1937’s A Day At the Races takes the Marx Brothers to the country, and the movie introduces us to Judy Standish (Maureen O’Sullivan). She runs the Standish Sanitarium, but she enjoys few patients and much debt.

Her assistant Tony (Chico Marx) tries to help when the Sanitarium’s wealthy patient Mrs. Upjohn (Margaret Dumont) plans to leave and go to the Florida base of Dr. Hackenbush (Groucho Marx). Tony intervenes and convinces Hackenbush – who turns out to be a veterinarian – to come up to work at Standish. This becomes especially important for Judy since she hopes to get financial assistance from Upjohn.

Judy dates Gil (Allan Jones) but she tells him off when Gil buys a racehorse to try to make money for her. She thinks this is a waste of money and a big mistake, but the lovers eventually reconcile so Gil continues to try to help her.

Standish financial manager Whitmore (Leonard Ceeley) encourages Judy to sell the sanitarium to Morgan (Douglas Dumbrille) for $5000, but she declines as she thinks Hackenbush will lead to a resurgence. We learn that Morgan and Whitmore have some scheme, and it turns out they want to turn the sanitarium into a casino, which is why they push Judy for the sale.

Stuffy (Harpo Marx) works as a jockey at the nearby racetrack, and Tony plans to have Stuffy ride Gil’s horse High Hat. Tony also brings Stuffy into the sanitarium as a patient to use him as an inside man to follow Whitmore’s scheme. Various issues try to foil the good guys, including investigations of Hackenbush’s qualifications, and we watch the different parties fight to overcome the odds and save the sanitarium.

If you read my comments about 1933’s Duck Soup and 1935’s A Night at the Opera, one will find many similar sentiments about the movies of the Marx Brothers. I found it tough not to just cut and paste many of those comments for my review of A Day At the Races, as it presented a lot of the same highs and lows.

But even I’m not that lazy, so I’ll at least toss out some basic comments about the good and the bad of Races. On the negative side, it includes some of the same kind of interminable musical moments that marred the earlier flicks.

Did Congress enact some law that every Marx film had to include a pretentious sequence in which we watch Harpo get serious and play his harp? Okay, I realize that his moniker includes the name of the instrument, but geez, do these moments play like death.

They come across as self-consciously “artistic” and really kill any momentum. We usually find sequences with Chico at the piano as well, and these don’t play any better. Their inevitability makes them no more tolerable.

Races also tosses out the same musical production numbers that marred Opera. As with Opera, we find the dishwater dull Allan Jones as our leading straight man, and he continues to bore.

Jones drags down any scene in which he appears, especially when we get stuck with his miserable songs, and the romantic plot between Jones and O’Sullivan fails to go anywhere either. The movie even forces us to sit through a performance from a water ballet!

Why? As I surmised in an earlier review, I guess the movie bigwigs of the era thought audiences needed romance and music to go down with the comedy.

This should make the films seem more inclusive and broad, but instead they come across as watered down and pandering. It’s like the filmmakers didn’t trust the funny stuff to carry the day.

It could, though Races enjoys fewer laughs than its immediate predecessors. One problem stems from the nature of the Hackenbush character because the movie plays him as a sucker way too much of the time.

Groucho works best as the manipulator and con man, not as the guy who gets stuck as the butt of jokes. Maybe Harpo and Chico got tired of being the dumb ones and insisted they received the chance to act as the clever ones, but it doesn’t fly.

Inevitably, many of the gags work well, but the film’s somewhat excessive running time works against it. 110 minutes is a lot for a comedy today, but that was almost obscenely long for the era.

Compare it with Opera, which ran 18 minutes shorter, and Duck Soup, which clocked in at less than 70 minutes, or about 40 minutes shorter than Races!

Sure, some of the musical numbers fill a bit of that time, but much of the movie’s length stems from comedic pieces that run too long. It seems that all Marx movies suffer from gags that don’t want to end, but Races presents more of them than usual, and the comedic pacing generally seems somewhat slow.

Still, when Races succeeds, it lives up to the Marx Brothers’ reputation. It includes so many gags that inevitably some of them work very well.

For example, the bit in which Hackenbush messes with Whitmore to prevent him from finding out the truth about his qualifications seems terrific, as does Hackenbush’s examination of Upjohn.

Interestingly, Races seems to feature all three Brothers onscreen together more often than usual. In the prior couple of flicks, they often worked solo or in pairs, but they spend a great deal of time together here. Their natural chemistry gives the movie a nice kick that makes those moments successful.

I don’t know if the Marx Brothers ever made a totally successful movie, and A Day At the Races demonstrates the standard mix of highs and lows. The flick could use some judicious editing as well as the loss of some tedious musical and romantic moments. Nonetheless, it offers enough fun moments to make it generally satisfying.

