The Marx Brothers Council of Britain

Chico's odd hat antics

2012-01-05T09:53:00.000-08:00

We've had a few intriguing communications in recent months from Bob Gassel, who I must assume, until I receive evidence to the contrary, is the same Bob Gassel who worked on the Jerry Springer Show and a programme called Lesbian Mom.

A while back, he wrote to ask the following of you all:

The other day I attended my first Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and had a great time. I later looked online at the history of the big balloons and found a listing of when each was introduced. Suddenly I came across "1935: The Marx Brothers (without Zeppo)"!
Really? WTF! How could I have never heard of this? Does a picture or film exist anywhere? HELP!!!!

Unfortunately I forgot to post it at the time, but anyone got any thoughts?
Even more interesting was the following throwaway remark in a recent comment:

There's one quick shot in the Animal Crackers finale where Chico has his hat on backwards and over his eyes...it must be from a totally different take, or is possibly not even Chico at all...

In response to my plaintive request for more information, Bob has very kindly provided us with a couple of screen grabs. He writes:

It's only a couple of seconds long and the rest of the time Chico's hat is on normal…and while I'm pretty sure it's still Chico, he sure looks different.

He does indeed...

I agree with Bob that it is Chico, but why he's doing it, and why only in one shot I can't imagine.
Presumably he was in that quixotic mood that occasionally came over him, like when he pulls that face singing 'Freedonia, oh dont'ya cry for me."

But what do you think?
And thanks for joining our happy band, Mr Gassel!

LAGuy on Horse Feathers and Animal Crackers

2012-01-03T23:54:00.000-08:00

Our pal LAGuy, who blogs over at Pajama Guy, PajamaGuys and the vaguely superfluous Pajama-Guy got to go and see a double-bill of Horse Feathers and Animal Crackers over the Christmas break, while the rest of us were stuck indoors.
He has kindly sent us this report:

For several years now the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica has shown a Marx Brothers double feature on New Year's Day.
Last year it was A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera, which I discussed on this blog in the comments section of the Opera annotation. This year they showed Horse Feathers and Animal Crackers. (Do they ever show any films after the first seven?)
Bill Marx, son of Harpo (who was signing his book Son Of Harpo Speaks in the lobby) introduced the film. Last year it was Andy Marx. Bill said there's nothing like seeing a Marx Brothers film in a packed theatre (and the Aero was packed). The Paramounts are his favorites.
Anyway, I won't go over the countless comic delights of the two films, since I'm sure readers are aware of them. (If not, see the movies, don't bother to learn them from me.) So I just have a few comments about other things I noticed.

I love almost everything about Horse Feathers, even the little moments, like Groucho skipping away as he reprises "I'm Against It."
I know it's silly to worry about a plot in their Parmount films, but boy do they drop the whole bootlegger thing fast.
I wasn't looking closely, but as far as I could tell, the street where Harpo causes a traffic jam has a cafe, a sweet shop and two cigar stores.
I think British people know this, but just in case, when Groucho says of his son that he's only a shell of his former self "which nobody can deny," he's quoting the last line of the American version of "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow."
The radio says Huxley is taking a lacing, so I'm always surprised when Chico and Harpo get there that the team is only losing 12-0. I'm also disappointed when Chico announces they're going through the middle and instead they sweep left--up till this point, Chico has been quite accurate.

As for Animal Crackers, I wonder how many people would have guessed in 1930 that Groucho's parody of Strange Interlude would become far better known than Strange Interlude itself? (Maybe the Theatre Guild wasn't so lucky after all.)
It's interesting how Lillian Roth exclaims "isn't it romantic" in introducing her song. You almost expect her to sing "Isn't It Romantic?" except that song hadn't been written yet - it would be in two years for another Paramount production.
Why is Harpo's picture of a horse torn in the corner? Couldn't the Paramount prop department get him another?
I was watching Lillian Roth to see how she reacts to Groucho's "Then it's murder" line, since this is the one she kept cracking up on. She smiles and shakes her head. I wonder how many takes were necessary.
Mrs. Rittenhouse owns some pretty modernistic chairs in the scene where Chico and Groucho plan to build a house.
Someone had to scratch a bunch of frames so when Harpo is loading his sprayer you can't see the brand name (which I'm guessing is Flit)? [Sure is! See Annotated Guide - MC]
Harpo dropping silverware is a classic routine, of course, but it must have been far more effective on stage where the audience knew it was happening right before their eyes with no trickery. [And without those destructive cuts creating the false impression that they are stopping to refill his sleeve between shots! - MC]

Watching the two movies one after another couldn't help but remind you of certain similarities:

--Groucho does the leg swinging dance move in both

--both have the tune "Collegiate" (the Professor's theme and Chico's solo)

--Groucho jokes about firing some employee if he does something he doesn't want

--Chico notes a picture doesn't look like someone

--Groucho asks someone to repeat something and when they do notes they already said that

--Robert Greig

--I think Chico says the same Italian line to Lillian Roth and Thelma Todd

--Harpo pulls out and quickly unfurls a large picture more than once

--Groucho talks about brushing up on a Greek and waxing a Roth

--Harpo carries a bag loaded with fancy equipment so he and Chico can commit a crime

--when Harpo's coat is removed, there's not much underneath

As drunk by Chico

2011-11-24T01:11:00.000-08:00

How to fake a fake moustache (and perform a forward and reverse Groucho or die trying)

2011-11-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

I found this picture by doing a Google search for 'sexy Groucho'.
Why I was doing a Google search for 'sexy Groucho' is another story and a very unpleasant one, but I think it's fair to say this photo more or less lives up to its promise, despite the presence of that open tin of paint and industrial yellow mop and bucket behind her.
If you are the sexy Groucho in question, why not drop us a line here at the council to let us know why you decided to have yourself photographed as a sexy Groucho in what looks like a disused kitchen, and whether it is something you do regularly or just that once.
And if any of you know of an even sexier Groucho, by all means send me the photos to prove it. (I've added 'Sexy Grouchos' as a label so I'm relying on you all now.)

Yes, it's party season, that's the point, and doubtless you'll all be digging out the Groucho costume, heading off to the office party, and wondering why all the girls don't want to dance with you and just think you're a bit strange. (Unless you're our sexy Groucho here, who was doubtless danced off her feet all night, with and without that wheelie-bucket.)
But as our sexy Groucho ably demonstrates, it's vital to get the look exactly right. There's nothing worse that dressing up as Groucho and having people just assume you're Professor Robert Winston.

