The Great Animal Crackers Doppelganger Mystery

The opening preamble
I'm going to tell you something you almost certainly don't know about the Marx Brothers.
No matter how many times you've seen Animal Crackers, chances are there's a huge amazing thing about this film that you have never spotted.
It's true I have told some other people. I wrote to tell that chap who was Freedonia Gazette's British representative, forget his name now, Ray something I think, but for some reason he didn't believe me. He was an optician, if I remember rightly: a naturally sceptical breed of men. Then I wrote it up as an article and sent it to Paul Wesolowski, the Gazette's head honcho; he forwarded it to Gummo's son, presumably on the grounds that there was nobody else less likely to have an opinion about it, and shortly after that the Gazette folded. (Coincidence?) Flushed with triumph I wrote to Glenn Mitchell, author of The Marx Brothers Encyclopaedia. I knew I was definitely on to something when the letter came back because I got the address wrong.
So here it is.
There is an entire scene in Animal Crackers in which the Marx Brothers are doubled by three other men.
This is not mere opinion. There is no doubt.
Once you notice it, it is impossible to deny it.
The scene is the one where Chico and Harpo are stealing the painting in the dark, in the presence of Groucho and Margaret Dumont.
From the time the lights go out to the time they come back on again, Harpo, Chico and Groucho are not Harpo, Chico and Groucho but three other geezers miming to Groucho and Chico's dialogue and trying, and pretty much failing, to move like Harpo, Chico and Groucho.
Go away and watch it again. Look at those strange figures, weird figures. Who are they? Why are they there? Time to use the Sherlocka Holmesa method.

How can we be sure of this?
I'm very glad you asked me. There are a number of giveaways. First, even if you think they are the bona fide boys, they are plainly miming. Their physical gestures are forced and overt in order to match the dialogue, which they sometimes anticipate. When Groucho asks if anyone is there and Chico replies, 'Groucho' turns to Dumont (who is the real Dumont by the way) and nods slowly for ages while he waits for the soundtrack to catch up with his actions. Look at Harpo - big, bulky, slow 'Harpo' - flapping his arms when he's hanging from the painting. 'Chico', too, makes a bunch of strange, slow gestures completely unlike his normal self.
Second, there is the fact that when the lights come back, they do not simply switch back on. The scene goes from twilight to pitch black - for no logical reason at all - before then cutting to full illumination - with the camera in a totally different position.
Finally, there are the men's faces. These are to be found on the front of their heads and remain today as useful a means of identifying them as they were back in 1930. Okay, it's pretty dark, but we get a good look at 'Harpo' when there's a lightning flash (freeze-frame it) and 'Groucho' is discernible throughout. Look at his little head! Look at his close-cropped hair! Groucho has a sharp centre parting and fluffy hair rising up in a v-shape in this movie. Does this guy? No. He looks like Leonard Zelig.

Okay, then - why?
Here we can only speculate. In roughly reverse order of likeliness, here are the possible explanations I've come up with.
First, recall that this is the film in which director Victor Heerman supposedly had cells built and brought on the set so as to ensure the Marxes could not escape between takes. This story is probably apocryphal, but the point of it - that it was genuinely difficult to get all four Marx Brothers on set and doing what they were supposed to be doing at the same time - is backed up by the testimony of just about everybody who worked with them. Could this scene have been shot on a day when they were AWOL, on the grounds that it was dark and nobody would be able to see them properly anyway?
Or maybe it was planned that way from the first, as a scene that didn't need the real Brothers on set, because it was dark and nobody would be able to see them properly anyway. This would mean that 'they' would most likely be miming not to the soundtrack we hear but to crew members reading the script off-camera, adding to their obvious physical dislocation; with the Brothers' dialogue added later. Presumably it was felt that this wouldn't matter too much because it was dark and nobody would be able to see them properly anyway.
Or, perhaps the original shoot proved unsatisfactory - maybe the light levels were wrong and the film came back from the chemists more or less pitch black. I'm speculating wildly here. Then, when a reshoot was ordered, it was decided not to bother recalling the Brothers themselves on the grounds that the soundtrack didn't need re-recording, and it was dark and nobody would be able to see them properly anyway.
Or, maybe the early sound recording techniques were still so cumbersome, that no opportunity to get round them would be missed. So here we have a scene in the dark - why use live sound when you can't really see the lips move? Get the boys to record the dialogue, then they can mime to it without the sound department needing to get in on it at all. And then, why use the Brothers at all? After all, it's dark and nobody would be able to see them properly anyway.

