Preceded by: Wrong Again: Laurel and Hardy go after the stolen "Blue Boy"-but find the horse, not the painting. Is that horse-on-the-piano gag a reference to L'Age d'or? Directed by Leo McCarey. Produced by Hal Roach. Story by Lewis R. Foster, McCarey. Photographed by George Stevens, Jack Roach. (1929, 20 mins, Silent, B&W, 16mm, Print from WKE) "But after all we must remember that art is art. Still, on the other hand, water is water, isn't it, and east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple sauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, er-now you tell me what you know." --Groucho in Animal Crackers. "Animal Crackers, the first film by the Marx Brothers that we have seen here, impressed me, as it did everyone, as an extraordinary thing: the liberation by means of the screen of a special magic which the customary relationships between words and images do not usually reveal, and if there is a characteristic state, a distinct poetic level of the mind that can be called Surrealism, Animal Crackers belongs to it...The poetic quality of a film like Animal Crackers might correspond to the definition of humor, if this word had not long since lost its meaning of total liberation, of the destruction of all reality in the mind. In order to understand the powerful, total, definitive, absolute originality...of a film like Animal Crackers...one would have to add to the notion of humor the notion of something disturbing and tragic, a fatality (neither fortunate nor unfortunate, but difficult to express) which slips in behind it, like the revelation of a dreadful illness on a profile of absolute beauty." -- Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double