The ‘Z’, incidentally, stands for ‘Zenos’

Monkey Business marks one of the surprisingly few occasions on which the Marx Brothers were assigned a specialist comedy director.

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Norman Z. McLeod (who would also helm Horse Feathers) does not enjoy much of a reputation per se. He reminds me of that line in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, where the great detective tells Watson: “Some people, without possessing genius, have a remarkable power of stimulating.”

For a comedian’s director like McLeod, praise rarely comes any higher. After all, there’s something innately ludicrous about the notion of anybody actually directing the Marx Brothers or W C Fields.

But both acts could make bad films, and certainly did when not properly handled. Meanwhile, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and It’s a Gift (1933) have no business outside of anybody’s list of the twenty greatest comedies ever made, and all three have Norman McLeod's name on the dotted line.

What did he have that many of their other directors lacked? He didn’t try to impose his personality to the detriment of theirs and – a rarer gift than you might think – he obviously got all the jokes.

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Norman Z. McLeod displaying his famed ability to draw a cartoon horse while wearing a bow-tie and fluffy angora jumper

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Soft-spoken (once describing himself as "quiet as a mouse pissing on a blotter"), he began as an animator, the best training for thirties comedy, and also worked as a Sennett gag man.
In addition to the three classics above, he went on to direct Burns and Allen, Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland, Leon Errol, Danny Kaye (in Kid From Brooklyn [1946] and Secret Life of Walter Mitty [1947]) and Bob Hope five times (including Road to Rio [1947] and The Paleface [1948]).

Though his best work was at Paramount in the early thirties, his move to Hal Roach towards the end of the decade also brought him a number of successes crowned by the charming supernatural comedy Topper (1937) with the great Roland Young.

His films tapped perfectly into the commercial mood of their times, which is why they were usually popular then, are often forgotten today, and frequently have incredibly evocative titles like Redheads on Parade (1935), Swing Shift Maisie (1943) and Never Wave at a WAC (1952).

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Monkey Business: Annotated Guide

You've got the hang of this by now, so I'll just get on with it.
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0:00 - Opening Credits
In what could well be the archetypal Marx Brothers credits sequence we hear a lovely tinkly medley of tunes, beginning with Chico's theme song I'm Daffy Over You, as a series of barrels roll out at the camera at high speed before abruptly stopping and revealing the information on their sides.
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I especially like the fact that this is not superimposition: the words and the pictures are plainly stuck on the sides of the barrels. The effect is absolutely adorable..
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1:45 - Sweet Adeline

In this wonderful, fondly-remembered scene, all four Brothers pop out of barrels at once after a rendition of the above-mentioned song. It is a quartet - that's how the shipboard staff know there are four stowaways. Of course, with Harpo being mute the joke does not quite work.
Or does it? Is Harpo singing? Many writers have suggested so, since, they explain, there are clearly four voices, and the one that holds the longest note at the end is not a voice we have heard before...
Sadly, this is pure wishful thinking. I've listened to this over and over again and I can hear precisely three voices: Chico (the one that starts the song), Groucho (the one that is clearly Groucho), and the other one. This latter is somebody doing a funny voice rather than singing naturally, but who is nonetheless a capable singer. Perhaps we should amend that 'voice we have not heard before' to 'voice we have not heard often'.
Seems to me it's Zeppo.
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6:58 - "You can't do it with irons, it's a mashie shot."
A type of golf-club, 'mashie', according to Wikipedia, derives its name from the "old golf-club naming convention according to which the short-irons or 'approach clubs' were known as 'Mashies' and the very well lofted club was called the 'Niblick'." The 'inbetween club', known with logic if nothing else as the Mashie-Niblick, was used from 1903 until about the 1940s, whereupon it was rendered obsolete by the introduction of the standardized numbered iron set produced by... the Spaulding Sporting Goods Company.
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8:03 - "I didn't eat yesterday, I didn't eat today, and I'm not gonna eat tomorrow: that makes-a three days."
A typically logic-mangling Chico joke which interestingly also turns up, delivered by Stan Laurel, in Laurel & Hardy's One Good Turn released the same year. The Marx film was released in September of '31, Laurel's at the end of October. As the Laurel & Hardy shorts were made very quickly, this could well be a straightforward and blatant steal. Or it is just as likely that the joke is a classic howler long predating both and their proximity here merely a coincidence.
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8:41 - "That's Columbus Circle."
Chico is here referring to the famous Manhattan landmark, a traffic circle dominated by a statue of Columbus, completed in 1905 and located at the intersection of Broadway, Central Park West, Central Park South and Eighth Avenue.