Okay, then - who?
Well I had no idea until recently. I always assumed they were just anybody, perhaps the people stood nearest to the set at the time; especially since you could throw a brick from a moving bus and hit someone who looks more like Groucho than this weedy little guy. But then I saw a sentence in Simon Louvish's book, in a paragraph with nothing whatever to do with this scene, that leaped out at me.
He writes: "Like all stars, the Brothers had doubles, to set up the scenes, till they were required."
That's not identical doubles, of course, just reasonably similar stand-ins. And that's who they must be.

Animal Crackers: Annotated Guide

Yes, it's back! The regular feature that nobody's talking about, that takes ages to prepare and debuted to virtually no interest whatsoever: the Marx Brothers Annotated Film Guide.
Even more than last time, I was really stumped by some of this one - so get your thinking caps on and join the council! .
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4:30 - Jumping butterballs! It's Donald MacBride!

Yep, that's Donald MacBride all right. The explosive character actor and later the fearsome Mr Wagner, Groucho's nemesis in Room Service (shown here with Harpo and Groucho in that film), can be seen doing that style of acting peculiar to extras - looking around for somebody to make eye contact with and then making a big expressive gesture to them - throughout the film, but our first clear shot of him is here, in jumper and tie behind and to the right of Lillian Roth. Oh, to be in a jumper and tie behind and to the right of Lillian Roth! Jumping butterballs!

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4:46 - What is this line?

The crowd sing:

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Most heartily we'll greet him
With plain and fancy cheering

Until he's hard of hearing...
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Then what? The DVD subtitles opt for "The Captain has arrived" again, but it's clearly nothing like it. Anyone out there have ears tuned to the exact frequency of early thirties sound recording?
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6:10 - Enter Captain Spaulding...

Depending on how old your copy of the film is, one of two things will happen at this point: either Groucho will take his pith helmet off, or he'll take his pith helmet off twice. The version I saw on television in the nineteen-eighties, and the first videotape I had of the film (on Betamax) retained the continuity error. These days, it's been removed. Not sure how much I approve of this sort of tinkering, or whom or what it really benefits. My first tape also had a mysterious bit of indecipherable speech at the very end after the Paramount logo had faded, which I always fancied was Chico, recorded on set after the final shot had been finished. Now that's gone too. Anyone else remember it?

Anywhere, here is the Captain: probably Groucho's most famous 'character', yet possessor of one of his least eccentric character names. Actually, Captain Spaulding was the name of a vaudeville fire-eater ("The Man Who Was Hotter Than Vesuvius!"). It is also now the name of the killer clown in Rob Zombie’s crappy horror film House Of 1000 Corpses, which also has characters named Rufus Firefly, Otis Driftwood, Ravelli and The Professor, and is rubbish.

One other thing: look at Groucho's lapel from the very first moments of this scene: the caterpillar that Chandler will eventually pluck from his jacket causing him to faint is already there. If you're ever lucky enough to see the film on the big screen you'll notice something else, too: it's real, and crawling the whole time as well. Pre-CGI, you see.
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8:27 - "I think I'll try and make her!"

This line has been excised - rather carefully, it must be said - for the benefit of people who might be shocked by it, as well as those who prefer songs not to have rhythm and rhyming couplets.

Simon Louvish reprints the various Hays Office edicts concerning the film, many of them revealing the same unfamiliarity with the individual Brothers shown by the London Cocoanuts caricaturists (see here). The "try and make her" line is attributed to "Harpo's song", while further exception is taken at "the business of Zeppo pulling an intimate undergarment out of the woman's bosom with his teeth" (what would you give to see that?) and to "the following scene on the couch with the girl throwing her legs in the air and exposing her crotch after he bites her". A few more opportunities like that and maybe Zeppo wouldn't have left the act after all.

