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"Esther Muir deleted paste up scene"
Love you, too
One of my favourite ever images is a publicity still from the Marx Brothers' 1937 film A Day at the Races featuring villainess Esther Muir doused from head to foot in old fashioned flour/water wallpaper paste. After seeing this in a Time Life guide to the movies in a library in the early nineties I made haste to acquire the videotape - only to find that this doesn't happen in the final cut of the movie. Esther and Groucho are draped in damp wallpaper slapped to the wall by Chico and Harpo above their heads.
The extended scene was purportedly cut from the film as it was considered too 'low brow'. Groucho was said to have stated "We're not the three stooges!". No print nor negative was ever recovered. In the movie's final cut there is no mess in the wallpaper scene
My theory is that the scene was never filmed for the motion picture and the horseplay was staged for a publicity stills photographer after print was called on the scene and the set was finished with.
The extended scene was purportedly cut from the film as it was considered too 'low brow'. Groucho was said to have stated "We're not the three stooges!". No print nor negative was ever recovered. In the movie's final cut there is no mess in the wallpaper scene
My theory is that the scene was never filmed for the motion picture and the horseplay was staged for a publicity stills photographer after print was called on the scene and the set was finished with.
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What if there was a way to add a little colour to old beautiful B&W pictures ... and btw. google turned out a few more ... 
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My theory is that the scene was never filmed for the motion picture and the horseplay was staged for a publicity stills photographer after print was called on the scene and the set was finished with.
There's another (similar) possibility, from Esther Muir's Wikipedia entry:
She toured with the Marxes in a stage version where material from the movie was rehearsed and crafted prior to filming. Muir described the Marx Brothers as diligent comic actors who sometimes worked days and weeks on a scene to perfect it. "We played pranks and had many laughs in spite of the hard and messy work..."
So these shots could even be from a version of the scene as done in the stage show, but, like you say, rejected from the film.
I remember seeing that still in an issue of Life Magazine. Thanks for posting this!
twankey1961 said:
My theory is that the scene was never filmed for the motion picture and the horseplay was staged for a publicity stills photographer after print was called on the scene and the set was finished with.
There's another (similar) possibility, from Esther Muir's Wikipedia entry:
She toured with the Marxes in a stage version where material from the movie was rehearsed and crafted prior to filming. Muir described the Marx Brothers as diligent comic actors who sometimes worked days and weeks on a scene to perfect it. "We played pranks and had many laughs in spite of the hard and messy work..."
So these shots could even be from a version of the scene as done in the stage show, but, like you say, rejected from the film.
My theory is that the scene was never filmed for the motion picture and the horseplay was staged for a publicity stills photographer after print was called on the scene and the set was finished with.
There's another (similar) possibility, from Esther Muir's Wikipedia entry:
She toured with the Marxes in a stage version where material from the movie was rehearsed and crafted prior to filming. Muir described the Marx Brothers as diligent comic actors who sometimes worked days and weeks on a scene to perfect it. "We played pranks and had many laughs in spite of the hard and messy work..."
So these shots could even be from a version of the scene as done in the stage show, but, like you say, rejected from the film.
The scene was definitely shot for the film. The theory I have always been told by several sources is that Groucho Marx deleted the footage because the scene too closely resembled a Three Stooges scene...whom he hated. Groucho always felt that his style of humor was high brow and sophisticated political satire and he felt that The 3 Stooges style was low brow slapstick. He apparently took one look at the scene after it was shot and said "we are not The 3 Stooges" and insisted on personally destroying the film reels.
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