Go West

Go West is a 1940 comedy-western film starring the Marx Brothers. In their tenth film, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico head to the American West and attempt to unite a couple by ensuring that a stolen property deed is retrieved. The film was directed by Edward Buzzell and written by Irving Brecher, who receives the original screenplay credit.

Plot
Confidence man S. Quentin Quale is heading west to find his fortune, but is short ten dollars for a train ticket. In the railroad station, he encounters brothers Joseph and Rusty Panello and attempts to swindle their money, but the two manage to swindle Quale's money. The Panellos are friends with an old miner named Dan Wilson whose near worthless property, Dead Man's Gulch, has no gold. They loan him their last ten dollars for a grubstake and he gives them the deed to the Gulch as collateral. Unbeknownst to Wilson, the son of his longtime rival and beau to his granddaughter Eve Wilson, Terry Turner has contacted the railway and persuaded them to build through the gulch, making the deed holder rich. After crooked railroad executive John Beecher and shady saloon owner "Red" Baxter manage to steal the deed, Quale and the Panello brothers work with Terry and Eve to retrieve the deed.

Cast

 * [[Groucho Marx as S. Quentin Quale
 * [[Chico Marx as Joe Panello
 * [[Harpo Marx as "Rusty" Panello
 * John Carroll as Terry Turner
 * Diana Lewis as Eve Wilson
 * Walter Woolf King as John Beecher
 * Robert Barrat as "Red" Baxter
 * June MacCloy as Lulubelle
 * George Lessey as Railroad President
 * Tully Marshall as Dan Wilson (uncredited)
 * Iris Adrian as Mary Lou (uncredited)
 * Joan Woodbury as Melody (uncredited)
 * Joe Yule as Crystal Palace Bartender Joe (uncredited)
 * Mitchell Lewis as Halfbreed Indian Pete (uncredited)
 * Arthur Housman as Drunk In Saloon (uncredited)
 * Frederick Burton as Johnson (uncredited)

Musical Numbers

 * "As If I Didn't Know"
 * "You Can't Argue With Love"
 * "From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water"
 * "Ridin' The Range"

Trivia

 * Like all other Marx Brothers MGM films, Go West has several musical numbers, including "As If I Didn't Know" and "You Can't Argue With Love", both by Bronislau Kaper and Gus Kahn, "Ridin' the Range" by Roger Edens and Gus Kahn, "From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water" by Charles Wakefield Cadman and "The Woodpecker Song" by Harold Adamson and Eldo di Lazzaro. (In this song, Chico, playing the piano, rolls an orange on the keys in sync with the melody.)
 * As with A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, the Marxes played key comedy scenes from Go West live onstage on a pre-filming tour; this tour was much shorter than that for the first two films, lasting three weeks.
 * Groucho was aged 49 during the filming of Go West, and his hairline had begun receding. As such, he took to wearing a toupee throughout the film, as he did in the previous film, At the Circus.
 * Go West Screenwriter Irving Brecher stood in for an ailing Groucho when publicity stills for the film were first taken. Brecher bore a remarkable resemblance to Groucho and is all but unrecognizable in the photos, sporting Groucho's glasses, greasepaint mustache and eyebrows.
 * Thomas M. Pryor of The New York Times called the film "an unevenly paced show" with "only one really funny sequence," referring to the climax.