The song line "The men must all be very old / The women hot, the champagne cold" was going too far, but the substituted "the women warm" was acceptable.

Oddly, however, many other cuts demanded in these memos remain in the version we have (such as the Groucho-Chico badinage about the location and function of the maid's room in their imaginary house, and Groucho's lines about "Somewhere My Love Lies Sleeping with a male chorus" and "we took some pictures of the native girls but they weren't developed"). Also making it to release is my personal favourite Marxian outrage: Chico's line "She can't take it there!" when Harpo is walloping Margaret Dumont repeatedly in the abdomen.
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8:50 - What is it with these stupid subtitles?

The English subtitles on the Universal DVD of this film are a disgrace.

They've just informed me that the line "He brought his name undying fame" is "He put his name on dying fame", which, as many of you will have noted without my prompting, doesn't mean anything.

Lazy idiot errors like this are strewn throughout - "an imitation, and I must admit a pretty cool one!" becomes "a pretty cruel imitation"; "You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on, and so is the Guild" becomes "very fortunate the Theater Gill isn't putting this on, and so is the Gill"; "A more dastardly crack I've never heard!" becomes "Dastardly cracker!"

"When we pet" in the song 'Why Am I So Romantic?' becomes "When we touch", a masterstroke that robs the line of both meaning and its ability to rhyme with the next one.

Even worse are the hundreds of other cases where they simply haven't been bothered to transcribe properly. Loads of it is reduced to a kind of shorthand which swallows jokes and ruins the language; frequently whole lines are just plain left out. Jokes are ruined this way: "If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce it tastes much more like prunes than rhubarb does" has been reduced to "If you stew cranberries like applesauce they tastes (sic) like prunes." The joke "I may be wonderful but I think you're wrong, Ravelli" is now merely the statement "I think you're wrong, Ravelli", and "You think it's a mystery now, wait 'till you see it tomorrow" has been replaced with a simple "Wait till tomorrow."

But if these are examples of jokes being destroyed because the subtitlers can't be bothered with the effort of transcribing lots of dialogue, how to explain the occasions when they have simply rewritten them? Do they think they're funnier than Kaufman, Ryskind and Groucho? When Margaret Dumont says she can't see her hand in front of her face, do they really think "It wouldn't be very pleasant anyway" is funnier than "You wouldn't get much enjoyment out of that"?

Bastards!
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1o:17 - "I feel that the time has come, the walrus said..."

Lewis Carroll, but you knew that.

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13:24 - "The gates swung open and a Fig Newton entered."

Do you know, I always thought this was a type of cigar. I now know that it's simply what we Brits call a fig roll: a pastry roll filled with fig jam.

Quite why Harpo is being likened to one here, though, I do not know. (One interesting possible explanation has since emerged, however: see here.)
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21:14 -You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on."

This was the celebrated New York theatrical society that had been putting on highbrow stuff since its formation in 1919. One of its most celebrated successes had been Eugene O'Neill's four hour ball-buster Strange Interlude in 1928. Hence...
l.

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21:20 - "Pardon me while I have a strange interlude..."

Groucho is here parodying O'Neill's device of having characters step forward and recite internal monologues revealing their true feelings to the audience while the rest of the cast freeze and, like Margarets Dumont and Irving here, stand around like berks. Charles Marsden, one of the characters in the play, is the "poor old Marsden" to whom Groucho refers. Future Marx saviour Irving Thalberg produced it as an MGM movie in 1932 with Norma Shearer, Clark Gable and future Judy Standish Maureen O'Sullivan.

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21:38 - "How happy I could be with either of these two if both of them just went away."

Groucho is here referencing a line by John Gay, from The Beggar's Opera: "How happy could I be with either, Were t’ other dear charmer away!"
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22:36 - "Are you suggesting companionate marriage?"