So here are some tips, courtesy of ehow.com ("Discover the expert in you").
First, how to have a Groucho moustache.
"Groucho Marx is one of the most recognizable stars from Hollywood's early days," the preamble informs us, "thanks in part to his exaggerated mustache and eyebrows".
Of course you can save time by buying a glasses-nose-moustache combo ready made, and save yourself having to deal with all that messy greasepaint. This link will get you to the relevant page of the 'Just for Fun' online party supplies website, and to a charming photograph of what Groucho might have looked like in the nineteen-seventies if he'd retained his hair, and started smoking carrots.
Meanwhile, back at ehow.com ("Discover the expert in you"), here's how to be really serious and get yourself the whole costume. Full marks to whoever wrote this one for remembering Gummo, but points withdrawn for offering me no assistance whatsoever on how to create a Gummo costume.
A Groucho swing dance move is apparently a real move in swing dancing (hence the name) that is inspired by the famous loose-limbed Groucho dance, but not, obviously, a mere imitation of it. Imagine how silly that would look. The link above will show you how to do both a forward and a reverse one, which is like a forward one, only backwards. Bizarrely, it tells us that "the move may actually be referred to by a different name depending on the person to whom you're speaking".

And while we're on the subject of fake moustaches and their purpose and application in theory and practice for fun and profit, Damian, one of our most esteemed and longest-serving council members has forwarded me the following anecdote and photographic evidence. Make of it what you will...

I was in Berlin at the weekend and went to visit the Film and Television Museum. While passing through the Dietrich archive I came across a picture of her and good old Groucho which made me do a double take. It wasn't the photo itself but the fact that Groucho's 'tache and eyebrows looked like they had been retouched by hand. I don't know if he wasn't wearing his grease paint smear on that day and then the studio put it in afterwards, or if it needed 'thickening' - either way someone got nifty with a .001 paintbrush.
Photography wasn't allowed and I had already been approached twice for taking shots so I couldn't take a snap of the actual photo; I have tracked down a copy on the net and attached it, and even in this version it looks a few shades darker than anything else in the shot!

(That's Groucho on the left.)

Avert innocent eyes: a delicate enquiry about Groucho and pornography

2011-10-16T02:34:00.000-07:00

I sense an unresolved tension in Groucho during his latter years.
Like many another comedian before him - Bertrand Russell, for example - I'm sure he was intoxicated by the adoration of the young and trendy college generation that hailed him as a counterculture hero, bestowing upon him the kind of cred so rarely accorded those of such advanced years.
The urge to return the favour, and assume their attitudes and opinions, must have seemed not merely mannerly but virtually an obligation, not least because his continued golden boy status might easily rest upon his continuing to live up - or down - to their preferred image of him.
Obviously, the crusty conservatism of a Bob Hope was out of the question, and in later interviews, Groucho obligingly toes the line in many areas, especially regarding Nixon and the war in Vietnam. He was a regular visitor to the Playboy mansion, too, and a notable subject of the Playboy Interview; he seems to have genuinely liked Hugh Hefner.

Then, of course, there is the notorious Marx Brothers Scrapbook, in which author Richard Anobile published, without Groucho's sanction and to his great subsequent chagrin, unedited transcripts of what he had assumed were off-the-record digressions into his sexual history and fantasies, relayed in the kind of censorable language he might well have assumed would never in a million years make it into print. If so, he misread the age.
Hilarious as much of it is (he explains how he "wanted to fuck" Thelma Todd and Marilyn Monroe, the latter of whom "wore this dress with bare tits") you strongly get the impression that this is not the voice of the real off-duty Groucho, but rather that of an old man attempting, a little desperately, to impress a shabby young author with his modern attitudes.

But when you watch him on the Dick Cavett Shows of the sixties and seventies, beyond the modish front and the comic lechery (when Erin Fleming describes herself as his secretary on one show, he mumbles "that's the euphemism of all time"), a frequently very old fashioned fellow indeed emerges.
He talks of his boredom with permissiveness in films and theatre, and tells, at least twice, the story of his walking out of Hair halfway through - an anecdote more calculated to alienate him from the counterculture can scarcely be imagined. There is a wounded sincerity about him in these moments, suggesting that he felt himself to be at the centre of a culture he in fact somewhat disapproves of.
As well as expressing the old-fashioned idea that men should only tell 'dirty stories' to each other, out of the hearing of women (and gets as close as Groucho ever could at that time to audible audience disapproval when opining that he will approve of women's lib only when women pay alimony), he frequently makes plain a squeamishness about nudity and sexual frankness in popular culture. (A friend and fan of Woody Allen's, he was nonetheless greatly displeased by Erin's appearance in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, a film whose humour he found alienatingly one-note.)
However else he may have made friends with the sixties generation, it seems certain, pornography, and in particular its new, overground popularity among unashamed trendsetters (so-called 'porno chic') would have left him cold.
So imagine my surprise when I read this passage in John Baxter's biography of Fellini, concerning an occasion in which il Maestro approached Groucho with a view to him making an appearance in Giulietta of the Spirits:

Marx ... declined, though he and Fellini did meet in new York. Strolling down Broadway, Marx took him into a sex shop to show him some porn movies. 'He himself had seen an enormous quantity,' says Fellini. 'He said to me: "You're Italian, yes or no? Then you can't have not gone to see porno films." He was convinced that Italians spent their life going to see porno films and masturbating.'

Now, I can believe this of Fellini - though it's hard to imagine any commercially-available pornography able to keep up with his fantasies - but not of Groucho. I would have trouble believing it of the Groucho who called for Nixon's assassination in the 1970s, but given that this would have had to have taken place in the early 1960s I think it is simply unimaginable.

So what does everyone else think? Have you heard this story anywhere else, or anything comparable? Does it ring true to you?

Hello, I must be coming?

The Chico Suicides

2011-09-28T11:37:00.001-07:00

Strangest darned pictures of the elderly Chico and Harpo I've ever seen...
But I can't stop looking at 'em. I love the way that drill bit seems to warp and bend, because they haven't lined themselves up properly.

New “Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel” script discovered in Australia!

2011-09-23T00:03:00.000-07:00

One of our newest council members is Jennifer Filips from Australia, who got in touch a while back with this to say:

I am a really big Marx Brothers fan and I'm really excited to find your site because it teaches me new things about them.
I'm only 13, but I still like them.
I really like the Swordfish scene and the bits where Groucho sings.
I even do piano lessons so I can teach myself how to play like Chico.

(Incidentally, when I mentioned in my last post that she was 'learning to play the piano like Chico', she rushed to quash any potential misconception, urging me to stress that she is not being taught to play like him, but is doing so surreptitiously, as her piano teachers want her to play "smoothly and slowly", opining that the Chico method is "too silly".)

