff not only with Aunt Susanna, but also the businessman and the gorilla...which allows Jeff to come out on-top with both the circus & his now-fiancee.

The movie is silly fun.  At the Circus is not generally considered one of the more important Marx Brothers movies, and critics at the time were less-than-kind.  While their criticism fell more on the Brothers, who had been doing this schtick for a while in 1939, honestly the biggest bummer for a modern audience who doesn't always get a Marx Brothers comedy every year, is that they felt the need to put a vapid love story central stage rather than give us more time with Groucho & Harpo (Chico, as always, is a love-it-or-leave-it scenario).  The best parts of the movie are of course Groucho pitching fake woo at Margaret Dumont (or is it real...you can never quite tell with Groucho), and his marvelous singing of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady."  While the rest of the musical score is largely forgettable, "Lydia" (which I first heard a year later in The Philadelphia Story) is fully-realized hilarity, and I loved it.

As for our star Eve Arden?  We came up a bit of a goose egg in terms of Arden's importance to this plot.  The actress is in only a couple of scenes, the primary one being with Groucho where she has to trick him so that he doesn't find the $10,000 she's hidden (she's the spy within the circus operation), which she does successfully by getting him to be part of her acrobatic act.  Arden nails a small role, and looks quite impressive aboard the trapeze in this movie, using her tall frame for maximum grace & comic effect.  You're left wishing that they would've gotten rid of Jeff & Julie all-together, and given Arden's villainous acrobat more to do.