I know that it's a book you all love, and you've never given me the least encouragement, but there's no denying I've been a bit snippy about Joe Adamson's Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo on this site.
My comments were made in the spirit of an ineffectual David taking on a Goliath with a pea-shooter, and it is only because the book is so overwhelmingly regarded as the single best and most important book about the Brothers ever written that I spoke with such impunity.
But the thing is, Joe Adamson's got in touch, and he's mighty p.o-ed, as who would not be under the circumstances.
I have spoken unguardedly about the book in the past because to do so seemed to me likely to cause about as much offence - or effect of any kind - as taking a pop at Abraham Lincoln.
Some reputations, I felt, are sufficiently ironclad to not even feel the occasional pygmy dart.
But we must remember that even award-winning authors/comedy film-makers/academics have feelings, and so I am happy to state here that to give personal offence to the big man was never my intention, and had I thought for a second that I would have done I'd have been more careful.
Apologies unreservedly offered.
I've outlined the genuine reasons why I am not mad keen on the book in my specific response to Mr A's missive, but I'm not mad keen to annoy or upset anyone either, so if you ever catch me again calling it Adamson, Adamson, Adamson and Sometimes The Marx Brothers, or saying anything else unduly sarky about the book, give me a sharp rap across the knuckles with your ruler.
1:40 - "This way to the sanitarium! Free bus to the sanitarium!"
Chico's desperate efforts to tempt the new arrivals to come to Judy's health resort are harshly rebuffed in every instance, and back at the van, a wistful Judy predicts the business's collapse. But despite its unpopularity and financial precariousness, a look at the large hoarding welcoming visitors to Sparkling Springs Lake will reveal that the Standish Sanitarium is considered one of the four primary attractions in the town, and is even included on the advertised sightseeing tour.
2:17 - Miss Judy
While Alan Jones has been retained as the singing Zeppo, our heroine this time is Maureen O'Sullivan, an interesting substitute for Kitty Carlisle in that she is solely an actress, and not a singer. This means that despite the huge success of 'Alone' in the previous film there will be no duet number for Jones and his girl this time out. This runs so contrary to the film's general scheme of 'if it happened in A Night at the Opera, copy it' that I wonder if it wasn't a contractual request of Jones himself.
Irish O'Sullivan, the mother of Mia Farrow, was an MGM contract player familiar from supporting roles, the occasional second feature lead, and most of all as Jane in the Tarzan pictures (whose costume, before the Hays Code insisted on replacing it with a one piece, is one of the supreme eyefuls of early talking cinema).
She's perky and likeable, and apparently made an especial impression on Groucho, who spoke wistfully of the two of them running off together in the breaks between shooting. O'Sullivan batted away such advances sympathetically, citing the fact that both were married. In later life, however, she did hint delicately that there may have been a degree of reciprocation.
8:20 - Mr Morgan
The principle villain of the piece, owner of the race track and the successful Morgan Hotel, and instigator of the plot to get Judy to relinquish control of her sanitarium, is played by Douglas Dumbrille, one of the great specialists in the noble Hollywood art of playing villain to comedians and second feature detectives.
Over the years he shifted and schemed in the background behind Abbott and Costello, Bing and Bob, The Bowery Boys, Charlie Chan, Mr Moto, the Lone Wolf and Michael Shayne, and appeared in over 150 films.
He returned to the Marxes as the even nastier Mr Grover in The Big Store, still scheming to take the hero's business away, but this time happy to resort even to murder to get what he wants.
Dumbrille made the headlines when in 1960, two years after the death of his first wife and at the age of seventy, he married 28 year old Patricia Mowbray. The marriage lasted happily until his death fourteen years later, thus justifying the spirit of the statement he issued at the time of their engagement: "Age doesn't mean a blasted thing... We don't give a continental damn what other people think."
9:31 - Dr Hackenbush arrives
Notwithstanding its considerable running time, it has been much lamented that no room was found in the film for Dr Hackenbush's song, originally to have been featured here.
It would have been an eye-opening moment: the only time a Marx Brother had burst into song at MGM without ambient justification. Later numbers like 'Lydia' or 'Riding the Range' are being performed as songs by the characters, with visible instruments, and even 'Sing While You Sell', which comes closest to the effect that 'Dr Hackenbush' would have had, is partially rooted in reality in so far as it is about the virtues of singing and dancing while at work. But for a Groucho character to simply start singing in the middle of a scene would have been to assume a liberty afforded only the romantic leads at MGM, and though I've no evidence to support me, I can't help wondering if this, rather than merely time constraints and a lamentable sense of priorities, was a contributory factor in the song's excision. Too much like movie magic for Thalberg, perhaps?
That said, I don't mourn its absence as much as many fans do. Unquestionably it would have been preferable to just about any three minutes of just about any later scene. But it still doesn't strike me as a lost classic, and Groucho's fondness for the number has always intrigued me. I was genuinely surprised when I first heard it, given its reputation and the fact that Kalmar and Ruby wrote it.
Like most everything else in this film it is painfully derivative, though not, this time, of A Night at the Opera. Here, the obvious influence is 'Hooray For Captain Spaulding / Hello, I Must Be Going' from Animal Crackers, but compared to those of its inspiration, the lyrics are graceless and clunky:
Chorus: So this is Dr Hackenbush, the famous medico. You're welcome, Dr Hackenbush... Groucho: If that's the case I'll go. Chorus: Oh no you mustn't go! Groucho: Who said I mustn't go? The only reason that I came is so that I can go.