Then, a while later, she got in touch to say that she had written a new Flywheel script for Groucho and Chico to perform, a prodigious feat indeed, especially when you consider that my treatment for Deputy Seraph The Movie still ends abruptly after the opening nuclear holocaust montage.

So anyway, here it is for your reading - and listening, in the mind's ear as it were - pleasure...

Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel- Script #1

Announcer: British Broadcasting System in proud association with the Five Star Theater in proud association with the Five Star Theatre proudly present the Marx Brothers in... Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel!
(Cue opening music.)

*Telephone Rings*

Miss Dimple: Yes? Yes. Yes. No. I expect him to be back very shortly. Yes. Good-bye.

Groucho/ Flywheel: Miss. Dimple, who was that on the phone?

Miss Dimple: That was Mr. Gladox. He has some important business to discuss with you.

Flywheel/Groucho: Important business? Tell him to come in Tuesday. I'm going golfing Sunday.

Miss Dimple: But Mr. Flywheel, today is Monday!

Flywheel: Yes, I know, but I'm going golfing today as well.

*Door knocks.*

Chico/ Ravelli: Hello, boss. Hello, Miss. Dim.

Miss Dimple: Hello.

Flywheel: Ravelli, why are you so late?

Ravelli/Chico: I was held up at a fast-food restaurant.

Flywheel: You were held up at a fast-food restaurant?

Ravelli: I was ham-burgled.

Flywheel: (To audience:) He's a big ham, isn't he folks?
(To Ravelli, sarcastically:) Forgive me for asking this, but what else happened, Ravelli?

Ravelli: I was put in ham-cuffs. But I getta out all-a-right.

Flywheel: How did you escape?

Ravelli: I just ate the chains and ran out.
Flywheel: (Sarcastically) Well, that went better than expected.

(Music break. "Blue Skies" plays.)

Flywheel: Miss. Dimple, didn't you say that a man wanted to see me?

Miss Dimple: That's right, Mr. Flywheel.

Flywheel: Good. Well, where is he?

Miss Dimple: You told me to tell him to come in on Tuesday, Mr. Flywheel.

Flywheel: Oh, yes. Miss. Dimple, take a letter.

Miss Dimple: Yes, sir. What would you like me to write?

Flywheel: Dear Mr. Gladox -

Miss Dimple: One D or 2 Ds?

Flywheel: Send the 1, and the second can follow.

Miss Dimple. OK. Now what do I write?

(Sound effect: type-writer)

Flywheel: Because you are arriving on Tuesday, I am writing in regards to your departure. Leave promptly at 2 PM on Thursday.

Miss Dimple: Why Thursday?

Flywheel: By that time he'll be sober.
From, Waldorf T. Flywheel.
Miss Dimple, read that back to me.

Miss Dimple: OK, Mr. Flywheel.
Dear Mr. Gladox,
Make your departure no later than Thursday.
Care of Waldorf T. Flywheel.

Flywheel: There seems to be a lot missing there.

(Ravelli enters.)

Ravelli: Eh, boss, boss!

Flywheel: Yes, what is it, Ravelli?

Ravelli: Can I ask you a question?

Flywheel: Not if I know what's good for me, but go ahead.

Ravelli: All'a'right. What has 4 wheels and flies?

Flywheel (Sarcastically):I don't know. I give up. What has 4 wheels and flies?

Ravelli: A fruit fly!

Flywheel: I guess that I should've known that one, Ravelli.

Ravelli: Eh, that's a-good, eh, boss?

Flywheel (Sarcastically): Fantastic. Hey, Miss. Dimple, how is the letter?

Miss Dimple: Fine, Mr. Flywheel

Flywheel: Good.

Ravelli: Eh, boss, did you know that my uncle used to do impressions?

Flywheel: Impressions? Like what?

Ravelli: He used to do impressions of onions.

Flywheel: He really must've made people weep.

(Groucho (Flywheel) starts singing "Sing Us a Sensible Song" and Chico (Ravelli) joins in.)

Ravelli: Eh, that was a-nice, boss.

Flywheel(Sarcastically): If you can call it that.
(Sadly): It is really cold up here.

Ravelli: Eh, I a-know! How about-a we go to Florida?

Flywheel: Good idea, Ravelli. Something has come out of that head for the first time.

Ravelli: That's not nice.

Flywheel: I know, but it's true. Let's go to Florida!

Ravelli: OK, boss.

Flywheel: Miss Dimple, would you like to come with us?

Miss Dimple: Come where?

Flywheel: To sunny Florida! With the beaches! Nothing to do all day but sit in the sun! No work, just play!

Miss Dimple: Oh, yes! I'd love to come!

Flywheel: But then you'd have no work! No, I'm sorry Miss Dimple, but you must stay here!

Miss Dimple (Sadly): OK.

Flywheel: Ravelli and I will be back soon enough anyway.

Miss Dimple: Have a good time!

Ravelli: Don't a-worry, we-a will.

(Cue ending music.)

Announcer: This has been the Marx Brothers in... Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel!
Next week, what will they do in Florida? You'll have to tune in and see!

I get the message!

2011-09-20T23:50:00.000-07:00

Has it really been February since I last posted?

All I can say is thanks so much for caring still, and not forgetting all about us. It's true I've been shamefully neglecting things here, all the while claiming imminent return every time someone's got in touch to say, How bout it then?
I guess the last straw was this morning, when I woke to find an email in my in-box headed "Annotated Guide to Humour Risk" which once opened revealed the message "I knew that would get your attention."

This is what happens when you have too many blogs.

But I give you my personal guarantee (not, I hasten to add, with Mr Hammer's codicil) that the Council will be back this week, and regularly thereafter. Forthcoming are such unimaginable delights as the annotated guide to A Day at the Races, an interview with Flywheel historian Andrew T. Smith, a brand new Flywheel script, as written by a 13 year old Marx fan from Australia who even as we speak is learning to play the piano like Chico, and Groucho's guide to shaving.
And those are just the bits I've had sitting round almost ready to go since February.

In fact, as a measure of my good will, I won't even make you wait for that last one.

Does Chico sell honey?

2011-02-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

We received the following enquiry today from a new correspondent:

The other day my parents said there's an advert for honey being shown at the moment that Chico Marx is in! Whether it's done from archive footage or a lookalike (it's a tough break for both of them!) I don't know, but I had a look on youtube and googled it but I have no idea what they're going on about! Does anybody know, or are my mother and father slowly going crazy in their old age? Thank you!

My first instinct was to relegate this to the looney file, but then I suddenly remembered that it just so happened I was passing by a television the other day when I heard Chico and Harpo's Big Store piano duet being used as the background to an advert.
I didn't know what it was being used to sell, but turns out it was Rowse's honey.
So your parents were right, but sadly, no visual representation of the great man is involved.