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9:14 - "Sure I can vessel!"
No I'm not going to bother to explain that this is a pun on whistle, but I will point out that what Chico chooses to whistle is, again, I'm Daffy Over You. He hums it a third time later on, and Harpo plays it on the harp. It shows up again in Horse Feathers.
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9:30 - "Mutinys, Wednesdays and Saturdays."
Matinees, of course.
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9:33 - "There's my argument: restrict immigration!"
A very funny Groucho line which a) gives the 'Is Chico Italian?' theorists plenty to lose sleep over, and b) also turns up in the very funny theatrical agent sketch that the Brothers shot around the same time as Monkey Business for a Paramount promotional short. Though in essence a sketch from I'll Say She Is it was updated to include the Chevalier impersonations from the present film and, perhaps, this line. Or is this a line from I'll Say She Is that found its way into Monkey Business because it was fresh in Groucho's mind after filming the sketch? Either way, it's one or other of the two, and my money's on both, though I'm not saying which.
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12:58 - The enchanted Punch & Judy show

Another of the film's most famous scenes, and certainly among the most celebrated Harpo sequences in the canon, this scene plays rather eerily when you realise that there is no puppeteer in the booth.
Some of the puppetry is being done by Harpo, some is not - and Punch's voice, heard from first to last, can only be coming from Punch himself...
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16:20 - "You got 'it'. And you can keep it."

Chico's take on one of the greatest pop-cultural obsessions of the times: what is 'it' and who has 'it', 'it', of course, being that extra undefinable something some of us have and some of us don't, that is almost but not quite a synonym for sex appeal. Elinor Glyn conceived of 'it', Clara had 'it', and so did Gary Cooper, provided you were a woman or something.
The number of times it was used as a chat-up line around that time must be unimaginably vast, but only Chico has mastered the art of using it as compliment and insult simultaneously.
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18:45 - Enter Thelma Todd

The vivacious comedienne and stalwart support of many of the greatest comics of the thirties here makes the first of two splendid appearances with the Marx Brothers. She was intended as something of a replacement for Dumont, who appears neither here nor in the other Todd film Horse Feathers.
The element of genuine, rather than mocking or mercenary, sexual attraction informing Groucho's pursuit of Todd gives their encounters an entirely different dynamic to the Groucho-Dumont dialogues.
This is intensified in the next film, when Chico and Harpo additionally join in the pursuit, frequently grabbing her and jumping on top of her, climaxing in the notorious final scene, when the entire team marry her at the same time and leap on her during the ceremony.
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20:25: "That's what they said to Thomas Edison, mighty inventor, Thomas Lindbergh, mighty flier, and Thomashefsky, mighty like a rose."
All in all, I found Monkey Business contained far fewer real head-scratchers than the previous two films. This one sentence, however, is a densely-packed pageant of obscurity that more than makes up for the relative lack elsewhere.
Where do I even start? I suppose with a nearly irrelevant anecdote from one of my favourite sources for such things: Corey Ford's lovely book of twenties reminscences The Time of Laughter:
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An even more popular indoor sport in those days was charades, and we spent long hours acting out political slogans and book titles and well-known songs. The longest of the hours was spent by Heywood Broun, who described in his slow, deliberate drawl a very large yak in a zoo which, after several thousand words of description, got up to its feet. When nobody could guess what song title it was, Broun told us triumphantly, "Mighty yak arose."
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Is that really how you play charades?
No matter, since the thing we learn from this story is that Mighty Like a Rose (or more accurately Mighty Lak' a Rose, since it is entirely written in now unfashionable negro dialect) is a popular song of the time.
So far, so straightforward. Now we run into difficulties over the three Thomases.
First, you don't need me to tell you that mighty flier Lindbergh, perhaps the most celebrated American of all around this time, was called not Thomas but Charles. I can find no reference anywhere to a flier called Thomas Lindbergh, or any other kind of Thomas Lindbergh.
The best I can come up with is a Lindbergh Bay, in St. Thomas, which is not a mighty flier but one of the Virgin Islands. It was originally Mosquito Bay, but was given an upgrade in nomenclature when Lindy landed in a nearby field on a 1928 flight from Paris to the United States, supplying the islanders with the excuse they had been dreaming of to give the place a more attractive name to tourists than Mosquito Bay. (According to the island's tourist board, the bay is "great for swimming and also a popular gathering place for locals who use the area for political rallies.")
The location is sometimes hyphenated to 'St Thomas-Lindbergh' but I think you'll agree with me that the odds of any of this having anything to do with Groucho's comment are still slim enough to call into serious question the wisdom of my bothering to mention it at all. I just wanted you to see how committed I am to this thing.
Of course it's possible that Lindbergh was so popular, that simply giving him the wrong name was itself a kind of joke back then. It may also be worth having a look at the original playscript, which may or may not be the source of the common seeming-misquote: "Thomas Jefferson, mighty President, Thomas Edison, mighty inventor, and Thomashefsky, mighty like a rose." This makes a whole bunch more sense - always a red rag to Groucho, who may have simply switched names for his own amusement, bored at having said the same line hundreds of times.
Now then, to Thomashefsy. Here again I am feigning a confidence that I do not really feel. The official script (prepared from the soundtrack in the absence of an original shooting script) has it as Thomas Shevsky. I boldly reject this. But who is Thomashefsky, or as other sources would have it, Thomashevsky?
Even this throws up problems. For there are almost as many Thomashevskys who are famous enough and contemporary with the remark as there are Hungerdungers. Oddly, there are three who are called not only Thomashevsky but Boris Thomashevsky. Two of them are Russian writers. The third is a former Ukranian who came to America and became a pioneer of Yiddish theatre, changing his name from Thomashevsky to Thomashefsky so it would sound more American.