Despite the relative artlessness of the song, however, it would certainly have given the film a lift. Over at his Comedy Palace, Noah Diamond has done an amazing job of recreating what this scene might have been like had the number been retained. And here it is.
9:54 - "This is Dr Hugo Z. Hackenbush..."
Indeed it is, and I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it very nearly wasn't.
Until a very late stage, Groucho's character was given the more overtly comical (and fitting) surname of 'Quackenbush', until complaints were registered from at least one genuine Dr Quackenbush, whereupon the switch was made.
I was always surprised that so plainly jokey a name could have existed in reality, but in fact Quackenbushes are legion in America. Lovely Monogram starlet Wanda McKay, for instance, was in reality Miss Dorothy Quackenbush, and a Google search on the name will bring up a whole bunch more, as well as the gun company whose advert is reproduced above.
All the same, I don't get why having the same name as a Groucho character is grounds to make the studio change it. Presumably there were hotel managers, perhaps even Florida hotel managers, called Mr Hammer, and I doubt it did their business any harm when Cocoanuts came out. It's not like seriously ill people in the vicinity are going to suddenly stop going to the doctor from fear that he might really be an interloping horse doctor with painted eyebrows.
Intriguing, too, to consider how any two-bit Dr Quackenbush learned of Groucho's character name in a forthcoming film in the first place. Ordinarily the film would be on release before he'd have heard about it, and I doubt he'd have had much luck getting them to change it then. (Overdub it every time?) Presumably it was the pre-production live tour that gave him the tip-off.
Incidentally, the photograph below, taken from the tour, is interesting in that it shows how even as late as 1937, Harpo was still wearing his original dark red wig for stage appearances, reserving the strawberry blonde one only for the movies, where it photographed less harshly.
Despite this surely excessive care for the feelings of the world's Quackenbushes, the word 'Hackenbush' is also not without precedent.
Or is it? According to Wikipedia, 'Hackenbush' is the name of a two-player mathematical game played on any configuration of coloured line segments connected to one another by their endpoints and to the ground. Of course, when I say 'ground' in this context, and 'connected to' in relation to it, what I'm really saying, as I'm sure you knew without my having to say, is that there is a horizontal line at the bottom of the page/playing space and several line segments such that each line segment is connected to this ground point, as it were, either directly, at an endpoint, or indirectly via a chain of segments connected by endpoints. Of course, any number of segments may meet at an end point, and thus there may be multiple paths to ground, but then, that's all part of the fun of Hackenbush. Sadly, constraints of space forbid me from more than mentioning that the game can be made even more fun via the application of graph theory, by considering the board as a collection of vertices and edges and examining the paths to each vertex that lies on the ground (which needless to say should be considered as a distinguished vertex - woe betide the Hackenbush player that examines the path to each vertex that lies on the ground without considering it as a distinguished vertex). According to many experts, the game is also enhanced when played drunk. It is also regarded as the ideal 'first date' game.
You want more? Then get stuck in to this. Now you know how mathematicians pass the time when they're not calculating the odds at horse races.
Whether the game derives its name from the Doc, I don't know. But it appears to date from the early 1980s.
10:07 - "Just a moment while I calm these paralytics."
The three doctors and their excessive bowing represent social conformity in traditional Marx Brothers fashion, as indicated by their identical dress and behaviour. Think also of the interchangeable detectives in the Paramount films, always called something like 'Hennesey', the identical Professors in Horse Feathers, and the identical aviators in A Night at the Opera. Groucho's description of the doctors as paralytics carries therefore a certain degree of satirical venom. The nodding and bowing, of course, recalls the repeated introductions of Mrs Claypool to Mr Gottlieb in Opera.
10:24 - "I knew your mother very well..." "But that's my father!"
It's a typically over-cautious MGM touch that the painting referred to could be taken as a person of either gender by anybody, and so Groucho's mistake is not an unreasonable (or funny) one. The Paramount Groucho would have made the same comment regardless of any actual ambiguity in the portrait.
10:42 - "Dodge Brothers, late '29"
Groucho's response to the paralytics citing their prestigious medical backgrounds is this reference to the automobile manufacturing company, founded in 1900 and sold to the Chrysler Corporation in 1928.
Whether there is any specific significance to the addition of "late '29", other than as an arbitrary mimicking of the doctors announcing their graduating years, I don't know. LA Guy has convincingly suggested that it is simply suggesting the age of Groucho's car, in that he hasn't been able to afford a new model since the Great Depression.
It is of some slight interest to record that following the merger with Chrysler, the Dodge vehicles became part of the same production line that made the Plymouth and DeSoto, the most famous sponsors of You Bet Your Life.
12:32 - "Ixnay on the illpay!"
Groucho's admonition to Mrs Upjohn is spoken in 'pig latin', a schoolyard code hugely popular in the thirties that even today will probably need no explanation for American readers, though it is less familiar here.
The technique is simply to move the first letter of each word to the end and follow it with 'ay', but the result, especially if delivered with sufficient pace, will sound truly baffling to those not in on the secret.
