Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Day at the Races,’ As Dr. Groucho Deftly Defends His Credentials)

Mrs. Upjohn [played by Margaret Dumont]: “Surely, you don't question the doctor's ability?”

Whitmore [played by Leonard Ceeley]: “No, not exactly. But running a sanitarium calls for a man with peculiar talents.”

Dr. Hackenbush [played by Groucho Marx]: “You don't have to look any further! I've got the most peculiar talents of any doctor you've ever met.”—A Day at the Races (1937), screenplay by Robert Pirosh, George Seaton and George Oppenheimer, directed by Sam Wood

Premiering 80 years ago this week, A Day at the Races clocked in at one hour and 50 minutes, making it the Marx Brothers’ longest feature. That was not its only distinction, however: the other related to Groucho’s character, a veterinarian passing himself off as a medical doctor.

In the original screenplay, this medical masquerader was given the Dickensian name of Dr. Quackenbush. MGM’s legal department, however, discovered that there were at least a dozen real doctors in the U.S. with this name. Nervous studio executives decided that a slight change of spelling would get them out of any legal hassles. Groucho liked the new name so much that he sometimes used it in signing off in letters to friends.

I have to admit to another reason for liking this name: It sounds like a cousin to a town near where I live: Hackensack, N.J. Five years after A Day at the Races, writer-director Preston Sturges used that place name for even more uproarious effect in The Palm Beach Story, when he gave Rudy Vallee’s stand-in for filthy-rich industrial John D. Rockefeller the sobriquet “John D. Hackensacker III.”

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on a Medical Quack’s Progress)

Sganarelle: “No, I tell you; they made a doctor of me in spite of myself. I had never dreamt of being so learned as that, and all my studies came to an end in the lowest form. I can't imagine what put that whim into their heads; but when I saw that they were resolved to force me to be a doctor, I made up my mind to be one at the expense of those I might have to do with. Yet you would hardly believe how the error has spread abroad, and how everyone is obstinately determined to see a great doctor in me. They come to fetch me from right and left; and if things go on in that fashion, I think I had better stick to physic all my life. I find it the best of trades; for, whether we are right or wrong, we are paid equally well. We are never responsible for the bad work, and we cut away as we please in the stuff we work on. A shoe maker in making shoes can't spoil a scrap of leather without having to pay for it, but we can spoil a man without paying one farthing for the damage done. The blunders are not ours, and the fault is always that of the dead man. In short, the best part of this profession is, that there exists among the dead an honesty, a discretion that nothing can surpass; and never as yet has one been known to complain of the doctor who had killed him.”—Moliere, The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), in The Complete Works of Moliere, Vol. II, edited by Charles  Heron Wall (1898)