Copious Notes

Groucho Marx in 'Duck Soup.'

So, you think that a win-at-all-costs attitude is a new phenomenon in college sports? Ha! Has the Kentucky Theatre got a 1932 Marx Bros. movie for you.

Horse Feathers is part of a Marx double feature at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. Wednesday, this week’s installment of the theatre’s summer classics series. The other feature is Duck Soup (1933), one of those movies that was considered a near bomb when it premiered, but is now regarded as a comedy classic.

Duck Soup is the one where Grouch Marx is appointed the leader of fictional Fredonia by a rich widow, played by Margaret Dumont. Harpo and Chico play spies from the rival state of Sylvania, and Zeppo is Groucho’s advisor who inadvertently helps him start a war — as only war can be waged in a Marx Bros. movie.

And in Horse Feathers, they play football as it can only be played in a Marx Bros. movie. Watch for the final touchdown. The film is about a football game between Darwin and Huxley colleges, and a lot of humor focuses on colleges stretching eligibility requirements to be competitive.

Of course, we relay all of this like people care about the plots of Marx Bros. movies.

Yes, Duck Soup has a pretty serious satire of war, and both movies poke fun at the new film censorship board of the day. But the real point of these films is classic comedy, like Duck Soup’s mirror scene and the speakeasy joke in Horse Feathers.

With these, the brothers’ last two films for Paramount, the quartet made Depression-era audiences howl with laughter. And today, the same thing will happen at the Kentucky.

Some things never change.

If you have ever been creeped out seeing a solid line of birds sitting on a power line or hearing a deafening squawk of a flock of birds during migration season, it’s probably because you’ve seen a certain Alfred Hitchcock flick.

That squawk can be particularly unnerving because Hitch made it the soundtrack of his 1963 hit, The Birds, which shows at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. today as part of the Kentucky Theatre’s Summer Classics series. Tickets are $4 at the door.

Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and Jessica Tandy in The Birds.

Leave it to Hitchcock to take creatures normally associated with peace, love, and tranquility and turn them into murderous monsters.

It actually is a pair of love birds that Melanie (Tippi Hedren) buys for Mitch (Rod Taylor) that gets the drama started on Bodega Bay. Melanie buys the birds after a contentious encounter with Mitch as an excuse to get close to Mitch again, and maybe endear herself to him.

Soon after she arrives, massive flocks of birds begin staging gruesome attacks on the maritime village, including an unnerving assault on school children. One of the classic scenes of The Birds, where Mitch, Melanie and others walk among thousands of quiet birds in an attempt to escape, was brilliantly parodied by The Simpsons in the episode A Streetcar Named Marge (one of the best Simpsons episodes ever).

In the scene, set at the Ayn Rand School for Tots, Maggie has just retrieved pacifiers that were taken from her and all her friends. When Homer, Bart, and Lisa arrive to pick Maggie up, they must step gingerly through hundreds of babies to the deafening sound of pacifier sucking.

Part of the creepiness of the movie is it doesn’t answer questions. Was it the love birds? Was it Melanie? Was it just a freak of nature? Hitch seems to provide one possible explanation in the trailer, above.

During a chat with Kentucky Theatre manager Fred Mills Tuesday, we touched on the subject of the holiday classics series, which is not happening this year.

Fred Mills in the Kentucky Theatre projection booth in 2007. Copyrighted Herald-Leader photo by Pablo Alcala.

Mills said he had received a few calls about the series, an abbrevaited version of the summer classics series, which has been a huge hit for the Kentucky. The holiday classics series has not been as successful, Mills says, and it came at a bad time for the theater’s primary programming: prestige, arthouse moves that often end up being prime candidates for Oscars.

“From about Thanksgiving, through the end of the year, some of the bigger pictures are released by the studios, and you can’t really interrupt those pictures to show another film,” Mills says. “So the only time you have available to do it is early morning, and we tried that last year, and it just didn’t work.”

Contracts with distributors often stipulate that films must play at prime times such as Friday nights and weekends. This holiday season, The Kentucky is featuring Milk, a biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States, starring Sean Penn. And Friday, Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s drama about a poor Indian teen who goes on the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, opens. Slumdog was just nominated for a Golden Globe Award for best motion picture drama.

In summer classics news, Fred said the theater has secured the late Paul Newman’s The Hustler for next summer.

We’ll have more from our chat with Fred next week in the Herald-Leader and at LexGo.com.