Meet the British Marx Brothers

In the last post we observed how relative lack of familiarity with the Marx Brothers in Britain at the time of The Cocoanuts meant that the artists responsible for designing the posters basically drew what the hell they liked when tasked with caricaturing the team.

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Even odder, now, seems the fact that the original stage play by Kaufman and Ryskind was viewed not as a Marx Brothers property from the first, but as an original stage play by Kaufman and Ryskind.

As a consequence of this kind of thinking, came perhaps the oddest and least-recalled chapter in the entire history of The Cocoanuts: the 1928 British stage production with an all-new cast.

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It opened at London's Garrick Theatre in March of '28, and it's hard indeed to imagine what such a production could possibly have been like. Our only means of guessing is by watching the cast in later film appearances, in the hope that we might get a vague sense of how they may have interpreted the 'roles'.

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Least accessible to us, sadly, are Leonard Henry and Max Nesbitt as Chico and Harpo - and yes, that is how they were billed.

Nesbitt was one half of the brother act Harry & Max Nesbitt, a musical comedy duo. Sadly, the pair made only a few rare film appearances between 1927 and 1934, giving us little chance to assess just what kind of a Harpo Max would have made - a pity since, of all the roles, Harpo's is surely the hardest to conceive being played as anything other than outright impersonation.
The British Pathé library has a couple of extracts of the pair performing, from which these small images are taken (Max is the one with the uke):
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Do you see a likely Harpo here?
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Chico's was presumably seen as a relatively straightforward comic dialect role, which is presumably how Leonard Henry would have approached it. Henry made eight films during the thirties, the most accessible to us today being his last, the Tod Slaughter barnstormer The Face at the Window (1939). The fact that this melodrama is supposedly set in Paris, and Henry is cast in what sounds like the comic relief capacity of Gaston the cook, made me wonder if dialect comedy was his stock-in-trade. In fact it's a light but not quite comic role, and Henry, like the rest of the cast, uses his own British accent.

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In the Mary Eaton ingenue role was one of the most vivacious and versatile of British actresses, Enid Stamp Taylor.

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Fortunately, posterity has left us many opportunities to enjoy her work, between her film debut in 1927 and her last in 1946, the year in which she died as the result of a fall at the age of only 41.

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She appears with George Formby, Lupino Lane, Gordon Harker, Claude Hulbert, Gracie Fields, Flanagan & Allen, Jessie Matthews and the Aldwych Players, as well as alongside Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc in The Wicked Lady, her penultimate film, and the last to be released before her death.
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But for reasons I shall shortly come to, by far her most useful appearance from the point of view of this enquiry is in the 1937 film Okay For Sound. Before going further into why, let us meet our Groucho, Mr Fred Duprez.
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Fred was an American vaudeville comic who built a successful career in Britain (as well as the father of feline actress June Duprez). In fact, it was in his capacity as a British comic draw that he accompanied Will Hay to America for his oddball co-production Hey! Hey! USA (1938), and it was on the ship coming back again afterwards that he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of fifty-four.

Did he do the full Groucho bit in The Cocoanuts, greasepaint moustache and all? The same goes for them all, actually - remember the Marxes were not remotely familiar at this time, so they would have had to have gone to America and study their performances if they were going to impersonate them.

It seems far more likely that they interpreted the 'characters' (!) in their own way. And if so, we can get a good idea of what Duprez's 'Groucho' may have been like from Okay For Sound, in which he too appears.

In it he plays a Jewish film mogul who keeps his studio from bankruptcy by conning his backers and disorientating them with wordplay. Though it lacks the self-defeating absurdism, there is a large measure of Groucho's screen persona here - it's certainly a lot like Gordon Miller in Room Service - and the Jewish dialect helps a lot too. (Duprez is rather reminiscent of that splendid Jewish comic actor Harry Green, the Marxes' fellow Paramount contractee in the early thirties.)
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There are many odd similarities between this film and The Cocoanuts. Both were hit stage plays adapted for the movies. Both were shot in the afternoons while the stars were performing on stage in the evenings. But the connection runs deeper than these mere coincidences. For not only does the film feature the London Cocoanuts ingenue Enid Stamp Taylor, and provide a good comic role for its Groucho, the main stars, likewise making their film debut, are the only British comedy team to ever approach the wild, iconoclastic style of the Marxes: The Crazy Gang.

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The six core members of the Crazy Gang were, in fact, three discrete double-acts: Naughton & Gold, Nervo & Knox and Flanagan & Allen. But while the three acts dispensed basically traditional music hall material on their own, when all six men got together they morphed into a six-headed animal possessed of qualities far greater than the proverbial sum - and no stage, or screen, ever proved quite big enough for what was unleashed.
Their comedy relies greatly for its effect on pace, and rapid transitions between wordplay, slapstick and farce, their physical comedy was often highly elaborate and acrobatic, their verbal comedy often extremely clever, just as often groaningly corny. But the really important thing is that with six of them at it at the same time, there was frequently more going on than could be fully taken in, resulting in a kind of sustained delirium that, once up and rolling, gave audiences little time to breathe between laughs. For this reason, there is little doubt that what we see of them on film, through technical necessity as much as anything, simply cannot be the full-strength entertainment enjoyed by stage audiences when they were really firing on all cylinders. But then, this is just as true of the Marx Brothers. Okay For Sound shares with the Marxes a frantic pace, a tangible sense of energy, a distinctly modern kind of absurdity to their humour and a boisterous iconoclasm along with, more specifically, the scenes of theatrical destruction, the addresses to camera and the deliberate baiting of pompous authority.

Unlike the majority of British stage to film crossover comics, no attempt is made to turn them into comic characters able to function within a narrative. Like the Marxes at Paramount (and not at MGM) they are placed in a realistic fictional narrative yet never quite integrate into it, they move parallel to it, as if they have landed from some indefinite elsewhere, remaining hermetically sealed from the world around them until it dares to rub against theirs, and then watch out. No convincing characterisation is offered or necessary; they are simply let loose, their job to pull rugs, blow raspberries, deflate authority, and generally clog the wheels of genteel society.

As already noted, Okay For Sound, like The Cocoanuts, was shot in the afternoons and days-off during a smash-hit stage run, and is basically a ragbag of disconnected routines taken directly from their revues. The plot such as it is lets them wangle their way into an ailing British film studio and take over the productions being shot, causing various kinds of chaos and alienating just about everybody but ending up with a film that somehow proves a huge hit and revives the studio’s fortunes. It could easily be adapted into a Paramount Marx vehicle, since there is no logic to it; no reason whatever why these six obvious reprobates are allowed to virtually destroy a film studio without ever being restrained, while their final triumph is as absurd as the football victory at the end of Horse Feathers.

Unlike the Brothers, however, they also enjoy the unusual freedom of being able to assume different roles in comic sketches. The best of these is the sequence in which Teddy Knox provides both American and hilariously vague British commentary to a wrestling match: "If we only had the River Thames running through here and a few boats on it you'd think it was boat race day". There is also much saucy humour of a kind that would probably not have passed US censors: a character called Farquhar is asked "How are the little Farquhars?", a scene in which the blasting of a dam is delayed is met with the observation "There's no dam blast!", and Enid Stamp Taylor has her skirt ripped off three times.

Squint a little, and you could almost be watching the British version of The Cocoanuts.