Goodness gracious! I should have known that the two films were distant cousins — after all, Woody Allen's film (one of his very best, and certainly his most genial) ends with an extended tribute to Groucho in which everyone wears phony mustaches and pretends to puff on stogies. But not having taken a look at Horse Feathers in twenty or thirty years, I failed to realize how much Woody had borrowed. How could I have forgotten that Everyone Says I Love You extracts and transforms two songs from Horse Feathers: "I'm Through With Love" as well as its own title song. And of course it shares its liberated and episodic series-of-skits structure not only with Groucho but with all vaudevillians. Not to mention a willingness to throw logic to the winds or under the bus for the sake of a gag. Everyone Says I Love You is a lovely, gentle film (much more mild than its raucous unsubtle predecessor).
Its exhilarating choreography is very distinctly not indebted to anything in the earlier film.
Some ambitious scholar could write an illuminating essay on Woody's Marxism.
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