August 28, 1930 –
… Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh… Now you tell me what you know …
The Marx Brothers second outing at Paramount, Animal Crackers, opened on this date.
The film parodies several contemporary plays, most notably when Groucho Marx’s character Captain Spaulding has an interior dialogue concerning his marriage proposals to two different women. The scene was meant to lampoon Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude. Indeed, besides directly referencing Eugene O’Neill, Groucho at one point breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience, “Pardon me while I have a strange interlude.“
The Haus of Dcaligari 