This, I suspect, is the man we are looking for. Of course, it could just as easily be his performing wife Bessie Thomashefsky, also an actress and singer. (Here is a nicely exhaustive account of Thomashefsky's career, including one of his most famous jokes retold at great length in four very slightly different ways.)
Ah, but why partner his name with the song Mighty Lak' a Rose?
I thought you'd ask that. Perhaps he performed it sometimes? I don't know. To be honest with you, I'm past caring.
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20:52 - "Your honour, I rest my case."
Old Hollywood trailers were very often compiled not from the master-negative but from out-takes. Often, therefore, if you know a film really well, you can detect subtle differences in intonation and delivery. With the Marx Brothers, this is especially apparent in the trailers for Animal Crackers and Monkey Business. This moment marks one of the more obvious differences between film and trailer: in the latter Groucho delivers the line quite differently and adds "right here!" after "I rest my case." (Most fascinating is the trailer for The Big Store, which features a Groucho line from the unicycling climax - "I used to do this in vaudeville!" - not used in the film at all.)
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24:05 - "How many Frenchmen can't be wrong?"

What sounds like a typically absurd Groucho riddle is actually a reference to a popular phrase - "fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong!" It turns up all over, sometimes slightly rephrased: in advertising, in Mae West, in publicity for Chevalier, in the title of a smash hit Broadway revue by Cole Porter and starring Olsen and Johnson (filmed in 1931 with a script by Marx writer Al Boasberg). So far as I am aware it is as a song title, the song written in 1927 and directly inspiring the show, that it was first used, though perhaps the song title itself refers to an already extant phrase.
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29:02 - Joe Helton reads the paper
On board ship, the reformed gangster Joe Helton reads about himself and his daughter in the 'late London edition' of the Daily Sketch, presumably suggesting that the voyage takes place between London and New York.
The article on Helton is headed MILLIONAIRE RACKETEER RETURNS TO AMERICA and tells us that his daughter is a "recent graduate of continental finishing school."
It's one of the more upbeat stories in this particular edition of the Sketch, much of the rest of which is given over to accounts of peculiar road accidents written as a string of odd, semi-incomprehensible headlines. On the left of the Helton story we find:
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YOUNG GIRL TIED IN A WOOD
Her Story of Motor Ride After Road Smash
"HIT FROM BICYCLE"
Struggle to Loose Herself from Her Bonds
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And on the right:
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SAFELY SWINGS IN 700 FEET FALL
Amazing Escape When Car Hurtled Over Cliff
LANDED ON LEDGE
Somersault in Mid-Air Saves Motorist's Life
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35:28 - "A man who has licked his weight in wild caterpillars"
A joke that is funny in itself, that is to say in the inadequacy of the boast, but rendered additionally amusing by the addition of the word 'wild', by the general grotesqueness of the image conjured, and of course by the evocation of Captain Spalding in Animal Crackers fainting at the sight of the caterpillar on his lapel.
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36:09 - "Keep out of my business!"
An unusual, albeit subtle, example of a retained flub, where Groucho forgets that Briggs says "Keep out of my business!" twice, and comes in too early with his line "Your turn."
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37:23 - "I've worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty."
A nice example of a favourite type of Groucho joke, where a portentous build-up collapses into bathos. Other fine examples include, from Cocoanuts: "My personal guarantee: if these lots haven't doubled in value in a year, I don't know what you're gonna do about it" and "Think of the opportunities here in Florida - three years ago I came to Florida without a nickel in my pocket, now I've got a nickel in my pocket," and this beauty from President Wagstaff's inaugural address in Horse Feathers:
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As I look out over your eager faces, I can readily understand why this college is flat on its back. The last college I presided over, things were slightly different. I was flat on my back. Things kept going from bad to worse, but we all put our shoulders to the wheel, and it wasn't long before I was flat on my back again.
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38:39 - "Have your landing cards and passports ready, please."
While this memorable line is being delivered, look at the man standing on the right in the white hat. He is the first of my three uncertain nominations for the role of 'extra played by Cyril Ring', the actor with a lead role in Cocoanuts whose almost instant descent thereafter into walk-on oblivion included this especially demeaning assignment (see here). I normally pride myself on being able to pick Cyril out of any crowd, but in this film he's more elusive. My other candidates are:
46:40 - The man saying "Is there a doctor on the boat?" (a long shot, this one), or
47:45 - One of the three men stood to the left of Frenchie.
I'll get Cyril expert Mary on to this (see here and here) and give her the casting vote.
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42: 08 - "You know who's on this boat? Maurice Chevalier, the movie actor!"

