Go West (1940 film)

Plot

Confidence man S. Quentin Quale (Groucho) heads west to find his fortune. In the train station, he encounters crafty brothers Joseph (Chico) and Rusty Panello (Harpo) who manage to swindle his money. The Panellos are friends with an old miner named Dan Wilson (Tully Marshall) whose property, Dead Man's Gulch, has no gold. They loan him their last ten dollars for a grub stake and he gives them the deed to the Gulch as collateral. Unbeknownst to Wilson, the son of his longtime rival and beau to his granddaughter Eve Wilson (Diana Lewis), Terry Turner (John Carroll) has contacted the railway to arrange for them to build through the land, making the deed holder rich.

Cast

Groucho Marx - S. Quentin Quayle

Chico Marx - Joseph Panello

Harpo Marx - Rusty Panello

John Carroll - Terry Turner

Diana Lewis - Eve Wilson

Walter Woolf King - John Beecher

Robert Barrat - "Red" Baxter

June MacCloy - Lulubelle

Tully Marshall - Dan Wilson

Iris Adrian - Mary Lou

Joan Woodbury - Melody

George Lessey - The Railroad President

Joe Yule - Crystal Palace Bartender Joe

Mitchell Lewis - Halfbreed Indian Pete

Production

Like all other Marx Brothers MGM films, Go West has several musical numbers, including "As if I Didn't Know" and "You Can't Argue with Love" both by Bronislau Kaper and Gus Kahn, "Ridin' the Range" by Roger Edens and Gus Kahn, "From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water" by Charles Wakefield Cadman and "The Woodpecker Song" by Harold Adamson and Eldo di Lazzaro. (In this song, Chico, playing the piano, rolls an orange on the keys in sync with the melody.)

Groucho was aged 49 during the filming of Go West, and his hairline had begun receding. As such, he took to wearing a toupee throughout the film, as he did the previous film, At the Circus.

Go West Screenwriter Irving Brecher stood in for an ailing Groucho when publicity stills for the film were first taken. Brecher bore a remarkable resemblance to Groucho and is all but unrecognizable in the photos, sporting Groucho's glasses, greasepaint mustache and eyebrows.

Musical numbers

"As If I Didn't Know"

"You Can't Argue With Love"

"From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water"

"Ridin' The Range"

Reception

Thomas M. Pryor of The New York Times called the film "an unevenly paced show" with "only one really funny sequence," referring to the climax. Variety wrote, "The three Marx Bros. ride a merry trail of laughs and broad burlesque in a speedy adventure through the sagebrush country," adding that the film had "many fresh situations for the Marxian antics." Harrison's Reports wrote that it was "much better than their last two pictures" and that the final twenty minutes "should thrill as well as amuse spectators." Film Daily called it "wildly funny in places, amusing for the most part and dead in one or two spots that a little editing could improve." John Mosher of The New Yorker wrote, "Possibly not the most strenuous Marxian product that we have seen, the picture nevertheless is very satisfactory and quite lunatic enough."