Then around the same time, Damian, who had earlier remarked on the obsession with nuts and nut-related tie-ins and promotions in Marx Brothers pressbooks, sent me this:

It is, and I quote, "what could have been if a Planters/Marx endorsement had been signed".

I've known this fellow for over a decade, and only now do I discover that he's been keeping his own blog for the best part of two years. Take a look here, and tell him Groucho sent you.

Gems from the “Night at the Opera” Pressbook!

2011-02-20T01:11:00.000-08:00

Look closely at this man on the left.

Think he's Groucho Marx? Well think again.

It's actually an usher made up like Groucho - just one of a thousand socko and surefire ways MGM have come up with to make you want to see their latest comedy release A Night at the Opera, starring this crazy bunch of goofs the Marx Brothers.

Pressbooks are always weird; their ballyhoo suggestions always peculiar in the extreme. But there's something especially revealing about these, since Opera was, after all, a prestige release from the ritziest studio on the block.

Given Thalberg's unease over the team's reputation for undisciplined zaniness, you might have thought they'd play down the madcap stuff and concentrate a little more on the production values, but these campaigns are, if anything, sillier than the Paramount ones.

The thanks for sending them my way go out to Damian, a Council regular (he's the man who solved the Abe Kabibble mystery). In his accompanying dispatch he notes the relentlessness with which the Brothers were associated with nuts, taken to extreme lengths here with a huge variety of peanut endorsement tie-ins and related nut-based tomfoolery.
It prompts the wider point that, while the Marx Brothers were regarded by their adherents as an oasis of comic sophistication in a roughhouse desert of pratfalls, they were always marketed as the most lowbrow comics imaginable, as a bunch of nuts, Tourette zanies almost to be pitied as much as enjoyed. An odd disjunction.

Anyway, time to let MGM work their magic.
Think you don't especially want to watch A Night at the Opera at the moment? You will after the hidden persuaders have gone to work on you with this lot:

MGM display the personal touch. Who, me?

Because the Marx Brothers are nuts themselves, see?

"Hey, honey, I've just seen three tramps on a tandem. Let's go to the movies tonight!"

Because the Marx Brothers are nuts themselves, see?

We've all heard the expression 'to laugh one's head off', but it takes the comic imagination of the MGM publicity department to see its true potential. Here we see a man distracting passers-by with a big coat and a small porcelain head.

Here they actually invent their own well-known expression out of thin air before converting it into comic promotional gold. But is it just me or does this person look like he's upside down in absolutely no way, shape or form?

More nut-related promotions, and a cuckoo clock one for variety. Because the Marx Brothers are cuckoo themselves, see? (No wonder Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot loved them so much.)

You loved them in Duck Soup!

Boy, that guy looks pleased to be there! MGM take no chances with their early or late Santa promotion. What's the betting they had a third sign made for Christmas Day screenings: "I came at exactly the right time to see A Night at the Opera"?

And what about that 'Press Idea'? Genius.

Michael Myers, the killer from the Halloween movies, stands in for Harpo at this Loew's Halloween midnight prevue event. The promotion presumably trades on the fact that the Marx Brothers are themselves nuts.

The only man who took up that 'want ad' offer was disqualified for laughing at the bit where Lasparri beats the crap out of Harpo.

A cigar ad. You can work out the connection for yourselves.

This idea was later revived for Go West, but by then it was: 'Hear for yourself Baltimore audiences chuckling every so often, a man at the back coughing, and the occasional sound of people heading for the exit'.

Or if you're really desperate:

A Night at the Opera: Annotated guide

2010-12-06T23:57:00.000-08:00

I have already noted that the number of obscure references to contemporaneous culture and current affairs in the Marx screenplays seems to be decreasing from film to film, and despite the return of Kaufman and Ryskind, surely the finest and most densely allusive wordsmiths who ever wrote for the Marxes, A Night at the Opera confirms this trend.
Nonetheless, there are still a goodly number of interesting points to be raised as we make our way through the movie, so let's begin.
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0.00 - The MGM logo
All change - the Paramount mountain, with its promise of wit and sophistication, has given way to the MGM lion's imperious roar of self-approval.
Possibly some audiences will be surprised to see Leo, half-remembering that MGM specially re-shot this sequence to feature the Marxes themselves roaring (or in Harpo's case honking his horn while he mimes the roar) and with the slogan 'Ars Gratia Artis' replaced by 'Marx Gratia Marxes'.
So they did, and some sources claim with the original intention of starting the film with it, which would have been very impressive. But in the end propriety won out (oh, well) and this splendid sequence was used only in the trailer.
.

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1:24 - "... gentleman has not arrived yet?"

Not many movies begin partway through a sentence. And A Night at the Opera is no exception - or wasn't, at least.
But the version of the film available to us today derives from a later re-issue dating from the war years, and has been somewhat over-zealously shorn of all reference to the fact that it is set in Italy. (I suppose we should be lucky that Chico's still in it.)
Among the many pointless cuts was an opening establishing sequence shot like the beginning of a Lubitsch musical, with various passers-by singing part of a song before 'passing it on' to the next person, the last of whom is the waiter, who begins the first half of his sentence as the song ends. All of this was lost, apparently for no better reason than that it makes clear that the scene is set in Milan.
It may be, however, that the bulk of the missing material has at last been found. A fuller alternative version recently discovered in a Hungarian archive, with several of the lost Italian references present and correct. Sadly, however, even this version is still lacking the introductory sequence, and begins just as ours does: with a nasty clicking noise, followed by a waiter saying "... gentleman has not arrived yet."
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2:32 - "Have you got any milk-fed chicken?"
Then squeeze the milk out of one and bring me a glass.
Not the greatest Groucho quip, perhaps, but a fortunate substitution for the one in an extant original draft script:
.
Groucho: Steward, do you have any French pastry?
Steward: But this is an Italian boat.
Groucho: Well then, what's the rate of exchange?
.
Perhaps the new version was improvised by Groucho during the pre-filming live tour (where, according to legend, the 'make that three hard-boiled eggs' was devised) and found to get a bigger laugh. Whatever, we're lucky it was changed, otherwise it would now be missing entirely, thanks to its reference to an Italian boat.
.
4:25 - "Mrs Claypool, Mr Gottlieb, Mr Gottlieb, Mrs Claypool..."
Note Groucho's original dining companion over Dumont's left shoulder. Obviously recovered from her anger at Groucho landing her with the bill, she is now spontaneously and charmingly amused by his foolish behaviour.
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4:36 - "I just wanted to see if your rings were still there."
Almost certainly implying that Gottlieb might have cleverly stolen them. As a child, however, I interpreted it to mean that the very toxicity of his kiss had somehow corroded and disintegrated them. I think I still prefer my version.
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5:14 - "He's the greatest tenor since Caruso."
.
Enrico Caruso (1873 – 1921) was the most famous Italian tenor of the early twentieth century, hugely popular in America thanks to his pioneering commercial recordings (nearly 300) and performances at the New York Metropolitan Opera (nearly 900).
He also appeared in a few early Hollywood movies, including the Paramount release My Cousin (1918), which features him on stage performing "Vesti la giubba" from Pagliacci. This is the opera in which we see Lasparri performing at the beginning of the film, and the aria which Groucho sings part of later on.
Here's Caruso's recording, matched to the film sequence:
.