I'm going out on a limb here - but could the Chevalier scene be the single funniest thing the Marx Brothers ever did? I mean, if you had two minutes to introduce the team to a complete newcomer, could you find a better extract than this?
It's perfect: Zeppo is charming and amusing and gets to sing a bit, Chico is funny ("Are you Maurice Chevalio? Well, there you are!"), Groucho is funny ("Look at that face!" "Well, look at that face!"), Harpo is hilarious and at his most anarchic and uncontained, and the cumulative comic effect of the song - being sung in different but equally ridiculous ways by men who could not look or sound less like Chevalier if they tried, yet somehow think complete confidence in themselves and a straw hat are all that's necessary - is as joyous as anything in comedy history.
It's also, of course, good extra publicity for a fellow Paramount contractee, not that he needed any. Other Paramounters mentioned in the film include Clara Bow (through the oblique reference to having 'it') and Gary Cooper. And look out for a variation on the Chevalier impressions in the updated I'll Say She Is sketch the Brothers filmed as promotion for this film. .

47:45 - The fifth cast member named Marx

In this memorable sequence, the dapper, somewhat Roscoe W. Chandler-like gentleman we first see in long-shot waving his handkerchief at the approaching ship, and then in medium-shot, smiling broadly with his hand on some foxy dame's shoulder, is Sam Marx, aka Frenchie, the Brothers' father.
Reference book consensus insists that he is also to be glimpsed on board ship, though the evidence of the film itself would seem to contradict this. Nonetheless, this remains the only time that all twelve Marx Brothers appeared together in the same off-license.

55:29 - "Oh, Emily!"
A part that you can't help thinking was written for Margaret Dumont. The woman playing it even looks like her.
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56:29 - "You must have been married in rompers. Mighty pretty country around there."
A line with a definite echo - perhaps intended, perhaps not, but definite all the same - of Ring Lardner's celebrated theatrical parody I Gaspiri - The Upholsterers:
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First Stranger: Where was you born?
Second Stranger: Out of wedlock.
First stranger: That's a mighty pretty country around there.
(The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week.)
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57:18 - Harpo chases a blonde girl across the lawn on a bicycle with an enormous flower sticking out of the front of it
The particular distinction of this moment, one of the most strange and celebrated of the film but one which comes absolutely from nowhere, is that it represents the only location photography in the entire film, with the exception of stock-shots of the ship.

Animal Crackers: Some final thoughts

Before calling time on this main batch of posts on Animal Crackers, just a few final words of context.
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Though it generally enjoys a higher reputation than The Cocoanuts, the film is usually placed on a lower pedestal than the three other Paramounts that follow it. This is because, like its predecessor, it is still essentially stage-bound, with long, talky scenes and few set-ups, played out on single sets from which the actors enter and exit while the camera sits there looking at them.
In the next film, Monkey Business, we instantly see the change: Paramount has discovered editing; and the new writers oblige with a series of staccato sequences that match the pace of the material itself.
I say this in order to prove that I am not oblivious to the difference in style and rhythm that distinguishes Crackers and Business. And I say that the better to emphasise that Animal Crackers is still, all things considered, my favourite Marx Brothers film.
And it is my favourite film not in spite of these distinguishing characteristics but because of them..

I like the Brothers on stage. One of my greatest regrets (along with March 17th, 2004) is the fact that I am not of an age to have seen them on Broadway. Next to that experience, I feel, none of these films would hold much more than a sputtering and stubby candle.

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There is a relentlessness to the Brothers' humour when it's going at full sledgehammer force that is dissipated by slickness, by energy in the direction. It bludgeons you more when you're just trapped there, watching it spill out before you, with nothing else to distract you and nowhere else to go.
If you're honest, you'll admit this is true. What's your favourite bit in A Night at the Opera? It's the contract scene or the crowded stateroom, am I right? Yes, the climax is great too - but if you had to choose? Or A Day at the Races? Chico's ice cream scam. What's the only good bit in Go West? The opening scene.
All theatrical style sketches. All Broadway Marx Brothers. Movie Marx Brothers get chased round ocean liners and that's hilarious too, but it's not of the essence. The essence is a very particular kind of aggressively illogical and self-defeating wordplay of the sort that Animal Crackers sprouts in Biblical profusion. It's New York v. Hollywood, a contest with only one possible winner. Their first two films are plays with the smell of Broadway, of curtain calls and high-kicks from the chorus line, of Woollcott and Benchley guffawing from the audience. Animal Crackers, for me, combines this theatrical quality with some of the best material the boys ever had:
. Tell me, Mr Chandler, where are you planning on putting your new opera house?
I thought I should like to put it somewhere near Central Park.
I see. Why don't you put it right in Central Park?
Could we do that?
Sure, do it at night when no one is looking.

