In praise of The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts (1929), the Marx Brothers' first movie, is a majestic comedy that finds them at their most energetic and inspired and belongs among their very highest achievements.

.

This is not, however, its reputation.

For many the fact that it is technically primitive, shot entirely on small studio sets with undiscriminating sound recording, a graceless camera and static theatrical set-ups, is for some unfathomable reason an obstacle to enjoying it.

Paul D. Zimmermann wrote: "The camerawork showed all the mobility of a concrete fire hydrant caught in a winter freeze." Thank God, then, that the Marx Brothers were in front of it at the time, being hilarious. Otherwise that could have caused a few problems.

Others, like Allen Eyles, note "its silly plot and dated musical elements". Yes, nothing spoils a Marx Brothers movie like a silly plot. And as for that dated music, the date it seems to have plumped for is 1929, so no complaints from me there, either.
.

For me, the music of the Paramount Marx films is just another of their great joys, and I'll not hear a word against the second leads, either. Mary Eaton, Oscar Shaw, Kay Francis, Lillian Roth, Hal Thompson, Margaret Irving and the rest are all terrific. I know it is considered de rigeur to love the Marxes alone, and snort haughtily and derisively through the songs and subplots, but if you're one of those who do, know now that my friends and I consider your behaviour the very height of naff.

("A rendition of 'the skies will all be blue / When my dreams come true' is enough to convince us that the 1920s had their down side", suggests Simon Louvish in his book Monkey Business. It seems pretty charming to me.)

There's a feeling abroad that the free display of disrespect towards the secondary elements is what the Marxes would themselves have done, that hooting at Allan Jones is somehow of a piece with throwing fruit and vegetables at Margaret Dumont. I feel this is profoundly mistaken, and that the Brothers would have been appalled at such ignorant rudeness towards fellow showbusiness professionals.

It is sheer philistinism to be unable to see the beauty of Lillian Roth's performance of Why Am I So Romantic?, or the difference between Kenny Baker trilling Two Blind Loves and Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle's gorgeous performance of Alone. The songs in the Paramount films, including Irving Berlin's universally-mocked numbers in The Cocoanuts all delight me, and in particular Berlin's Monkey Doodle Doo boasts lyrics so weird they deserve quoting in full:

.

Monkeys upon a tree never are very blue.

They never seem to be under par that is true.

Not like the ones you see on a bar in the zoo.

Monkeys upon a tree do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

.

Oh, among the mangoes where the monkey gang goes

You can see them do

The little Monkey Doodle Doo.

Oh, a little monkey playing on his one key

Gives them all the cue

To do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

.

Let me take you by the hand

Over to the jungle band

If you're too old for dancing

Get yourself a monkey gland

.

And then let's go, my little dearie, there's the Darwin theory

Telling me and you

To do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

.

Tell me that man wasn't on the same wavelength as the Marx Brothers!

.

Shot not in Hollywood but at Paramount's Long Island studios (where so many of history's most beautiful and evocative films were nonchalantly tossed together) while Animal Crackers was still cutting up Broadway, the film catches the performers at the height of their powers.

It also benefits from some of the most expertly-tailored material they were ever given. The great playwright George S Kaufman is a massive part of what's so great about the Marx Brothers. His work here and in Animal Crackers helps define (or certainly refine) them as an act (and his astute recall for A Night at the Opera is probably the sole reason why that film is as bafflingly good as it is).

.

It is vitally important to locate the Marx Brothers we know, the Marx Brothers leaping to life here (as opposed to, say, the Vaudeville Marx Brothers who are now lost to us but were surely a cruder and broader and in many ways less distinctive force than the one here preserved), in the tradition of twenties New York humour, that sprang from the pages of the New Yorker on to the Broadway stage and then to talking pictures. Into the world of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and Alexander Woollcott and indeed Kaufman (a world that the off-stage Harpo himself would soon crash in a kind of mascot capacity) came a wild, unpretentious but uncommonly talented comedy team. This team was then taken under the collective wing of the wits and sophisticates there assembled. Something about the unrestrained anarchy of the Marx Brothers' comic tornado appealed to their delight in disrupting propriety, and it was they who gave them the impetus, opportunity and material necessary to become the fashionable darlings of high class audiences.

Kaufman inherited a team too well-defined to reinvent, but working with what he was given it was he who who made their rough-edged style perfect, bestowing upon them the finest wordplay, wildest ideas and most sustained flights of insanity, where absurdist argument develops rigidly by its own internal form of anti-logic. The 'Why a duck' sequence, first and perhaps best of the great Groucho-Chico duologues (though I retain a sneaking preference for the left-handed moths of Animal Crackers) is justly famous, but even funnier is the auction scene to which it serves as prelude, with Chico's obtuse refusal to stop bidding up, and Groucho's deliriously exasperated attempts to maintain enthusiasm:

.

What am I offered for Lot 25? Come on, folks, you know you're all allowed to bid, this is a free country. What am I offered for Lot 25? What am I offered for Lot 25 and a year's subscription to Youth's Companion? Will somebody take a year's subscription? I'm trying to work my way through college. Will somebody take a six months' subscription? I'll go to high school. Does anybody want to buy a lead pencil? I'll wrestle anybody in the crowd for five dollars.

.

The script, like all early Marx material, is also satiric and rooted in the culture of its exact historical moment. The setting is the Florida land boom of the nineteen-twenties. The invention strikes me as classic Kaufman: given an act a large part of whose comic persona revolves around conning, duplicity and pretensions to affluence, status and power entirely at odds with the reality of their situation, it is both natural and inspired to look around for the perfect contemporary setting with which to transform them from sketch artists in revues to characters in musical comedy, and hit upon the Florida real estate bubble. (Sorry that was such a long sentence, but it's all over now.) Groucho's character, in particular, lends itself exactly to such a milieu (Louvish has some good material contrasting Groucho's characteristic pronouncements in the film with those of real Florida entrepreneurs), as, on a much lower level of aspiration and attainment, do those of his seedy lieutenants Harpo and Chico, the latter of whom makes no secret of his desire to fleece the fleecer, and the former of whom steals the cutlery that Groucho has himself stolen from other hotels. (Look out too for a fourth brother, Zeppo, occasionally to be seen hiding behind the desk in the hotel lobby. And make the most of him. He has even less to do in Animal Crackers.)

.

.
To this irresistible recipe, Kaufman then adds that simplest yet most elusive seasoning: almost unbelievably great jokes. Get the most artful comedy team ever to deliver them, and you have The Cocoanuts. Woollcott raved, Broadway fell like Troy and the rest, as they say, is cliché.

The Cocoanuts is a great moment in Broadway history, and it is to the film's credit that it merely replicates the exact experience of the show and makes no effort to turn it into a movie. From Monkey Business on we have the Marx Brothers at the movies; for the time being, let's enjoy them on stage.

Director Robert Florey recalled his efforts to include real Florida location shooting being rebuffed by the studio brass with what still seems to me to be the perfect dismissal of all those who affect to having their enjoyment compromised by the artificial nature of the production:

"Why are you so concerned with having real backgrounds when one of the leading characters wears an obviously false moustache?"