.
In 1906, as well as surviving the San Francisco earthquake, Caruso was charged with pinching the bottom of a married woman in the monkey house of New York's Central Park Zoo. Despite his ingenious defence - that one of the monkeys had delivered the offending goose - Caruso was found guilty and fined ten dollars.
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5:15 - The all-new Harpo takes a beating
Thalberg reinvention at its most disastrous. The aim: make the team more sympathetic to women. The method: make Harpo a figure of pathos, and kill stone dead what was hitherto a delightfully funny sequence (in which he is seen to be wearing several costumes at the same time) by showing him getting the crap kicked out of him by nasty Lasparri. (Boo! Hiss!)
This is even lousy in the context of the scene itself, since it ends with Harpo returning to the room to take another going-over, the sound of which always elicits nervous and confused laughter from audiences.

8:30 - "Fiorello!" "Tony!"
Remember those writers who insist that Chico's character only pretends to be Italian? Yeah, me too.

12:03 - "You can get a phonograph record of Minnie the Moocher for seventy-five cents!"

Minnie the Moocher is a classic jazz song (first recorded in 1931) by the great Cab Calloway and His Orchestra. Like many jazz numbers of the time, it features several unabashed references to drug use: 'he showed her how to kick the gong around', 'he was cokey', etc.

The song, and live action footage of Cab performing it (apparently the earliest known film of him), was featured in a fantastic Fleischer Studios 'Talkartoon', also called Minnie the Moocher (1932), and starring Betty Boop, the most sexually desirable woman in cinema history. Like so much Fleischer animation, it has a weird, otherworldly quality, and a visual and comedic imagination entirely distinct from that of other animation studios.

14:28 - The contract scene

The last classic Chico-Groucho duologue - oh, welcome back Kaufman and Ryskind!
This is the moment when you realise that the film really is going to be taking you right back, to the beautiful, theatrical structure of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers.
There's only one thing about this scene that fails to delight me, and that's the mass hysteria that the line "you can't fool me, there ain't no Sanity Claus" seems to provoke whenever the film plays in rep. It's a nice enough little joke and I have no real problem with it, but I've never understood why this odd consensus has sprung up that it's the funniest line in the piece, and must be greeted with this unanimous fake roar. It's not like you don't know it's coming, and there are so many other great lines to fixate upon:

"We had an argument and he pulled a knife on me so I shot him."
"Of course he won't be able to eat but he can live like a prince."
"You haven't got a baboon in your pocket have you?"
"I was blind for three days."
"Why can't the first part of the second party be the second part of the first party? Then you've got something."
"Well, that takes out two more clauses."
"That's all right, there's no ink in the pen anyway."

Logically, the best-known lines should get the smallest laughs, because they're the best-known lines. Shouldn't they?

The newly-found Hungarian version of the film (see 1:24, above) confirms that the jump-cuts in this sequence do, as predicted, correspond with excised references to Italy:

Chico: I'm a stranger here myself.
Groucho: Aren't you an Italian?
Chico: No, only my mama and papa is Italian.
Groucho: What's his [the tenor he wants to sign] name?
Chico: It's an Italian name. What do you care? I can't pronounce it.
.
It is indeed an Italian name. No amount of snipping could change the names Rudolfo Lasparri or Ricardo Baroni, and Chico of course speaks with an Italian accent throughout, making all this laborious mutilation not only destructive but utterly futile.

16:38 - "Don't you know what duplicates are?"
"Sure, those five kids up in Canada."
By 'duplicates' Chico means the Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario in 1934, and the first quintuplets known to survive their infancy. At the time, everybody would have got the joke: the quintuplets achieved a degree of celebrity that was virtually unprecedented in the pre-Internet age. Their likenesses were featured on "framed photographs, spoons, cups, plates, plaques, candy bars, books, postcards, dolls, and much more" all available at a souvenir shop run by their mother, which also offered "stones from the Dionne farm for $0.50 that were supposed to have some magical power of fertility" (Wikipedia). They were also used to advertise Quaker Oats and other products nationally. 6000 people a day, including many top Hollywood stars, came to see them, via a special observation room at their nursery; the midwives who delivered them cashed in with a souvenir and dining stall of their own, and it was claimed in 1934 that they had brought $51000000 of tourist revenue to Ontario. As well as appearing in four Hollywood films, they are referred to in two Stooges shorts, My Man Godfrey (also written by Ryskind), Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Women, Dumbo and an Agatha Christie novel. In the Warners cartoon The Coo-Coo Nut Grove (1936), they appear in animated form, alongside the Marxes.
All of the quints were girls, and two remain alive, now aged 76.

21:08 - "Are you sure you have everything, Otis?"
"I've never had any complaints yet!"
According to a popular Groucho anecdote, recited on at least three occasions on the Dick Cavett show alone, this line proved too saucy for most state censorship boards, who cut it from the prints. Interesting if true: I didn't realise American censorship operated on a state by state basis like that. Odd that it wasn't taken out of the reissue version we have, but fortunate, needless to add.

22:40 - Alone
Surely the best non-comic song in any Marx movie, heart-rendingly performed by the luminous Kitty Carlisle.
How I look forward to this moment whenever I watch the movie at home. How I dread it (and the bit where Allan Jones joins in at 24:06 still more) whenever I watch it at the cinema.

28:03 - Groucho goes soppy
Perhaps the most audacious bit of Thalberg revisionism: Groucho becomes a real character with real interests and a soft side we'd never suspected hitherto. But I'll be damned - is this not a nice little scene?
It may not be right to have Groucho doing this, but doesn't he do it charmingly? It should be a disaster, but as anyone haunted by the bits where he sucks up to the male leads in At The Circus and The Big Store will know, you can do this sort of thing well or you can do it badly. It's a sweet little moment and somehow I don't think it spoils the mood or stunts the momentum here at all.