Now to find the painting, all you've got to do is go to everybody in the house and ask them if they took it.
You know, I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters. You say you're going to go to everybody in the house and ask them if they took the painting? Suppose nobody in the house took the painting?
Go to the house next door.
That's great. Suppose there isn't a house next door?
Well then of course we gotta build one.
Well now you're talking! What kind of a house do you think we ought to put up?

Your honour, I rest my case.

Lillian, oh Lillian, say have you met Lillian?

Lillian Roth, the fair Arabella in Animal Crackers, is my favourite Marx Brothers leading lady, pipping even Thelma Todd and Kitty Carlisle.
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It's partly because Arabella is such a fun, sparky character anyway, even to the extent of being given genuine comedy dialogue - which is more than Zeppo got - but also because Roth herself is exactly the kind of quintessential jazz baby one wishes the early Marx films were full of.
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Ordinarily, careers like Roth's run frustratingly parallel to that of the Marxes, but rarely jump tracks and combine. It is heartbreaking to reflect on the amount of talent Paramount had on its books at the time that would have made for a fascinating team-up. (Do you ever wish the Marxes had made some shorts, by the way? Yes, me too.) Just look at Paramount on Parade (1930; and incidentally, I've asked it before and I'll ask it again - why in God's name are the Marxes not in this film?)
There's Helen Kane, for example, who actually did work with the Brothers on stage; what a film combo they would have made! Or Nancy Carroll, Louise Brooks, even Clara Bow.
Still, Roth we do have. By some great good fortune, Roth we have.
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Actually, as you probably know, it was supposedly Roth's bad fortune to have been cast in the role. As she has it in her autobiography I'll Cry Tomorrow, the casting was punishment for her alleged on-set temperament and difficulty (and this at a time, she claimed, when of all the Paramount stars, only Clara was getting more fan-mail).
"We're sending you back to New York to be kicked in the rear by the Marx Brothers until you learn how to behave," is how she recalled the news being broken to her.
Most writers interpret this to mean that specifically being cast in a Marx film was the punishment; it's more likely that being banished from Hollywood to New York was what they had in mind. (Though how that was a punishment either is beyond me.)
Anyway, once there, she had a thoroughly good time, and was even given a song to sing (the only non-Marx number in the picture) after all the other show numbers had been pruned by director Victor Heerman.
From I'll Cry Tomorrow:
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It was one step removed from a circus. First, Zeppo, the youngest, sauntered into the studio, about 9.30 am. At ten, somebody remembered to telephone Chico and wake him. Harpo, meanwhile, popped in, saw that most of the cast was missing, and strolled off. Later they found him asleep in his dressing room. Chico arrived about this time. Groucho, who had been golfing, arrived somewhat later, his clubs slung over his shoulder. He came in with his knees-bent walk, pulled a cigar out of his mouth, and with a mad, sidewise glance, announced: "Anybody for lunch?"
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Groucho and I had a scene that had to be shot over at least ten times. In this instance I was the culprit. We were supposed to be hunting a thief who had stolen a valuable painting from Margaret Dumont, who played the society dowager Groucho chased. My line, when we stumbled on a fake painting, was, "Oh, if we could only find the real painting!" Groucho's line was, "I know who the thief is. here's his signature." "Who is it?" I asked. "Rembrandt," he said. "Don't be silly, he's dead," I retorted. Groucho snarled, "Then it's murder." I burst into giggles every time he said that, ruining the take. The line itself wasn't so hilarious, but I knew Groucho was going to say it with the big cigar jutting from his clenched teeth, his eyebrows palpitating, and that he would be off afterwards in that runaway crouch of his; and the thought of what was coming was far too much for me.
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You may generally disapprove, as I usually do, of the modern tendency to include 'blooper reels' on DVDs, celebrating the self-indulgence of the cast. But on this one occasion... What wouldn't you give, eh? What wouldn't you give?
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If you want to see more of Lillian, and I can't think of any cogent reason why you wouldn't, you can choose from any of the following, in all of which she is equally - that is to say sensationally - sweet, charming, sexy, funny and talented:
The Love Parade (avec Chevalier), Meet the Boyfriend (an adorable short), Sea Legs, Take a Chance (in which she does a striptease number), Paramount on Parade, Ladies They Talk About... you can't go far wrong with anything she made in the thirties, actually.