A Day At the Races appears in an aspect ratio of 1.37:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. The movie looked very good.

Overall delineation seemed solid. Only minor softness ever crept into the presentation, as it provided a largely accurate image.

No issues with jagged edges or shimmering occurred, and I saw no edge haloes. Light grain cropped up and I saw no print flaws.

Black levels looked very solid, so contrast seemed smooth and distinctive, while dark tones were deep and firm. Low-light sequences also displayed nice definition and accuracy, with shadows that were appropriately detailed and clear. Ultimately, Races offered a very positive visual experience for a movie of its vintage.

While not as good as the picture, the DTS-HD MA monaural soundtrack of A Day at the Races seemed fine for a film of this era. Speech was slightly dense and thick, but the lines displayed no edginess or sibilance, and they remained easily intelligible at all times.

Music seemed reasonably bright and dynamic given its age. The score and songs never excelled, but they came across with pretty fair definition.

Effects seemed fairly clear and tight when I considered technological restrictions. No issues with background noise manifested. In the end, the audio of Races came across as satisfying for an old flick like this.

How does the Blu-ray compare to the DVD from 2004? The lossless soundtrack felt a bit warmer than its lossy DVD counterpart, but the primitive nature of the source limited improvements.

Visuals showed a nice step up, as the Blu-ray appeared more precise and richer. It also lost the source flaws that popped up during the DVD, so expect a nice upgrade.

The Blu-ray repeats the DVD’s extras, and we open with an audio commentary from Glenn Mitchell, author of The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia. He offers a running, screen-specific chat that gets into biographical information for some of the participants, the influence of producer Irving Thalberg over the film’s structure and some production issues.

Although he presents some decent information, Mitchell speaks so infrequently that this becomes a frustrating piece. The comments about Thalberg add some useful material, especially when we learn of his death during production and its impact.

I also like the fact that Mitchell strongly slams one part of Races, as he declares the ballet sequence boring and urges us to skip it. We don’t often hear that kind of bluntness in this format.

However, much of the information seems somewhat pedestrian, and a lot of the good bits already appeared on Leonard Maltin’s chat during A Night at the Opera, which makes it redundant if you’ve already heard that one.

Or vice versa, I suppose. Ultimately, though, it’s all the dead air that makes this commentary fairly unsatisfying.

After this we get a featurette entitled On Your Marx, Get Set, Go!. In this 27-minute, 37-second program, we hear from director Robert B. Weide, writers Larry Gelbart and Irving Brecher, comedy writer Anne Beatts, writer/director/actor Carl Reiner, film historian Robert Osborne, and actors Dom DeLuise and Maureen O’Sullivan.

They discuss the Marx style, developing Races, the cast and personality elements of the Marx Brothers, the movie’s setting and characters, a dissection of some set pieces, the impact of Thalberg’s death, and some general anecdotes related to the film.

The program provides a fairly concise examination of the topics. Some redundancy occurs if you’ve listened to the commentary, but a fair amount of new information pops up here.

It moves briskly and seems generally entertaining. It’s especially cool to hear from O’Sullivan, as it’s nice to get the perspective and stories of someone actually involved in the production.

Up next we find a 1937 Robert Benchley short called A Night at the Movies. It lasts 10 minutes and provides some sporadically amusing material. It’s also interesting to get a look at movie theaters of the era.

The Vintage Cartoons section includes three shorts: 1938’s Old Smokey (7:34), 1939’s Mama’s New Hat (8:24), and 1940’s Gallopin’ Gals (7:26). The first two come as part of the “Captain and the Kids” series, while the third’s from Hanna-Barbera.

None of them seem particularly good, but they’re moderately entertaining. By the way, they show up on this disc because all of them involve horses.

Within the Audio Treasures domain we find three features. There’s an outtake from “A Message from the Man in the Moon” that lasts two minutes, 34 seconds. Glenn Mitchell introduces the piece with some background, and then we hear Allan Jones sing the tune.

“Treasures” also includes a radio promo called “Leo Is On the Air” (13:28). This offers an extended ad that includes material from Races.

New to the Blu-ray, we get “Dr. Hackenbush” (2:56), a musical performance meant for the movie but unrecorded. Groucho does the song for the radio.

The disc concludes with the film’s theatrical trailer.

By the time they made A Day at the Races, the Marx Brothers had settled into a pretty formulaic system for their movies. That means Races presents a mix of negative traits moderately balanced by more than a few fine comedic moments. The Blu-ray offers positive picture along with relatively satisfying audio and an erratic but generally satisfactory set of supplements. Races doesn’t provide a consistently enjoyable movie, but it works well overall.

To rate this film, visit the original review of A DAY AT THE RACES