A hot topic of the time, following the publication of the book The Companionate Marriage in 1927, in which authors Ben B. Lindsey and Wainright Evans advocated a new kind of marriage in which birth control was deployed to prevent parenthood until both parties could be certain the marriage was a goer, and easy divorce by mutual consent the solution if it were found otherwise. It remains to be seen if it catches on, but I wish it the best of luck.

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22:42 - "You could sell Fuller Brushes..."

From the official Fuller Brush website:

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On a cold, crisp winter day, New Year's 1906, a 21-year-old entrepreneur from Nova Scotia, Alfred C. Fuller, began an enterprise which has become known worldwide as The Fuller Brush Company. From a bench between the furnace and the coal bin in his sister's New England home, young Fuller set out to make, in his own words, "the best products of their kind in the world." Through the years, The Fuller Brush Company has grown from one man's fiber suitcase, filled with unique custom-made brushes, to an exciting collection of home/business care, and personal care products, all crafted with the same quality and precision that have made The Fuller Brush Company a name welcomed everywhere.
From the beginning Fuller established three basic rules:
Make it work
Make it last
Guarantee it no matter what.
Today, almost a century later, these words still guide The Fuller Brush Company.

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23:07 - "Steel 186, Anaconda 74, American Can 138..."

Groucho's "strange figures, weird figures" refer obviously to the stock market, and carry the bitter tang of proximity to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The reference to Anaconda is not arbitrary in this context:
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In late 1928 the National City Bank created a pool for Anaconda Copper (a Montana mine owned by investor Percy Rockefeller's father, William) and started pushing its stock, then priced at $40, even though underwriters knew that copper was fetching weak prices in Chile. The share price leapt to $128 in three months and at its peak in October 1929 was selling for $150. Anaconda Copper became one of the magic phrases of the boom years, whispered like a talisman from one gullible investor to the next... In the trough of the Depression in 1932, Anaconda Copper was worth just $4.

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- Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

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The crash occurred during the stage run of Animal Crackers and Groucho in particular was badly hit. Harry Ruby recalls having to go backstage while Harpo and Chico improvised on stage to deal with Groucho, who was flatly refusing to go on, and only relented when Ruby threatened to take his place. ("No audience deserves to look at you for a whole evening!") According to his son Arthur, Groucho never again had an uninterrupted night's sleep.
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25:24 - "You're not Abe Kabibble?"

Most reference sources insist that the answer to this question is 'yes': Chico has correctly guessed the true identity of Roscoe W. Chandler, and Abe Kabibble is the full name of Abie the Fish Man. As I explain here, however, this is impossible: the name is both offered and dismissed with instantaneous confidence, and Chico then goes on to struggle for some time before pinpointing Chandler as Abie the Fish Man.

In fact, as explained here, Abe Kabibble was the full name of Abie the Agent, a Jewish immigrant car salesman and star of a long-running syndicated comic strip by Harry Hershfield.
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31:32 - "Tell me, Captain Chandler..."

Dead weird this: a real error and resultant improv/corpsing session from one performance of the show that went so well it was retained every night, now transposed to the film. Can there be any other movie with a staged fluff in it like this? Extraordinary. The only concession to the movies is Groucho's suggestion that he "could be the News Weekly for all he knows, or 'Coming Next Week'." He still asks for a programme, however.
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32:12 - "Let's go and see what the boys in the back room will have..."

This is not a reference to the song made famous by Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939), which appears to have been written for the film and therefore post-dates this film by almost a decade. He is simply citing the phrase itself.

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36:48 - Harpo scrumbles them up a little bit

The card game scene is a winner throughout, but I draw your attention to this lovely two-shot. Bearing in mind how annoyed with Harpo Mrs Rittenhouse was immediately before and indeed after this shot, and the appalling physical indignities he has inflicted on her, look at the expression of genuine coquettish amusement on Dumont's face as he eccentrically shuffles the pack. Obviously this is not Mrs Rittenhouse smiling but Margaret Dumont, reminding us that Groucho's favourite line about her not getting any of the jokes had, in fact, little basis in truth. I also like this because she must have seen him do it a hundred times by now. It's really adorable. That woman loved these boys.
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41:56 - "Atsa Flitz!"