After some epic bottle-bashing and much personal trauma she re-emerged in the fifties as a brassy torch singer, and very good with it, but it is the thirties Roth that really captivates. (Avoid like the plague the film I'll Cry Tomorrow in which neither Susan Hayward's lead performance nor the period trappings even attempt verisimilitude, indeed they seem to go out of their way to avoid it. Hayward is way too old; she sings, supposedly in the thirties, in post-war nightclub style, and generally looks, sounds and acts less like Roth than you'd think possible for someone of the same gender to do.)

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Her best performance of all is as gold-digging hoofer Trixie in De Mille's Madam Satan (1930), the film that followed Animal Crackers at Loew's theater (see here). She wears some incredible outfits, sings a great number in shorts and a top hat, leaps out of a zeppelin in a parachute and lands in a turkish bath, and also handles cross-talk comedy and some extremely physical farce with something more than mere applomb. (Some nice stories about this in her book, too: "'Me, jump from up there?' I gasped. 'Into that net? In these high heels and feathers? Oh, Mr DeMille, I couldn't possibly!'")
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It's possible that in remote and as yet undiscovered parts of the world, there are women more attractive than these, who also travel in pairs. But while we're waiting: Lillian and Kay Johnson in Madam Satan.

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Lillian and Jean Arthur giving thanks, while we give thanks for Lillian and Jean Arthur.
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Lillian and Frances Dee as mermaids. Seriously, I'm going to have to go and lie down in a darkened room in a minute.
. Right, that's it. I'm off.

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Madam Satan is perhaps the most gorgeous, sumptuous-looking product of the entire pre-Code era, with incredible decor and costumes, and delightful examples of what was then the last word in wit, sophistication and daringly modern subject matter. Yet inexplicably it was not a box-office hit; in fact it was one of De Mille's very few box-office disasters. Perhaps it was too much of its time - whatever, it seems amazing now, and Lillian Roth is no small contributor to its unique appeal.

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The gates swung open and a possible explanation of why Groucho calls Harpo a fig newton entered

I expressed bafflement in the Animal Crackers annotated guide (see here) as to why Groucho should proclaim "the gates swung open and a fig newton entered" when Harpo (as 'the Professor') first appears.

Damian, an established regular in these parts (see here) has come up with one intriguing possible explanation, as follows:

The line "The gates swung open" sounds to me to be a quote of some kind, as if it was some grand entrance.

I found this from The Muses Pageant, an anthology of Greek mythology and legend published at the beginning of the century. One story in it relates to Oedipus and on his entrance the line reads "All at once, the gates swung open and a tall, crowned figure appeared…"

Could Groucho be referencing this line in Animal Crackers to mock Harpo's entrance? Would this have been a line known to the theatre going public at the time? (You did have Martha Graham doing her Greek Tragedy routine and as Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx it could fit in with the general earlier wave of Egypt-mania.)

As for the Fig Newton bit I found references to a Fig Newton being 1920s-30s slang, meaning a white person who acts black; opposite of Oreo (i.e: someone who is white on the outside but black on the inside like a fig newton, as opposed to black on the outside but white on the inside, like an Oreo - MC.)

Could this be what Groucho means more than mentioning a biscuit?

Also talking about adverts, at the end of the Professor's entrance he blows smoke bubbles and Groucho asks if he has chocolate - to which Harpo responds by blowing a chocolate bubble.

Would this be linked to this late-twenties Rowntree's ad campaign?

So, was the Professor a fig newton in this sense? Is he recalling an advert when he blows a chocolate bubble? This all seems pretty persuasive to me... any dissenters?

What is not in any doubt, however, is that when he honked for vodka, he expected Smirnoff.

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The Ring Thing (continued)

There's simply no doubt in my mind whatsoever that you are all desperate for more posts about Cyril Ring - the actor whose name is instantly recalled whenever folks gather to discuss the character of Harvey Yates in The Cocoanuts. (See here and here.)

So here's the latest from my fellow Cyril obsessive, Mary O'Benar:

Per yours and Lolita's postulations that Cyril soldiered on because he cared deeply about his craft, I've found one item which may support that: in 1921, Cyril's among a handful of younger actors who create an after-hours review to entertain the theatrical community. Seems to be a rather innovative project, and it's under the aegis of several heavy-hitting guilds/clubs; Lambs, Friars.

