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Mechanical Music in the Movies
By Karl Ellison

I was watching the 1932 Marx Brothers movie "Horsefeathers", and in the
Speakeasy scene (the password is 'swordfish') there's a coin instrument
that plays three songs clearly.  I made a small (3.5 minute) streaming
windows-media video clip of the scene:  http://www.amica.org/tmp/hf.wmv

Can anyone positively identify the instrument from the audio?  To me
with the reiterating xylophone and wooden block, it may be a Cremona,
but I'd like to find out for certain.

And can anyone identify the names of the three tunes clearly heard in
their entirety?  Or even the roll number itself?

Karl Ellison


(Message sent Sun 3 Dec 2006, 21:53:58 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.)

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