36.00 - The engineer's assistant is not Billy Gilbert

Many official sources, including the NFT, claim that blustery comic support actor Gilbert plays two roles in the film, including the engineer's assistant, here. This is contradicted by the evidence of the face of the actual actor, which resembles Gilbert's to the extent that it is humanoid but no further. Hard to know how these rumours get started, but you'd be surprised how many otherwise reliable sources still doggedly insist that the engineer's assistant and Gilbert are one and the same.
Gilbert does appear, of course, in the steerage banquet scene; he talks at 41:05.

37:40 - The three greatest aviators in the world
It's odd the way these characters are never referred to by name by any character in the film; even when they are announced at the official function it is simply as "the three greatest aviators in the world". But if you freeze the newspaper that reports subsequently on the Marxian debacle that ensues, you'll see that they are called the Santopoulos Brothers.
Since Lindy's big landing, aviators had figured highly among America's greatest celebrity heroes, and it is a distinctively Kaufman and Ryskind touch to let the Marx Brothers deflate some. Such a pity, though, that Zeppo wasn't around to put one of those beards on - while Ricardo is not exactly a comedy part, he gets a far bigger share of the fun than Zeppo ever did. Of course, Zeppo could just about warble a song, but he couldn't have done the opera stuff.

44:20 - Chico plays piano to an audience of cute kids
This is the first time there hasn't been something vaguely challenging or inappropriate in Chico's piano sequence. Normally his piano playing, though sure to win his audience over with sheer virtuosity, has a bloody-minded, obtuse quality. Here it's just a musical interlude, and he's mooning over a bunch of adorable moppets and they're mooning right back.
It's not exactly harmful as the film's innovations go, but it's not an improvement either, and the switch is telling. It certainly lays the groundwork for the infantilisation and emasculation of Chico's character, which will proceed at high speed from here. The other thing you notice about this solo is that it's very short, to make room for Harpo being given a comedy piano spot as well as his harp solo. Considering that it was largely through Chico's industry that the Brothers got the MGM gig in the first place, there's something rather disgraceful about the way in which he is slowly allowed to become the new Zeppo as the films progress. It starts here.

51:25 - The Harpo bondage scene
The bit with Harpo on the ropes, swinging on the outside of the ship and ending up in the bedroom of the aviators, is supposedly one of those that Sam Wood most relentlessly re-shot, to the extent that Harpo was left with rope burns and cuts. Two things to look out for though (or three if you count Harpo looking weird in a wet wig): the cartoon butterfly that emerges from one of the aviators' beards (often remarked upon with praise, but a strange and untypical joke that I've never been much keen on), and the delightful moment when Groucho, looking out of his porthole, sees Harpo and warmly greets him. There's a real feeling of fraternal affection here.

54:33 - Chico's aviator speech
Lap it up, Chico fans! Kaufman and Ryskind here provide yer man with this gloriously absurd, brilliantly funny monologue - his first since the last time they wrote for him, and pretty much the last great solo comic moment, of any kind, in his entire career. Never again, through a further seven movies and beyond, would he be funny on his own. Never again would anybody bother to write great absurdist material of this sort for him. From hereon it's a bit of expository dialogue here and there, some silly behaviour, a lot of duncey humour and some piano playing. But this is as good as Captain Spaulding's lecture:

Friends, how we happen to come to America is a great story. But I don't tell that... The first time we started, we get-a halfway across when we run out-a gasoline and we gotta go back. Then I take-a twice as much gasoline. This time we-a just about to land. Maybe three feet. When whaddya think? We run out-a gasoline again. And a-back we go again to get-a more gas. This time I take-a plenty gas. Well, we get-a halfway over when what-a you think-a happened? We forgot-a the aeroplane. So we gotta sit down and we talk it over. Then I get a great idea. We no take-a gasoline. We no take-a the aeroplane. We take a steamship! And that, friends, is how we fly across the ocean!
57:16 - Groucho and the aviators converse in their own language
This must have sounded wonderfully weird at the time; today our techno-sophisticate ears will instantly identify the sound of tape running backwards.
Here's what they're really saying:

5
58:40 - Harpo enters for breakfast
Note his somewhat pallid complexion here. My guess is that this is another of Sam Wood's retakes, and the powdered sugar make-up he applies at 59:26 has been on at least once already that morning.
60:15 - The adjoining rooms
Excellent extended farce, and for Kaufman and Ryskind a blatant revision of the jewel theft scene in Cocoanuts, right down to the split screen between two rooms. Again, such a shame Zeppo's not in on all this fun, though he wasn't first time round either come to think of it.
67:59 - Groucho falls down the stairs
Or rather, Driftwood does. Slow this sequence down to get a good look at the double's face. This is also the first indicator that the new Marxes would not be above basic slapstick for its own sake. From here to Mrs Dukesbury stuck in a cannon is but a skip.
69:21 - "I can't feel cheerful about being such a hoodoo to you."
"You goddamn hoodoo!" is a line from The Front Page which would certainly have been familiar to messrs K and R, but I haven't heard the insult much used elsewhere. It's a variant of voodoo, and so in this context presumably means a hex: Ricardo means that he brings Rosa bad luck.
70:02 - The Brothers camp out in Gottlieb's office
Can this scene be the inspiration for all those surely apocryphal anecdotes about the boys invading Thalberg's office, roasting potatoes in the nude and creating artificial fires and the like? Or do we think any of that really happened?
71:14 - Take Me Out To The Ball Game

The sheet music Harpo inserts into Il Trovatore, and that yields such comic dividends shortly after, is this popular 1908 number, considered "the unofficial anthem of baseball" (Wikipedia).
It was also used as the title of a 1949 MGM musical starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and described as "MGM's gay Technicolor musical".
71:30: "Hey, Shorty - will you toss up that kelly?"
Just as you'd expect. 'Kelly' is a slang term for 'a man's stiff hat', usually a derby/bowler. The origin is, I think, unknown.
74:05 - "It's just the Tarzan in me!"
It's a funny thing, the popular culture reference lottery. Fact is that nobody reading this, probably nobody in the western world, needs me to explain who Tarzan is, why Groucho likens himself to him at this point in the film, or why he then makes that guttural cry.
But at
th
e time, Tarzan was pretty
new to most people: a character in a forgotten
British novel, brought recently to the screen (by MGM, naturally) i
n a series of films fe
aturing future Standish sexpot Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane (the ape man's foxy English squeeze). So what we have here is Groucho deliberately being given a joke that helps out the home team, like all the Maurice Chevalier stuff in Monkey Buisness. No reason to have thought that audiences seventy five years on would know instantly what he means, any more than most would know why Patsy Kelly solemnly intones "Chandu!" when she hears a gong sound in one of her short films with Thelma Todd. That's the way it goes: Chandu was lost to history; Tarzan endures.