It crops up in countless Hollywood movies, two of my favourites being the Stooges short Tassels in the Air, in which Moe and Larry attempt to explain the rudiments of the code to an uncomprehending Curly, and the fabulous section of Gold Diggers of 1933 where a gorgeous Ginger Rogers sings an entire verse of 'We're In The Money' in pig latin translation:
17:00 - Tootsie Fruitsie Ice Cream
We're now a quarter of the way through the running time of Monkey Business or Horse Feathers, and apart from a few gags in Hackenbush's arrival scene the film hasn't really even tried to be funny yet.
The sudden appearance of this full-fledged comedy skit, which can and often has been excised in its entirety to create a free-standing sequence that makes exactly as much sense out of context as in, shows all too clearly how the film has been conceived: as a series of chunks (plot, song, comedy sketch, etc) each with their own allotted span and order, like a variety bill.
This is the first of the half dozen comedy scenes, and because it has been written in isolation from the rest of the film it never quite takes flight in the way that earlier Groucho and Chico scenes did. It is very highly regarded, and for many the highlight of the movie. I find it mildly amusing.
25:07: "I want to turn this place into a gambling casino before the season ends!"
If he does, Morgan will have to fight off the rivalry of the one that already exists, and is advertised alongside the sanitarium and his race track and hotel on the huge hoarding at the railway station. Odd that he has gone to so much effort to snatch the sanitarium from Judy's hands, only to expensively turn it into something that already exists in the town. Why not just try to take over the one that's already there? Or turn the sanitarium into something else?
26:04 - "Look, Miss Standish, suppose I were to tell you I'm not the doctor you think I am..."
An especially nonsensical and disastrous example of how Groucho's comic persona has been tinkered with, this is perhaps the most cringeworthy Groucho moment until those two immortal pinnacles of horror: the bit where he says, "and yours truly who could certainly use the money for Jeff" in At The Circus, and the bit in The Big Store where he coquettishly fishes for compliments from Tommy Rogers as if one or the other of them were a girl. Even by those standards, the spectacle of a coy, sheepish and guilt-panged Groucho here is a demeaning one for all concerned.
30:35 - Dr Hackenbush in his consulting room
This scene reminds me of the bit in Wagstaff's office in Horse Feathers; the doctors are like the professors, the nurses like Wagstaff's secretary. Harpo and Chico arrive, looking to be accepted as patients rather than students.
32:19 - "Goodbye forever, goodbye forever..."
The song of which Groucho sings just that snatch is 'Good-bye!' by the Italian composer Paolo Tosti, with lyrics by Scottish novelist-poet George Whyte-Melville. The song was written in 1908 and became a popular standard.
Here's Deanna Durbin giving voice to it in a strange sequence from the 1946 film Because Of Him:
35:30 - "I think he's a Ubangi"
Chico is here referring to the popular name for African women wearing lip plates, widely exhibited in sideshows and circuses in the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries.
The name is in fact something of a misnomer, according to Mr Wikipedia: "Around 1930, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey promoted them as members of the Ubangi tribe, but the Ringling press agent admitted he picked that name from a map for its exotic sound."
Chico speculates that Harpo might be a Ubangi because of his habit of producing and inflating a balloon from his mouth whenever Hackenbush presses his stomach. Easy mistake to make. And I must say I do rather like Groucho's follow-up line: "I'll get a hammer and ubangi that right off."
35:57 - "I can't do anything for him: that's a case for Frank Buck!"
Buck (1884-1950) was a flamboyant American big game hunter and collector of wild animals for zoos and circuses. The title of his life story, Bring 'em Back Alive, passed into the language.
In later life he traded on his reputation by appearing as a featured attraction at Ringling Brothers circus shows, and in a series of movie roles, sometimes recreating his exploits straight and sometimes gently spoofing his popular image (as in Abbott and Costello's Africa Screams in 1949).
39:04 - The Water Carnival
Mr Thalberg would be gratified to learn that my wife loves this scene, the result of a curious decision to concentrate most of the film's musical interest in one self-contained sequence rather than dotted about the whole movie.
The result is that it plays almost like a separate mini-movie, an effect heightened by the opening which shows a close up of the programme being perused, showing the performers named therein (one of whom,Vivien Fay, is of course appearing under her real name), so that it looks as thought the scene has its own individual credit sequence.
Needless to say, this is the object of much derision from the kind of fans who think the presence of guest singers in a Marx movie is a calculated affront to their cynical cool. In reality, Allan Jones puts in another sterling performance, singing in an enormous banana sundae dish floating in a lake in front of a massive ornamental fountain while a selection of cuties from the MGM casting couch smile fixedly at the camera, and at Jones, but never at each other, while pretending to play ukuleles.
Vivien Fay, next up, is even better, and audiences who haven't by this time snorted themselves into an uncomprehending contemptuous stupor generally find their derision brought up short by the magnificent image of Fay twirling on her axis at terrifying length and speed, ending on a perfectly composed freeze and smile, when all she must have wanted to do in reality was fall to the floor groaning, while the world around her ebbed and flowed like she'd just swallowed a bottle of gin in one gulp. A superb performance. Races was the second of only six film appearances made by Fay, the last an uncredited bit in Bud and Lou's debut movie One Night in the Tropics in 1940. Born in 1916 she is, if the IMDB be believed, still with us at the time of writing.
45:43 - "Change your partners!"
Some lovely dancing from Groucho here, and our introduction to the mysterious and much abused Flo, played by Esther Muir.