Note that in this brief shot, the brand name Flit on Harpo's pest control spray, laboriously scribbled out frame by frame in its later appearances, is clearly visible. Odd, too, that if its reference to a brand name was the only problem with this, that the bits about Fuller brushes and Fig Newtons got through.
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44:33 - Asthmatic roaches

There is so much to be said about the swapping-pictures-in-the-dark sequence that I devote a separate post to it here. For now, I will confine myself to that weird, hacking, guttural laugh that Groucho attributes to roaches with asthma. What actually is it? Chico? But why?

Someone account for this!
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46:51 - "The principal animals inhabiting the African jungle are moose, elk and Knights of Pythias."

The Knights of Pythias are one of America's oldest fraternal secret societies, founded in 1864. According to Wikipedia, the order has over two thousand lodges in the United States and around the world, with a total membership of over 50,000 in 2003. Groucho yokes them into his account of African fauna in recognition of the two meanings of 'elk': an animal and a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, a similar society founded in 1868. Hence: "The elks on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the spring they come down for their annual convention..." A bit like the Masons if you're British, or the Sons of the Desert if you're a Laurel and Hardy fan.

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This is one of the most frequently reproduced stills from Animal Crackers - but in what significant way is it different from the scene as it appears in the film? Answer at the bottom of this post.
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48:34 - Chico's piano tune
The first appearance of what became Chico's unofficial theme tune, reappearing in different contexts in Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and elsewhere. But there's some confusion here. In common with several other published sources, I always thought it was the tune Sugartime, aka Sugar in the Morning, but the imdb does not list this piece, and refers instead to Chico's "trademark song" I'm Daffy Over You, written by Chico and Sol Violinsky. The answer is to be found here...
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50:08 - "I'm a dreamer, Montreal."

A pun on the song title I'm a dreamer, aren't we all? by Ray Henderson, Lew Brown and Buddy G. DeSylva. Recorded many times over the years, among its more notable recent incarnations is its appearance alongside Hooray For Captain Spaulding and numerous other Marx references, in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, sung by Drew Barrymore. Actually, it's sung by someone else and mimed by Drew Barrymore, but you'd be amazed how little this detracts from my enjoyment of the sequence.
Rest assured that if I can come up with any other possible reason to shoehorn pictures of Drew Barrymore into this site, however tangential or desperate, I will most certainly do so.
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50:15 - "... one of my own compositions by Victor Heerman..."
I always thought that was the line, at least: a meaningless citing of the film's director for want of any better name in a throwaway joke. The DVD subtitlers have it as Victor Herbert, who was the composer of Babes In Toyland and Naughty Marietta. On the face of it, this makes more sense, which just goes to show they can do it if they try.

But on the other hand, the piece he goes on to play is Silver Threads Among the Gold (you know: "Darling, I am growing older..." etc) which is by H. P. Danks and Eben E. Rexford, so the jury's out. I certainly prefer to think it's Heerman (which was pronounced 'Herman'). I suppose a script would settle it. Anybody got one?
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52:37 - "The old blue one"

52:48 - "That's one for old Purdue."
A new suggestion from Damian (21/5/9): I think this refers to the college football games between Yale and Harvard; Yale wore Blue and Harvard wore Red... American football was only really in it's infancy then, having parted ways from rugby at the end of the 1800's. Maybe this was how they were commonly known at the beginning. "One for old Purdue" refers to Purdue University as well, so the whole sketch seems to be based in College football.

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54:15 - "The whole thing was done with the white of an egg."
(Damian, 21/5 again:) This may refer to a painting technique called Egg Tempera that was popular in the Italian renaissance. The technique involved an egg yolk (although some accounts claim egg white or whole egg) being used as a binding agent for the pigments. The most famous example of this technique was probably the Last Supper by DaVinci. In the film Groucho must be using the phrase "white of an egg" with reference to renaissance painting..

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58:56 - Why Am I So Romantic?