76:50 - Is this the longest delayed gookie (sorry, I mean 'Harpo face') in Marx Brothers history?
The film's nearly over! It's a good one, though.

79:50 - Harpo's acrobatics
Now, this is interesting, because it's the Brothers' first true stunt-slapstick climax. It's tempting to imagine it was something decided upon by head office with which Kaufman and Ryskind were not at liberty to tamper, other than to make the individual jokes as brilliantly funny as they so surely are. But look at it in context. It's not a mindless slapstick climax, like the finales of At The Circus or The Big Store: it's a wonderful example of Harpo's magical powers, validated by the narrative, and totally in-keeping with the Paramount Harpo, just with the freedom of MGM resources. It was the later MGM movies, taking Opera slavishly as their models, that misread the scene and just assumed that if Harpo could magically run up and down theatrical backdrops then Groucho and Chico can unicycle about in a department store. This scene, like this film, is in so many ways a glorious last hurrah, as well as the portent of an altogether less interesting new beginning.

80:20 - 'We Never Sleep taxi service'

... as glimpsed on one of the painted backdrops in the opera..
To modern British eyes at least, an odd sort of a name for a taxi service, but one that any Marx fan will instantly identify as also the name of the collection agency that wants Davis's typewriter back in Room Service.
It originates as the logo of Pinkerton's detective agency. During his Lonesome Luke years, Harold Lloyd made a film of that title in which Luke tries his hand as a detective.

A Night at the Opera: An overture

2010-12-05T07:06:00.000-08:00

A Night at the Opera is a kind of optical illusion, a trick of the light. It's a film that seemed to announce the rebirth of the Marx Brothers as a permanent fixture in the Hollywood firmament yet it contains all the seeds of the precipitous descent that was just around the corner. Everything that went wrong with the Marx Brothers is to be found here. Yet somehow, it all came together this one last time.

The man who must accept responsibility, both for the excellence of this one film and for laying the foundations of the team's almost instant decline thereafter, is of course Irving Thalberg.

The problems that Thalberg thought he identified with the Paramount films were a) a lack of sympathy in their characterisations verging on nihilism, and b) no serious attention to narrative structure.

The result of these supposed defects, he opined, was that the films were simply assemblies of jokes, joined by meaningless plots that hung between them like string, and because there were no plot arcs or emotional crescendos women did not warm to them.

But with his guidance they could make a film with fewer laughs but more audience appeal. The trick is to have a plot the audience becomes emotionally involved with (which they sort of had in Cocoanuts, and bothered with less and less in each subsequent film), something that the characters are striving for, cute young lovers, production numbers and plenty of MGM wallop.

Within this more solid structure, in strictly measured doses, the Brothers would then be free to carry on as usual, only slightly tamed and constrained by narrative realities and MGM's no absurdity policy.

And that's what happened and Thalberg was proved right, commercially and critically.

But was he right?

Surely we can all agree that the film is indeed a beauty, but is it a beauty because of Thalberg's tampering or in spite of it?

Look at this way. Everything that he added to the Paramount template is still there in the later MGM features, and everything he took away is still absent. So the fact that Opera is manifestly better than At The Circus cannot be because of the Thalberg factor. The value is in how much was retained this time out, not in how much was substituted, jettisoned or tinkered with.

I'm not sure any of Thalberg's ideas were good ones per se.

I love the anarchy, haphazard structure, relentlessness of gags and dismissal of Hollywood narrative conventions that he so deplored in their earlier films. I think that the romantic subplot, production gloss and sympathetic elements of Opera work simply because they happen, by sheer chance, to have been done extremely well.

A lazy imitation of the Paramount formula would always be watchable. A lazy imitation of the MGM formula, by contrast, is called Go West, and it's not a pretty sight. As formulae go, loads of jokes and to hell with the plot was always the more fruitful option.
.

But Thalberg did two other things that are much more interesting.

First, he allowed the Brothers to tour, and hone the material before a live audience. All the books make much of this, but I always thought it was just me who considered The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, which were audience-tested, notably better than Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, which weren't.

If you think Duck Soup is their funniest film - and most of you do - then you have to ask yourself what the big deal about this tour was. Good material is good material: they also road-tested Go West, remember. In neither case, I suspect, did it make more than a superficial difference.

Where it probably did benefit them this time round was simply in helping them get back a little of their lost confidence, so that by the time they came to shoot they were sure of themselves and back to their full energy. But the main reason why the film is funny (despite the destructive innovations and distancing MGM fluffiness) is because it has a funny script.

And that's the really great thing Thalberg did: he brought back George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind to write it. Despite the disproportionately meagre commendation he receives for this - compared to all the attention that road-testing business gets - this is the single most important reason why A Night at the Opera is the last film of the Marx Brothers' untouchable period, and not the first film in their decline. Thalberg had stacked everything in favour of it being the latter; Kaufman and Ryskind, however, went away and wrote a series of beautiful jokes and sketches. The boys were back at their Broadway best again.

. In the long run, MGM was the worst possible studio at which to strand them. Nowhere understood comedy less. I suppose it's their own fault for not being their own writers. If they had control over their scripts they could have gone somewhere like Universal, who would've been thrilled to have them I'd have thought, and been no more creatively compromised there than WC Fields was.

Thalberg's showier additions probably made less of a difference to Opera's success than he thought, and did much long-term damage, as the format of the film was duplicated, with less and less invention, for subsequent MGM capers. All that glitz and gloss may or may not have brought newcomers to the fold, but surely a bit of glamour and a few nice tunes wouldn't have been enough to convert audiences who had previously had no time at all for the Marxes, while those who did love them would have needed no excuse to welcome them back. At best, Thalberg might have influenced a few fence-sitters with no strong feelings about the team either way to go for the big MGM programme (people went for a full bill of entertainment, don't forget) over what the other cinemas were offering that week. But what made the film a smash was word of mouth once those first audiences had reported back to their families, colleagues and friends. And we can thank the boys and their writers for that, not the set dressers or the director of photography.
.

Part of the pleasure, too, must have been in the anticipation of the Marx Brothers taking on the world of MGM, and - far from being submerged into it - being let destructively loose there. This was a deliberate tactic. The very title carries this frisson, a brilliant juxtaposition: The Marx Brothers, promising wildness and chaos, and the deliberately classy, sober-sounding A Night at the Opera. Put the two together, and the result should be combustibility.