That puts Cyril in the big leagues, and functioning with respect and support. If so, then to stick to acting decades after hitting bottom becomes quite tragic.
Cyril's face-time from all those films can't add up to more than 3 hours altogether, maybe less. From this distance, it does seem terribly futile as the work of a lifetime, but, in the end, impossible to know how Cyril saw it.
Cyril's last film part was in 1951, and that's the same year he came into a good inheritance. I did find that he was manager of a very good Hollywood restaurant in the late 1950s - huge bar, established regular hangout for famous movie folk - but I've no idea if he'd been doing that when still working in movies.

If it turns out he was the archetypal 'waiter between acting jobs' for 30 years, that truly would be tragic!

Save the Gookie!

(Thanks to Anthony Blampied for the tip-off.)
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Strange things are afoot at the Internet Movie Database. .
Under the postings for Harpo, all references to his "gookie" face have become "*bleep*ie", thanks to the board's automatic censorship device.
'Gook', it would appear, is a well-known racial slur. I dare say it is. Just as 'Gookie' is a facial expression named after a New York cigar roller.
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Okay, the censorship is automatic - but the user comments are not.
One says: "I guess some would call this excessive Political Correctness, but I wouldn't trade it for what people had to put up with in the Good Old Days."
The woman whose original post was censored has obligingly changed it from 'the infamous Gookie face' to 'the infamous Harpo face' - and apologised for offending anyone.
Odd, then, that the IMDB's own description of Harpo as possessed of "big, poofy, curly red hair" has managed to escape from the offenceometer unscathed.
I would have liked to have heard Groucho's views on this.

Crackers at Loew's

Thanks to Damian for these fascinating newspaper ads for the first run of Animal Crackers at Loew's, the Home of Hits.
Oh, to have been alive and breathing that 1930 air!
Last week: Helen Kane in Heads Up; this week: the Marxes and Lillian Roth in Animal Crackers; next week: Roth again in DeMille's Madam Satan ("a marvelous picture"). All that plus an added Krazy Kat cartoon!
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Saturday the fun begins! Those dizzy goofs on their way direct from three big weeks in Cleveland, Cocoanuttier than ever! A nice photograph of all four boys, and note the billing: Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, Groucho. It's not alphabetical, it's not left-to-right, it's just plain strange...

Starts today! Filmdom's four funniest fools in the biggest theatrical opening of the year! Four fools they may be, but only three make it to the poster this time, and only Groucho and Harpo are deemed worth caricaturing, along with a misleading selection of jungle beasts.

Only two more days to see the grand slam of comedies! Gags a mile a minute! And Zeppo's back! Harpo is speechless, Groucho is telling us that "it's all in pun", and Zeppo is saying "Scratch Elsie." Intriguingly, this refers to a snatch of dialogue in the 'dictating a letter' scene cut from all known prints of the film:

Groucho: Dear Elsie... no, never mind Elsie.
Zeppo: Do you want me to scratch Elsie?
Groucho: Well, if you enjoy that sort of thing, it's quite alright with me. However, I'm not interested in your private affairs, Jamison.

Odd that they couldn't have come up with an equally relevant quote for Chico, who's still saying "why a duck?" like The Cocoanuts never ended.

Chico era un italiano vero o stava solo facendo finta di essere un italiano?

Or to put it another way: Is Chico a real Italian or merely someone pretending to be an Italian?

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This is one of the most deep and profound questions thrown up by the entire Marx canon, similar to - but in its way even more vexed than - 'Is Harpo a man who does not speak or a man who cannot speak?'

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Now, obviously, in one sense the answer to both questions is obvious. Harpo definitely could talk and often did (when communicating, for example). And Chico was born in New York to a German mother and a French father. This is as foolproof a recipe for not being Italian as has yet been patented.

But just as obviously, that is not what we really mean when we ask the question. We mean: Is Chico playing a character who is a funny Italian or a character who is pretending to be a funny Italian? Strangely, the most popular answer seems to be the latter.

Allen Eyles tells us that "Chico sports a phony Italian accent and uses this as an excuse to misunderstand words" and this view is taken on, as often as not unconsciously, by just about all other writers on the subject.

The first level of complication is this: does Chico play the same character in every film? They do, after all, have different character names. If you want to be all literal about things then you have to say no, the eccentric musician Ravelli is a different character to the speakeasy employee Baravelli.

But this would be silly. Chico is an actor possessed of a definite persona, and it is that persona that reappears, regardless of whether he be called Ravelli, or Chicolini, or Faustino the Great, or even Tony. (Those MGM writers knew their stuff, eh?) Just as Groucho is always Groucho, so Chico is always Chico. Note that he always used the accent in interviews, when ostensibly 'himself'.

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It's that line in Animal Crackers that really seems to fire them up, when Chandler says, "How did you get to be an Italian?" and Chico replies, "Never mind; whose confession is this?"

"It is the only time Chico's dialect act is ever questioned," says Eyles.