Broadway dancer, friend of Edward and Mrs Simpson and one-time wife of Busby Berkeley, Muir is very funny in this film and also appeared with the Brothers in their pre-production live tour, getting covered in talcum powder and wallpaper paste and having her derriere slapped with a wallpaper brush every night and twice on Saturdays.
She also worked with Wheeler and Wolsey in So This Is Africa (below), and the film she made directly before Races was, intriguingly enough, called High Hat.
She made her last film appearance in 1941, moved successfully into real estate development, and died in 1995 at the age of 92.
There is a degree of mystery about Flo. She has been hired by Whitmore and Morgan, but to somewhat ambiguous ends. The idea is to discredit Hackenbush in the eyes of Mrs Upjohn by having her walk in on them mind-tryst, but it seems a bizarrely elaborate scheme when Hackenbush has already given abundant evidence of his incompetence and lack of credentials. Her exit line - "I'll get even! You dirty, low-down, double-crossing snake!" - hints at a return appearance that never comes, but might perhaps have been intended in one or other of the original drafts.
52:00 - Chico's piano solo
As in Opera, Chico's speciality spot has been cut insultingly short - rushed through in less than two minutes - so as to allow Harpo to hog some piano time on top of his harp solo. He plays a bit of Rachmaninov and then smashes the piano to bits. Hilarious, I'm sure.
The only amusing part is watching the orchestra in the background, who have obviously been told to react in comic fear to Harpo's antics, and who thus appear to flee, return and flee again, and again, every time he does something destructive. Look out for the lovely shot of the sheriff and two other men at 53:32: they resemble a non-existent comedy team.
66:55 - "It's the old, old story. Boy meets girl! Romeo and Juliet! Minneapolis and St Paul!"
Minneapolis-St Paul is the most populous urban area in the state of Minnesota, United States and is composed of 186 cities and townships built around the Mississippi, Minnesota and St. Croix rivers. The area is also nicknamed the Twin Cities for its two largest cities, Minneapolis, with the highest population, and St Paul, the state capital.
Wikipedia couldn't have put it better.
67:20 - Sig Rumann returns
Yet another transplant from Opera, and with Groucho given nothing new to do but make yet more jokes about the fact that he has a beard.
But it's always good to see Rumann on the bill, and his third appearance in A Night In Casablanca makes him a fully-fledged member of the Marx screen family.
He has less to do here than in his other two appearances, however. He is a specialist brought in by Whitmore to expose the inadequacy of Hackenbush's diagnosis of Mrs Upjohn.
Coincidentally, but most bizarrely, he was to perform the same function in the same year's Nothing Sacred, and again in Living It Up, 1954's remake of Nothing Sacred, and then again in 1966 in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie, thus making him the only actor to have played an eminent doctor called in to expose a medical fraud on four separate occasions, smashing Bjorn Borg's previous record of three.
69:04 - Hackenbush attempts to flee
No, I'm not going to labour the point yet again that this sort of thing is grotesquely out of character for Groucho. My interest is in the reflection in the mirror when he is at his dressing table. What is it? It looks like a street exterior. I can't see anything else on the set to correspond with it. It doesn't seem to be the reflection of the supposed view through an opposite window, or of a picture on an opposite wall. And what is that flash of white that appears on the right hand edge of it at 69:05? It looks like a human figure, but relative to the size of the reflected building, not someone in the room like Groucho.
71:35 - "I told you guys to stay down in that room with those pigeons!"
One of the film's great mystery moments! It would be lovely to think that this line is pure nonsense, put in for no reason at all other than because it is intrinsically funny, and to (just as meaninglessly) set up the appearance of the two pigeons that come in with the horse at the end.
But that's not the MGM way, is it? Consensus concludes that the pigeon line refers to an excised earlier moment, the exact nature of which we can now only guess at, that was probably cut to make room for an extra thirty seconds of Allan Jones brushing his tuxedo.
73:02 - "Down by the old mill stream, where I first met you..."
The song the boys sing when washing their hands was one of the most widely sung songs of the first half of the twentieth century, and an especial favourite of barbershop quartets.
It was written by Tell Taylor in 1908, published in 1910 and first performed by vaudeville quartet The Orpheus Comedy Four. The Marxes would doubtless have been familiar with it from their own touring days on the vaudeville circuit.
The chorus runs: Down by the old mill stream where I first met you, With your eyes of blue, dressed in gingham too, It was there I knew that you loved me true, You were sixteen, my village queen, by the old mill stream.
73:47 - "No, we're not mad. We're just terribly hurt, that's all." A lovely, baffling line.
74:08 - "This is absolutely insane!" "That's what they said about Pasteur!" A reference to Louis Pasteur (1822-95), the French microbiologist, pioneer in immunisation and the germ theory of disease, and inventor of pasteurisation and the rabies and anthrax vaccines. Groucho is therefore likening his efforts to convince a wealthy widow that she has high blood pressure on one side and low blood pressure on the other, and that the correct procedure for establishing this is to get her to wave her arms in the air until she flies away, to Pasteur's discoveries, on the grounds that both met with scepticism from reactionary authority. A nice touch of absurd arrogance - something he could have done with a bit more of in the film's first half.
77:22 - "Hee hoo! Where did that come from?" This moment always makes me laugh a lot. It's hard to explain what's funny about it: Groucho, enjoined to laugh, does so half-heartedly but producing a sound that is unexpectedly bizarre, and comments on it. It feels very modern somehow, almost like a line from Friends or something. (I appreciate Friends won't seem all that modern any more to our younger readers, but you get the point.)