My favourite non-Brother-performed song from any Marx movie, pipping even Alone. Very wittily written and performed adorably by the magnificent Lillian Roth. We're lucky to have it: apart from the Butler's chorus and the Groucho specialities this is the only song in the film. Unlike song and dance-happy Cocoanuts, the decision was made to cut a half-dozen songs from the original show (apparently on the orders of director Victor Heerman over opposition from the Brothers). Luckily this one was included, presumably so as to give Lillian Roth something more to do than just stand around looking cute.

As well as the songs, Heerman made the equally controversial decision to cut the play's grand finale scene, another costume ball in which Groucho appears as King Louis the 57th and all the Brothers perform a number called 'We're Four of the Three Musketeers'. One wonders how much this decision must have rankled with Zeppo, who sang in the scene, and with Margaret Irving, who does little enough as Mrs Whitehead, but here got to do some comic sketchery as Madame DuBarry.

An odd decision all round, actually, since the film now coasts along gloriously in no kind of a hurry for ninety minutes and then suddenly ends with Harpo's arbitrary business with the Flit can. It's still my favourite Marx movie, but a bigger ending would have made it even more magnificent. Imagine some logical melding of this film with the climax of A Night at the Opera.
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66:09 - "Morning, Mrs Rittenhouse."

Morning, Zeppo! Look everybody, it's one of the Marx Brothers, justifying his fourth billing by breezing back into the film a mere hour after we last saw him in scene one.

That Zeppo was little used and ill-used is a commonplace, but in this film it's plain absurd. He didn't have much to do in Cocoanuts but at least we saw him hanging about the place.

Here's what he does in Animal Crackers:
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5:00 - He comes in and announces Groucho's arrival in song.

9:35 - After standing about for a bit he disappears, long before the end of the scene; before Chico and Harpo's entrances, even. When Groucho says "Well, somebody's got to do it!" you can actually see him walking off. He is not present in any later long shot.

66:09 - After many crowd scenes, the musical soiree and the unveiling of the painting, at none of which is he present, he returns for the dictating a letter scene.

72:00 - Exits after a dozen or so lines and one genuine joke ("Do you want that ahem in the letter?")

88:15 - Re-enters with his brothers singing 'My Old Kentucky Home'. But he has no lines, and melts back into the crowd the moment the song is done.
88:50 - Again, we actually see him sneak away, and in several subsequent long shots of the whole room he is clearly not present.

91:52 - Reappears at the very end of the scene just long enough to say "Hey! What's the idea!" - his first line in twenty-five minutes - before instantly succumbing to Harpo's flitz.

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That's your lot: a bit of singing in scene one, a bit of "yes sir" and a semi-joke in one dialogue scene, and a face in the crowd at the end. That's it. His total onscreen time is something like ten minutes.

This would change: in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers he still isn't given anything funny to do but he is a central presence at least. I like Zeppo. I wish they'd given him things to do and I wish he hadn't left after Duck Soup.
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78:05 - "Remember the Charlie Ross disappearance?"

A somewhat tasteless reference to the 1874 abduction of a four year-old boy and his brother by two men who enticed them by saying they would buy them some firecrackers. They took them in a cart to a shop, where Walter, the older brother, was sent in to make the purchases. When he came out Charlie and the men were gone. Walter lived until 1943, and the family never gave up hope that they would hear from Charlie again, but neither his fate nor the whereabouts of his body has ever been discovered.
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78:40 - "It's a hair! A red hair!"

In the stage show, perhaps, but this is the film in which Harpo abandons his original red wig (seen in the film of The Cocoanuts) for a more photogenic blonde one. Or is it, as some have suggested, very light red?
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79:00 - "Get that gang of flagpole-sitters of yours..."

Ah, this is one of those lovely lines that brings the era back to life before your eyes. Among the myriad manifestations of the Roaring Twenties' thirst for idle novelty was the popularity of flagpole-sitters: folks who sat on the top of flagpoles as a display of endurance, often at great and daring altitudes. According to Wikipedia:
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The fad began when a friend dared stunt actor Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly to sit on a flagpole. Shipwreck's initial 1924 sit lasted 13 hours and 13 minutes. It soon became a fad with other contestants setting records of 12, 17 and 21 days. In 1929, Shipwreck... sat on a flagpole for 49 days in Atlantic City, New Jersey, setting the enduring record. The following year, 1930, his record was broken by Bill Penfield in Strawberry Point, Iowa who sat on a flag pole for 51 days and 20 hours, until a thunderstorm brought him down.

