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A Day at the Races, which was one of the Marx Brothers' own favorites among their films, was also their most successful at the box office, setting a record for them by earning $4,000,000 after its release in 1937. A broad, outrageous satire of the medical profession, it pictures doctors as incompetent, self-serving people whose practices are less than pure and whose patients are vain hypochondriacs. In the film, Groucho plays Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, a veteran horse doctor posing as the medical director of Standish Sanitarium, whose young and pretty owner is in danger of losing her mortgage to a ruthless real-estate manipulator and owner of a nearby racetrack, who in turn has plans to turn the hospital into a casino. Enter Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, out to save not only the sanitarium but also the romance between Judy Standish (Maureen O'Sullivan) and Gil Stewart (Allan Jones), and their own integrity. All they have to do is convince the rich Mrs. Upjohn (Margaret Dumont, whose performance in this film won her the Screen Actors Guild award for Best Supporting Actress) that she is too ill to pick up her money and leaveâ "a classic Marx routine all by itselfâ "and help Allan Jones hold onto the race horse he's bought long enough to win a race and some money, marry Judy, and save the institution. Together the Marxes tumble through a series of riotously funny predicaments, and the gags fly as fast and furious as a panicked Thoroughbred. Based on a story by scenarists George Seaton and Robert Pirosh, A DAY AT THE RACES has all the irrepressible Marx Brothers i full swing, with al their exasperating punning and comic cunning, and in what is, without a doubt, one of their all-time funniest movies. A Day at the Races was a collaboration of three veteran Hollywood screenwriters, GEORGE SEATON, ROBERT PIROSH, and GEORGE OPPENHEIMER. Seaton, who is a producer as well as a writer, has also won two Academy Awards for his direction of Miracle on 34th Street in 1947, and of County Girl in 1954, and in 1962 was the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Oppenheimer, co-founder of The Viking Press, has been drama critic for the Long Island, New York, paper Newsday since 1955, having spent fourteen years in Hollywood writing for the screen and five additional years writing for the television series Topper. Because the final film differs so much from the script, this volume includes both the original script and the dialogue and actors in the film itself. All orders shipped protected in a box.
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