80:01 - Harpo charms the ghetto What is there left to be said of this scene? Next to nothing, I'd say, save to reiterate that it doesn't have a derogatory or mean-spirited bone in its body, and its purity of motive, or lack of motive rather, is far too transparent to be anything but cynically denied. None of which is to make it a worthy or delightful sequence in its own right, and it certainly doesn't do much for me. But its crimes begin and end at taking the status quo as a given - and is that really such a faux pas in this context - especially when it showcases so much excellent talent in the process, not least the superb Whitey's Lindy Hoppers?
I cannot pretend to be troubled by Groucho in black face. I am personally horrified by the race course finale, with its shots of horses crashing to their likely doom, and look forward to the time when this reaction will be widely shared. But I hope it will always be obvious that the horse falls in this film are not included to deliberately offend, or on the assumption that their cruelty is entertaining. All it is is thoughtless, because it happens to date from a time when such considerations were not foremost in consensus consciousness. The same goes for the Harpo Gabriel sequence. Not only are the Brothers not trying to give offence, they would have been horrified to learn that they had.
90:48 - "Ride 'em, cowboy, or we're heading for the last lock-up!" Groucho speculates on the likelihood of imprisonment by adapting the title of Billy Hill's country standard 'I'm Heading for the Last Round-up', a somewhat maudlin piece about a dying cowboy. Groucho also sings a snatch of this number straight in one of the films, though I can't off-hand remember which. I'm thinking probably Room Service. Anybody?
94:29 - Ouch! Groucho's double takes a nasty tumble in this long shot, as he attempts to walk tightrope-style along the perimeter fence, loses his footing and lands heavily on his portfolio of investments. Like an anonymous trouper he scrambles on to an adjacent car and carries on, without a camera cut. The shot at 94:39 appears to be the exact same one shown from a different camera and the opposite angle, but it can't be, because in the first he steps onto the bonnet of another car but in the second he slides down over it. Which means he took that nasty tumble at least twice, and we don't even know his name.
103:20 - The finale and fade-out I like this climax. It's cute as hell, but it works really nicely, as virtually the whole cast bar the nasties walk triumphantly towards a moving camera and reprise snatches of the songs. Groucho still gets to do a line from the lovely 'I Got a Message From the Man in the Moon', a number that was cut from the film itself, probably to make room for a few extra shots of the horses breaking their necks. Chico, who of course does not sing in the film proper, makes a half-hearted stab at 'Blue Venetian Waters' before mysteriously saying "Heidi, Heidi, Hi Hat" and rounding it off by yelling "Get-a your Tootsie Fruitsie ice cream!" A Night at the Opera had ended rather abruptly: here, at last, the film improves upon its prototype. But getting here has been a long, far from unpleasant, but all too often mildly frustrating journey.
"The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx's physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo's chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute--his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body--its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum's text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand." (- blurb)
"Wayne Koestenbaum is our Roland Barthes, updated, remastered, cleared for the pressure zone of American mythologies. Delicate and brave, discerning and outrageous, the meditations organized around the other Marx track unconscious byways and the remarkable turns of a highly personal investment. Startlingly original, Koestenbaum provides critical understanding with poetic acuity and breathtaking disclosure." ( - Avital Ronell, author of The Test Drive)
If you can face the setting sun and say .... ... ...
The beginning of the end or merely the end of the beginning?
A Day at the Races is not a bad Marx Brothers movie, but it is surely the most over-rated.
It's also the longest, for reasons not to be found on screen. And it's also my wife's favourite, for reasons that are to be found on the screen, but which don't make a hell of a lot of sense to me. Suffice to say that when Thalberg patronisingly suggested that the emasculation of the Marxes would make them more popular with women, he could have had my beloved in mind.
Now back to the boys' stuff.
It's the film where the Thalberg deviations from the Paramount formula, which A Night at the Opera was inspired enough and hilarious enough to withstand, or circumnavigate, or even turn into advantages, finally come home to roost. All those corny ideas about it being funnier with fewer jokes and a better plot, and that comedy needs to be built around a plot and characters the audience care about, and that audiences need something to root for, and eruptions of anarchy only work if given explicable narrative justification... all that rubbish that Kaufman saw coming and sent packing in A Night at the Opera is lying in wait for A Day at the Races, and this time Thalberg wins.
And we see, or should see, that the fact that Opera was so good doesn't mean that Thalberg was right.
And this despite the fact that the film is the most painfully transparent imitation of Opera imaginable, with everything that was felt to have been successful in the first film repeated, only in almost every case just that little bit less effective, because misunderstood.
The characterisation is the first and most obvious casualty. Opera had the boys helping out the hero and heroine, but it wasn't like they were helping them save up for an eye operation: it was all about opera singers being nasty to other opera singers, and the villains, so to speak, were just pompous arty types. These were exactly the kind of people the Marx Brothers had always enjoyed annoying, and for no more benevolent a reason than that they deserve it. And so the fact that the Brothers had been turned into helping hands didn't show up as strongly, or destructively, as it might have done in another context... a context like this, for instance.
Here the villains really are villains, and the task in hand is to help Maureen O'Sullivan, as pretty Judy Standish, save her struggling business from nasty Douglas Dumbrille.