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Groucho is referring to Hennesey's policeman thus presumably to cast doubt on their practical use.
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80:46 - "If we can find the left-handed person who painted this, we'll have The Trial of Mary Dugan with sound."

Ah, 'with sound'! Once again 1930 opens up afresh before us! The Trial of Mary Dugan was a courtroom melodrama, originally a play, written in 1927 and adapted into an MGM movie in 1929 starring strange interluder Norma Shearer and also produced by her husband, Night at the Opera-boy genius Irving Thalberg. It was MGM's second all-talking picture.

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83:02 - "In that case I'll get in touch with Chic Sale."

Sale was a vaudevillian specialising in rural parts. Groucho's citing of him, in the context of the imaginary house he and Chico are constructing (and directly in response to Chico's line "You just want a telephone booth"), is a reference to The Specialist, a 1929 play and book about an outhouse builder, written and performed by Sale.

A rather sad postscript from Wikipedia: "For many years, even after his death, 'Chic Sale' was used as a euphemism for an outhouse. He is known to have found this unflattering, calling it 'a terrible thing to have happen.'"
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83:51 - "I may be wonderful but I think you're wrong, Ravelli!"

I'm assuming this is a reference to the song I May Be Wrong (the real lyric, obviously, being "I may be wrong but I think you're wonderful"). I had always assumed it was a Hoagy Carmichael composition, but I've just been to check on my Hoagy CD in which it's included, and the track listing claims that the writer or writers are unknown, and the Hoagy version was recorded as late as 1946. Another one for the musicologists...
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86:29 - "Didn't you ever see a habeas corpus?" "No, but I see Habeas Irish Rose."

Abie's Irish Rose was a Broadway comedy popular throughout the twenties about the problems encountered by an Irish Catholic girl who marries a Jew against objections from both families. (It was filmed by Paramount in 1928, with Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, and, in a tiny part, Thelma Todd.)

Despite its huge success, it received terrible reviews, most famously from Robert Benchley who declared it the worst play in town:

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Unfortunately, Benchley had established the custom of following his weekly criticism with brief summaries of previous reviews, called "Confidential Guide," which he rewrote for each successive issue; and as Abie's Irish Rose continued to flourish month after month, despite its negative notices, Benchley found himself hard pressed to invent new ways of saying "Among the season's worst" or "Something awful." His frantic struggles to improvise became a public joke: People bought Life just to read such efforts at evasion as "There is no letter W in the French alphabet"... The play set a Broadway record of 2327 performances, and by the fifth year Benchley was reduced to holding a prize contest for suggestions. Harpo Marx won with "No worse than a bad cold."

- Corey Ford, The Time of Laughter

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Such was its popularity, it was able to inspire and sustain an overt rip-off, The Cohens and the Kellys, the only concession to originality of which was the fact that this time it was a Jewish girl and an Irish man. Even this proved popular enough to spawn six sequels and retain sufficient pop cultural longevity to be echoed in the lyrics of The Big Store's Tenement Symphony as late as 1941:
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The Cohens and the Kellys

The Campbells and Vermicellis

All form a part of my tenement symphony

The Cohen’s pianola

The Kellys and their victrola

All warm the heart of my tenement symphony

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(Answer to picture quiz: Throughout this scene in the finished film, Harpo is not wearing a coat.)

Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today...

Ever get an idea in your head that it would be fun to do something and then never get around to it?
Well, stop wasting time.
Get around to it.

