GO WEST

US, 1940, 80 minutes. Black and white.
Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, John Carroll, Diana Lewis, June Mac Cloy.
Directed by Edward Buzzell.

Go West has a classic Marx Brothers scene for which it is well remembered.

The Marx Brothers are east and want to go west. Groucho Marx is once again a conman who is conned by Chico and Harpo, especially with money, they always paying him with a ten dollar note, he giving nine dollars change and they of course with a string on the ten dollars always get it back. However, after this comedy routine they do find themselves in the west. Chico and Harpo try some gold-digging – very basic out in the desert and they lend an old man some money and he gives them the deed to his land. In the meantime, the land is being scheduled for sale for a railroad.

The Turner and the Wilson families have been feuding. It is the old man Wilson who gives the brothers the deed. In the meantime, Terry Turner (John Carroll) tries to persuade the railroads to purchase the land. And he is in love with Wilson’s daughter, Diana Lewis.

In town, Chico and Harpo are thirsty, give the deed as an IOU – but the owner of the hotel is in league with people who want to sell other land to the railroads. This leads to all kinds of complications with finding the deed and hanging on to it.

Chico gets an opportunity, of course, in the bar to play his usual piece. Harpo has an unusual harp-playing scene, some strings at an Indian reservation which he turns into a harp. He then has a musical interlude with the Indian chief – and it is interesting to note Harpo’s outreach to the native Americans just as he had shared harp-playing and song and dance with African Americans in A Day at the Races and At the Circus. There is a great deal with the Indians – with Groucho having some ironic remarks about the relationship between the red man and the white man.

John Carroll and Diana Lewis are sympathetic as the romantic couple – and have a romantic song, Riding the Range, in which Groucho joins in the chorus.

The crooks try to get to the railroad headquarters in New York with the deed but the brothers engineer themselves onto the train, taking over the running of the train with the hero and heroine having to get a buggy to try to catch up with the train. It is also a matter of people on and off the train, chases over the train roof – and the loss of all the wood for the engine. This means, and this is the famous scene, Harpo and the others chopping the train to pieces in order to get enough wood to get it to their destination – and an interlude where the train goes off the tracks, going in a circle, even through a house where a builder is hammering on the roof and doesn’t realise what has happened.

In some ways, the Marx Brothers were reaching the culmination of their screen career with Go West. They were to make The Big Store in the following year – and then not make a film until A Night in Casablanca in 1946.