Groucho is his usual conman, except this time he doesn't want to be found out, and he keeps trying to flee when things get difficult. When he does let the inner Groucho free, with predictably chaotic results, we fade to the next day and find him writhing with remorse at having let Maureen down.
He's pretending to be a doctor, but not in the way that he has pretended to be a head of state or a college professor or an explorer - that is to say, magically - he's a real veterinarian, and a down at heel veterinarian at that, posing as a doctor so as to deceive Margaret Dumont into thinking she is ill when she is not. (Why? We need a reason if we're going to take these people seriously, Mr Thalberg. To extort money from her? Some hero!)
There's no point in playing it semi-straight because it still makes no sense: the man that Judy thinks might be the one to turn around the fortunes of her ailing sanitarium may not be the Groucho of Duck Soup, but neither is he anyone's idea of a real doctor, and if she looks carefully she might notice that his moustache and eyebrows are painted on. Otis B. Driftwood was an opportunist and a conman, but he had no 'real' life; we knew nothing whatever about him, and most important of all he was having a good time. Hugo Z. Hackenbush is an unsuccessful vet, who can't afford his rent, and however hard he finds it to restrain his anarchic impulses, he plainly wants to. It's as if what we had always taken to be Groucho's conscious assault on propriety was in fact a kind of nervous compulsion, a sort of Tourette's syndrome.
I don't want to get too misty-eyed about this, but I reckon that the magic of the pure Marx Brothers, the characters those men perfected on stage, and that writers like Kaufman and directors like McLeod understood so well, lay in the fact that they were forces for good inadvertently, because they were first and solely forces of honesty.
They act with both complete freedom and complete incorruptibility, and their very irreverence casts them as guardians of integrity. When they attack pomposity, dishonesty and selfishness, the rightness of their attitudes has the incidental side effect of making life's journey just that little bit easier for the honest, good-natured, unpretentious and invariably hard done by people who would otherwise be entirely at the mercy of the Lasparris and the Trentinos.
All the Paramount films end with a wrong righted, but the Brothers themselves, though instrumental in bringing that end about, only serve the interests of rightness in the abstract; it's never explicitly their mission that Huxley win the game or that John Parker is recognised as a great artist. That sort of thing just happens, when you have Groucho, Chico, Harpo and sometimes Zeppo about the place.
This is a vital point: these films are saying that the world would be a better place with a few more Marx Brothers loose in it. And that simply isn't true of these Marx Brothers, of Hugo and Tony and Stuffy. They're just like the people they're trying to help: life's losers, not well off, not distinguished, always looking over their shoulders, up against it... they're just a bit zanier than the straight heroes, that's all.
At Paramount, an interesting hierarchical relationship was developed between the brothers. Groucho was the outsider on the inside, the man who could talk himself into positions of influence and responsibility he was clearly and openly unworthy of filling. But Chico and Harpo are complete outsiders, overtly if guilelessly criminal and true forces of nature, and without Groucho they would have no connection whatsoever with the worlds in which the films are set. Groucho is their gateway in to Rittenhouse society. Groucho is an intermediary, an interloper in the world from which they are excluded: he recognises their purity of spirit, their complete surrender to the impulses he must to some degree sublimate in the grander scheme of rising to genuine influence and attainment, the better to make fools of the really important people. So he co-opts his more instinctive siblings as natural allies.
All of this goes to the wall at MGM. People who say that Room Service constrains them with too much reality really ought to take another look at this one. Groucho is sentimentalised: his anarchy is directed, purposeful, all in a good cause, and we start to find out things we don't want to know about him: he becomes a real man.
Harpo survives the transition best, perhaps, but there are vulgar efforts to make him pathetic - the one thing the Paramount Harpo could least be described as - and A Day at the Races is the second film in a row that introduces us to him by showing him being beaten by a hiss and boo bully.
But it is Chico who is most ruinously reinvented. Chico, whose logic was once so obtuse, whose motivation so mysterious, whose instinct for disruption so unyielding, that he was even capable of reducing Groucho to frustration is now working contentedly, and presumably efficiently, for the Standish Sanitarium, and so devoted to Judy that he's willing to work without pay. Once he was unwilling to work, even, perhaps especially, for pay.
And he's resourceful. Getting Mrs Upjohn to bankroll the sanitarium? His idea. Sending for Dr Hackenbush to sweeten her up? His idea. Ravelli the musician, who charges more the less he plays, and most of all for not rehearsing, this plainly is not.
And he's not even given anything funny to do. The character is completely superfluous, pointless - it's a Zeppo role.
Nonsense, you yell! Of course he's given something funny to do, I hear you screaming with fury.
What about the sacred Tootsie Fruitsie Ice Cream scene, you fool!
Well yes, I was coming to that.
A Day at the Races, despite its length, contains remarkably little comedy.
I don't mean what there is isn't funny. I just mean there's not much of it about. Let's look at the main comedy sequences now.
1. Tootsie Fruitsie Ice Cream
Yes, I do think this scene is mildly funny, in a straightforward kind of way. But it's a self-contained sketch that you could give to any comic and straight man and they'd get just as much fun out of it. (Indeed, it reads uncannily like an Abbott and Costello sketch.) Not only is it not tailored to Groucho and Chico, it actually violates the terms of their usual relationship.