But it seems to me that this is not Chandler asking the question of Ravelli but Louis Sorin asking the question of Chico; it's an in-joke, perhaps a retained ad-lib like all that 'you're Chandler, I'm Spaulding' nonsense.

It's amusing to think of Chico pretending to be Italian so as to annoy people; it makes the character funnier, more original, more Marxian - but there's no real justification for believing it.

In truth, Chico's was by far the most stock-drawn of all Marx characterisations. Ethnic characters played by dialect comics, scores of Italians among them, were vaudeville staples. Chico seems to have wandered into the characterisation for want of anything else to do, and then just outlived it, so that by the end he was representative of no comic style other than his own. Even the costume, topped by the soft felt hat, is not original to him; as the New York Times reviewer noted in his appraisal of the Animal Crackers stage play, he is clad "in the ungainly attire of an immigrant".

Almost everything we consider typical of him - the clothes, the accent, the pidgin English interspersed with Italian, the obtuseness, the wiliness - were all the stock features of the Italian ethnic comic. His greatness is that he doesn't settle for that: he is also a brilliant comedian. The absurdism and wordplay, hilarious flights of anti-logic, and all those features that are uniquely Marxian, do not really arise from the specifics of the character but merely use them as its medium. Whatever nominal 'character' he had settled on, he would still have transcended it..

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Ultimately, if we accept that Chico is always the same character from film to film, the clodhopping literalists of MGM must have the last word. And under Louis B Mayer, sworn enemy of witty comedy, Chico becomes explicitly Italian, just as Harpo becomes explicitly mute and Groucho becomes explicitly not as funny as he used to be.

There's a fascinating moment in The Big Store where he encounters Henry Armetta, another refugee from the golden age of funny Italians, by this time a reasonably busy small part comic relief character actor. Armetta's character accuses Chico of mocking his accent before they remember treading grapes together in Italy.

Cute Italians are rare in wartime Hollywood and finding such a routine in a 1941 Hollywood screenplay is a real novelty. The studios were not keen on showing Axis powers in a sympathetic light: that's why Peter Lorre stopped playing Mr Moto the Japanese detective after 1939. Even great literature was not safe: in the 1940 version of Louisa May Alcott's Little Men (starring Kay Francis and directed by Norman Z. McLeod) Jo's German Professor husband is made Swiss, and thus neutered, as it were.

And of course, the reason why the cut-about version of A Night at the Opera that seems now to be the only one that survives was chopped up in the first place was to remove all explicit reference to the fact that the film takes place in Italy. And yet through it, and now here in 1941 with Armetta, Chico cuts a blithe swathe, at'safining as he goes, like Mussolini never existed. Proof, I guess, that both men had long since been accepted as themselves, rather than mere representatives of comic types.

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That neither Harpo nor Chico felt able to step outside of their self-set defining characteristics is shown by the fact that they both accepted tv roles in the fifties that cast them as unambiguously mute and Italian. Harpo, in a straight role, played a deaf-mute who witnesses a murder in the tv play Silent Panic, while in the charming comedy pilot Papa Romani Chico is cast as the flustered head of a rumbustious Italian immigrant family.

Papa Romani is one of those bits of Marx ephemera that turn up with relative frequency on public domain compilations and it generally gets a very bad rap, presumably from people who are not just disappointed but also somehow surprised that it isn't as witty as A Night at the Opera. Know in advance, however, that what you are in for is fifties American comedy so inoffensive it makes Ozzie and Harriet look sharp and edgy, and there is no reason in the world why you won't have twenty-two and a half thoroughly enjoyable minutes ahead of you. I would have liked to have seen it become a series.

. I propose a middle-course out of this dilemma.
Chico is a Chico, of which there is one. By that I mean not the actor Chico, whose real name is Leonard, but the comic persona Chico, who is variously known as Ravelli and Chicolini and the rest. These sub-individuals, these Ravellis and Chicolinis; they are not anything, not real Italians or fake Italians. They are fictional characters. It's all pretend.

We do not need to settle these esoteric matters with such bludgeoning finality. That's the kind of mirthless exercise MGM screenwriters are given to. Just ask yourself this: does Groucho have a real moustache or a greasepaint moustache? Of course, it's a greasepaint moustache. Of course it could never pass as a real one. But it's only there because it's absurd and funny. The fact that Margaret Dumont never mentions it doesn't mean diddley. Does Captain Spaulding wake up in the morning and apply a greasepaint moustache in the mirror? Of course not. Only Julius Marx does that. Spaulding does not get up in the morning at all. He only does what we see him do; he only exists as long as we are watching. Chico's nationality falls into the same category. He has an accent because it's funny. We need go no deeper. Try, and the laughing stops.
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Perhaps we should give the last word to the man himself, who reflected in a late interview that he used to be Italian, but when he saw what happened to Mussolini he became Greek. All said, of course, in an Italian accent.