Below is a invoice from Blackwell's, the famous Oxford bookseller, for one copy of Richard Anobile's book Why a Duck?
I found it tucked inside my copy when I bought it second hand on Charing Cross Road many years ago. It is dated 24th May 1973, and addressed to Dr D. S. Parsons of Merton College, Oxford.
It seemed so right, somehow, for a doctor at Merton College to have ordered such a book, and so sad that he should have sold it on, with the invoice still carefully preserved inside.
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As soon as I saw it, it struck me that it might be amusing to write to Merton College, to ask if by any chance Dr Parsons was still on the staff, and if so to find out how it came about that he lost possession of the book he ordered and paid £2.50 for back in 1973, just under a month before I was born.
Marx Brothers fans, I've generally found, like meeting each other. A certain kinship is automatically assumed when a shared love of the Marxes is discovered: I'm sure it helped me to my own place at London university when I noticed that the man interviewing me had a picture of them on his office wall, and I named the film from which it was taken.
Needless to say, however, my Dr Parsons idea remained just that.

Years passed, and some fool invented the internet, and the idea occurred to me again. Now it would be so much easier.
So just over a year ago I looked up the staff of Merton College and found to my amazement that Dr Parsons was still a fellow of the college.
And again I put it off.

Finally, last week, with this site as impetus, I looked up the college again, but this time his name wasn't there. Perhaps he'd finally retired. So I wrote to ask if they could forward his contact details to me.
A few days ago I received this email from Matt Bowdler, Development Office, Merton College:

Dear Matthew,
I am afraid I have to be the bearer of bad news, Dr Parsons passed away last July. If there is any other information that I might be able to provide for you, do let me know.

So, Dr Parsons, I'll never know why you parted with your copy of Why a Duck? I'll never find out what your favourite movie was. I'll never share with you any reminiscence of that unique species of happiness that only the Marx Brothers can provide. I hope you exited laughing.

Hail and farewell.

Whatever happened to Cyril Ring?

A film trivia question. What actor appears alongside The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, as well as featuring in all of the following films:
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Laura, Mr Skeffington, The Seventh Victim, I Married a Witch, Holiday Inn, This Gun For Hire, Saboteur, Sullivan's Travels, Two-Faced Woman, Meet John Doe, The Lady Eve, North West Mounted Police, The Great Dictator, The Roaring Twenties and a little something called Citizen Kane?

The answer is Cyril Ring. Poor Cyril Ring.

It seems to me he makes a perfectly good job of villainous Harvey Yates in The Cocoanuts. But for some reason he got the most terrible reviews, and his career didn't so much decline as nosedive almost immediately afterwards.

Okay; many stars don't make it, perhaps the majority of Hollywood careers are brief. Stars are rare, numerically speaking at least. But the sad thing about Cyril Ring is that he didn't disappear. He kept working in the movies until the early fifties, making many, many films a year throughout that time, for virtually all the major (and minor) studios.
But always in the tiniest roles, demeaning walk-ons, a glorified extra, perhaps a line or two at most, always there, somewhere; turning up for the cheque, doing next to nothing. A face in the crowd, but a haunting one. Once you tune your eyes to spot his distinctive visage, with its pencil moustache and slicked-back hair - a look he never changed - you'll see him all the time; silent, reproachful, living testament to Hollywood's heartlessness.
After The Cocoanuts he made over three hundred and fifty films. He received screen credit in maybe three or four.
One where he didn't was Monkey Business (1931). What must it have felt like for him on that set? A major supporting actor in the first Marx Brothers movie and then, just two years later, a nobody in their third.
Poor Cyril Ring. You'll always be a star to me.
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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.

The Cocoanuts hits London!

Thanks to Anthony Blampied for these two unusual adverts used during the London run of The Cocoanuts.
The first is a real puzzler: who are these men?

Obviously that's Groucho in his party outfit bottom right, and Harpo top left (though in addition to his spliff he appears to have acquired a pretty ferocious set of gnashers).
But then, isn't that Harpo in the top hat and tails bottom left, too? And who the hell's top right? It's like the result of some genetic experiment. It seems to be Zeppo, with Harpo's (future) hair and Chico's hat. Three Marx Brothers in one, plus another split into two, plus Groucho. I make that six Marx Brothers.
And I love that quintessentially British mix of wild hyperbole and sober grammar: "It is impossible to resist splitting with laughter."

The other one is more straightforward:

I suppose I should point out to our younger readers, however, that neither "Ziegfeld's famous stars making love" nor "London's coolest theatre" mean quite what you think they do.