Chico can sometimes get the better of Groucho in anti-logical argument, but this is a simple bit of sucker-fleecing, with Groucho cast uncomfortably as the dope and Chico as the wily huckster. In other words, Chico is behaving rationally and logically and cleverly, and Groucho's being taken for a ride. Funny this may be, but it's not the Marx Brothers, at least not the Marx Brothers I love best.
You can't have it both ways. I like the bit in At The Circus with the midget and Chico and the cigars, but every book on the movie dismisses the scene because it is 'out of character'. If you don't find it funny, fine, but if 'out of character' bothers you, then the Tootsie Fruitsie ice cream sketch should be a complete write-off.
Actually, I'm bending over backwards to be generous here. I'm not sure it's even all that funny, to be honest, once you get the idea. It doesn't really build to much of anything, and crucially it doesn't rise to any pitch of self-defeating madness, the way these things used to do at Paramount. Look at this exchange:
G: Is there a printing charge on this? C: Just a two dollar delivery charge. G: What do you mean, delivery charge? I'm standing right next to you. C: Well, for such a short distance, I'll make it a dollar. G: Couldn't I move it over here and make it fifty cents? C: Yes, but I'd move over here and make it a dollar just the same. G: Say, maybe I'd better open a charge account. C: You got-a some references? G: Well, the only one I know around here is you. C: That's no good, you'll have to pay cash.
Now the obvious model for this is the contract scene from Opera; it has exactly the same rhythm. But compare the actual dialogue in the two scenes:
C: Now the next part I don't think you're going to like. G: Well, your word's good enough for me. Is my word good enough for you? C: I should say not. G: Well that takes out two more clauses.
Or:
G: Just you put your name down there, and then the deal is legal. C: I forgot to tell you, I can't write. G: That's all right, there's no ink in the pen anyhow.
While Kaufman and Ryskind's writing in Opera has that beautiful contempt for logic that characterises their Groucho-Chico dialogues in Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, with virtually every line contradicting the one preceding, and setting off on some new comic direction, what we have in the Races script is jokes. They're not bad jokes, they're just ordinary jokes. Give the script to any other comedians and, while they may not do it as well, it wouldn't need rewriting first. Whereas the 'why a duck' or 'left-handed moth' routines might as well be written in a different language.
No, they are written in a different language.
2. The call to the Florida Medical Board
Much more like it! 26 minutes in, and for me the first really great scene in the film. And why? Because Groucho has stopped sneaking about and is having fun again. Look at the lead in.Typical Thalberg scene-setting: Whitmore is overheard putting a call in to the FMB; Groucho realises it's in an effort to discover the truth about his medical standing and rushes, panicked, into his office to avert disaster.
From then on, all this is forgotten. The Hugo Hackenbush that cringes into his office is the one that tries to stop Whitmore seeing that he's giving Mrs Upjohn a horse pill; the one who says, "They can throw a horse doctor in jail for not paying his rent, too!"; the one who tries to run away when it looks like he's going to be exposed.
But the one who actually puts in the call is the Groucho we've been praying for since his first scene. All he needs to do is tell Whitmore that Dr Hackenbush is the man he claims to be. Instead of that, he deliberately infuriates him, without allaying his suspicions in the smallest degree. The cost of his actions is to make Whitmore even more belligerent and probably even more suspicious, but he doesn't care. Baiting Whitmore is a pleasure, and a public service. Suddenly, Groucho's back in the ring.
3. Hackenbush examines Stuffy
Okay, not bad. And it's got that line you all love, something about his watch stopping. Can't quite think of it for a minute. This is all reasonably funny, without ever really catching fire.
4. The wallpaper routine
Yes, it's funny, and I'll bet it was a riot on the road-show try-outs. But it's a bit basic; it's not classic stuff. It's slapstick. It's not the Chevalier impersonations.
5. The Harpo-Chico whistling translation scene
The first example of what will become a staple of the later films, almost always including a bit where Harpo mimes the contours of a shapely woman's body and Chico thinks he means a snake. Quite funny, but more ground lost to MGM literalism. At Paramount, it may be that Harpo is simply choosing not to speak, because it is annoying. Here, we learn that he cannot speak, perhaps because of laryngeal disease or some form of mental abnormality. Not as funny, that's for sure.
6. Mrs Upjohn's examination
For my money, the film's one and only classic, fully sustained and imaginatively developed comedy sequence. Insults, absurdity, anarchy; the beautiful repetition of the hand-washing; the three Dr Steinbergs being introduced to each other; Harpo and Chico lathering Dumont for a shave; Harpo taking her pulse; Chico yelling, "X-ray! X-ray! All about the operation!"; Groucho asking, "How is it that a dame like that never gets sick?"
The trick is in first establishing a premise, then tweaking it, then undermining it, and then, and only then, going bananas with it. The result should be the kind of laughter that builds too aggressively, so that you end up choking and sweating, half-hoping that there will be a break for you to breathe and swallow before the next majestic assault upon reason, and half-hoping that there won't.
This is what the Marx Brothers do, and in this film, I suggest, they only do it here.
7. The racetrack finale
Actually, I'm stretching things a bit even including this among the comedy sequences. The race itself is played dead straight, and the only funny stuff is to be found beforehand, in the Brothers' efforts to postpone it. These moments, like so much else, are both a Rank Xerox imitation of A Night at the Opera and a vastly less effective one.
As for the race itself, what Halliwell calls a "spectacularly well integrated racecourse climax" is an almost total dead loss. Not Marx Brothers comedy; not any kind of comedy.
Yes, this is devil's advocacy, from a man who loves The Cocoanuts and Room Service, and tires of hearing that Duck Soup is their best film, and sometimes just gets a bit grumpy for no good reason at all. I have nothing against this film, truly.
It's pleasant viewing, it's nicely made, and the boys are for the most part in energetic form. But I just don't get its reputation as among the very finest. Where are all the funny bits? When you think how many laughs Horse Feathers crams into 67 minutes, surely there should be a few more in the 105 minutes we get of this?
The real mystery is how something this derivative could have taken so much effort. According to Louvish, it went through six screenplays, with fourteen incorporated outlines and treatments and the fruits of five touring vaudeville scripts, only to result in the most slavish copy of a previous success audiences had experienced prior to Ghostbusters 2.
First of all: God Bless You, Bob Gassel for alerting me to the fact that the complete Incredible Jewel Robbery is now online.
With the exception of Story of Mankind this is it, it's the other Marx Brothers film, the only one, and for me the last one. Never again will I settle down to watch a Marx movie I've never seen before...
I'm still pressing for the DVD release: You Tube is all very well, but I'm into ownership and collecting and things on shelves.
You can see it just below this post, and I'd love to know what you make of it in the comments.
In other news:
Ed Watz, author of the book on Wheeler and Wolsey and general man about classic comedy got in touch recently to say some very nice things about the site, make me jealous ("I saw Groucho's show at Carnegie Hall, May 5 1972, when I was 13"), and to suggest the ideal snack to accompany a glass of Ravelli Wine:
Diamond geezer Noah Diamond looked in to comment on my post on Groucho and pornography. His excellent comedy blog Noah's Comedy Palace is highly recommended: I'll be filching the sensational Hackenbush song restoration for my Day at the Races annotated guide, up next, but here's another of his amazing pieces of work, from the same source:
Wow, say I, and doubtless you're thinking much the same. I've no idea how long this sort of thing takes to do, because I've no idea how to do it in the first place. But if it was one tenth as laborious as it seems to this complete know-nothing then it is as impressive a piece of work as it is delightful. And he still finds the time to do a live show about the history of New York and write a load of leftie stuff about how Republicans are all jerks and things like that.
A reader called Roger - I think that's all the name I ever got out of the guy - dropped me a line on the subject of Irving Brecher standing in for Groucho in some later MGM publicity shots. It's one of those famous stories that gets taken on trust without much evidence to back it up.
Like him, I've always been struck by the fact that the chap in the photo most often used in support of the contention (by Glenn Mitchell, among multitudes) couldn't be more obviously Groucho if he was actually holding his birth certificate.
Roger, however, nominates this as a more likely Brecho:
I don't know if it's Brecher or not, but it sure ain't Julius. And Chico and Harpo seem to be deliberately acknowledging the switch with their gestures and expressions. What do you think?
LA Guy quite rightly takes me to task for not incorporating readers' additions and corrections into my annotated guides - rest assured that this was the idea behind soliciting your opinions in the first place, and it is only laziness holding me back: I certainly will be continuing to update in the light of new information, so do please keep the comments and observations coming.
Damian writes with the following enquiry:
I'm currently reading Carter Beats the Devil a fictional story based on an early 20th century magician. In the story he joins a touring troupe, consisting of a variety of acts one of which is the Marx Brothers, performing Fun in Hi Skule. The brothers are used simply as characters who pop in and out of the pages, with Julius offering some wisecracking advice to Carter the magician while Leonard and Adolph spend their time either performing on stage, playing piano or playing pinochle. No mention of Herbert or Milton, but Minnie is there in full force too. Is this the only occurrence of the Brothers in fiction or are there others that exist?
Well, I've just discovered Ron Goulart's charming detective novels featuring amateur sleuth Groucho Marx, and I'll be doing a post on them soon. They're very nice little mysteries with lovely thirties Hollywood and New York backgrounds, and the excellent notion of having Groucho, in the lulls between radio gigs and the last few MGM movies, helping solve a few perplexing murder cases with just the right mix of irreverence and sharp observation. He's a bit like Columbo, in that he can get more out of a witness than more by-the-book investigators, simply because they are reluctant to take him seriously and so lower their guard.
More to come on these, but do any readers know of any other good fiction with Marx guest appearances?
Speaking of Marx fiction, long time friend of the site Ginger Ingenue has been posting some mind-boggling stuff on her blog Asleep In New York, currently hibernating again after an especially fine burst of activity. Read her Greetings From Vaudevillehere: it'll change how you see the boys forever after.
She also dropped the following provocative hint, during a discussion of Chico's odd hat antics:
...drooling over Chico helps you notice these things. In fact, I noticed something in Monkey Business yesterday, but I'll never ever EVER in a million years tell a soul. Ha. Too funny: but proof where my eyes were.
Further interrogation yielded the information that the moment in question is in the top half of the film and involves the bottom half of Chico... but that's as far as she'll go.
First one to spot it gets a big juicy steak with no spinach.
Lastly, I'm not giving up in my quest for sexy Grouchos: Ginger tantalised me with the prospect of a photograph of her dressed as Chico, for which we're still waiting by the way, but all and any photographs of young women dressed as the Marx Brothers are welcome.
Now I'm going back into the closet, where men are empty overcoats.
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