We are so familiar with this title now that we forget how clever and exciting it must have sounded, what a masterstroke it is. Their first film in two years, their first at MGM, and their first with a title that means something, and refers to the film itself... it just sounds so enticing, and new.

But had it been Go West or The Big Store audiences would have been right to predict the usual comic castration inflicted on just about every other comedian, however proven their track record, when they entered Leo's den. A Night at the Opera, on the other hand, carries a palpable tingle of anticipation, and that's because of the sense of epic comic collision promised by the combination of the Marx Brothers and opera. For that reason the title has rightly become iconic, and its power, like so much else that is great about the movie, was misunderstood when the formula was repeated. A Day at the Races and At The Circus are similar titles, but they carry no frisson. The Marx Brothers at a race track. So what?

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The only snag with this is that it can lead to the claim, made by Allen Eyles and others, that the film is anti-opera in its attitudes, and that the Brothers are attacking the rarefied, highbrow, non-populist form of art it represents. The fact that they are all for it once Allan Jones is doing the singing is then taken to be a flaw in the structure.

Not at all: it is Eyles's central premise that is wrong. The film dates from a time when opera was still widely popular, and the idea of a higher culture, into which it may prove edifying and pleasurable to dip occasionally, was not deemed oppressive. If there was such a thing as a forbidding high culture, it certainly wouldn't have been Verdi. As with the sniggering that accompanies the Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle solos today, we should resist the temptation to recast the Marx Brothers as cheerleaders for cultural philistinism: they are sophisticates at heart.

Gottlieb is a fraud, and draws the Marxian ire not because he appreciates opera but because he doesn't: he cannot recognise what (we are assured) is the excellence of Ricardo's voice even when he hears it, and is concerned only with reputations, status, and the superficial trappings of the opera world. The Marxes destroy Il Trovatore because Gottlieb and Laspari are not worthy of it. When the right singers are on stage they stand back and enjoy the show.

Finally, there's the matter of Sam Wood.

He, too, was part of the Thalberg masterplan. After getting them the best screenwriters, Thalberg thought they would need a disciplined taskmaster for a director, to keep the ship securely on course and prevent any repetition of the supposed hi-jinx that had disrupted the Paramount shoots. (These stories were probably apocryphal publicity stories, but Irv was taking no chances.)

Wood was certainly a disciplinarian, but the popular view is that he had no sense of comedy, insisting on multiple retakes that drained the scenes of vitality. (Which scenes were they, then?) He certainly did not hit it off with the brothers: they resented his seriousness and he found their antics undignified. The story goes that, after several takes of a scene in Races, he said dismissively of Groucho, “You can’t make an actor out of clay.” Whereupon the comedian replied “Nor a director out of Wood.”

History has sided with Groucho, concluding that Wood’s many fondly-remembered hit films (among them Goodbye, Mr Chips [1939], Our Town [1940] and For Whom the Bell Tolls [1943]) were foolproof commercial movies that several of his contemporaries could have brought in equally well, and almost certainly with more personality. Gloria Swanson, who worked with him on many silent films, summed him up in her autobiography as “a real estate agent at heart”.
But good professional craftsmanship is hardly undeserving of praise, and there are a number of neglected gems in Wood’s filmography. Paid (1930) and Hold Your Man (1933) are sleazy delights from MGM’s pre-code days, with Joan Crawford running her customary emotional gamut in the former, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow striking sparks in the latter. Jean Arthur was never better than in The Devil and Miss Jones (1941); ditto Joan Fontaine in Ivy (1947), a fine slab of barnstorming melodrama; ditto Don Ameche in Guest Wife (1945), a late but effortless screwball comedy with Claudette Colbert giving the kind of relaxed, funny performance she usually reserved for Capra or Sturges, and hadn't delivered much for anyone since the end of the thirties. Nothing reveals an unsuitable director as cruelly as farce, and, loath as I am to argue with Groucho, Wood's a professional to his fingertips: he knows what to do, he just doesn't get all Leo McCareyish about it. In my book that's for the better.

Up next: we track the influence of these factors, and identify those five kids up in Canada, in the annotated guide.

I'm going out and getting another prescription

2010-07-23T01:51:00.000-07:00

You would think that if there was anywhere in the modern world I stood some chance of feeling like I belonged, it would be in a packed repertory cinema showing a Marx Brothers movie. And so, for the most part, I do.
But my enjoyment of A Night at the Opera is always compromised by the knowledge that in just a moment Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle are going to start singing Alone - and that it will get a big laugh from these people who really should know better.

. Like all laughter at old movies it is not genuine but faked, and for the same reason - on the honest assumption that it is the correct thing to do. It seems to be an article of faith among Marx Brothers fans that everything in the films other than the actual comedy sequences are impositions, to be mocked or endured. I suppose they think this attitude is in some way true to the iconoclastic spirit of the boys themselves, wrecking the opera and tearing the coat tails of snobs.
If so, they are very wrong. I think the Marx Brothers would have been appalled at such rudeness towards showbusiness professionals.
But it is not just the usual philistinism that rankles in this special case: it is that this performance of this song is so very beautiful. You have to be an utter barbarian not to be charmed by it - unless, I suppose, you refuse to see and hear it at all.

The Marxes never again, and never before, had a heroine quite as classy as Kitty Carlisle's Rosa. She is beautiful, quietly amused by the Brothers' destructive wit and horseplay without ever quite endorsing it or joining in, and her dignity is such that even they dare not attempt puncturing it. Groucho is clearly besotted with her, Harpo rests his head on her bosom for comfort after a beating. Even Chico is courteous in her presence (whatever he may be thinking).
Something of a theatrical legend, she only ever moonlighted at the movies, but it is as Rosa that we will remember her: provided we have the eyes to see her and the ears to hear.
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(reposted from Movietone News)

Marx Mystery: Why the hell isn't “The Incredible Jewel Robbery” on DVD?

2010-05-17T03:22:00.001-07:00

I mean, when you think that you can get just about everything else...

Statistics show that there are now more compilation DVDs called things like "The Best of the Marx Brothers", containing adverts for Creamy Prom, that weird unedited You Bet Your Life pilot where Groucho's got an open-necked shirt on and a crappy documentary with all the clips taken from public domain trailers, than there are people alive on the planet.

With a bit of ingenuity, you can even track down a rough assembly of Deputy Seraph.

But Jewel Robbery, which according to some sources isn't even all that bad, and is of enomrous, not to say enormous importance as the last starring vehicle featuring all three non-Zeppo or that other one Marx Brothers in the same place, at the same time, doing more or less the same thing and looking in roughly the same direction, remains trapped in the archives, probably in a big rusty tin labelled 'Absolutely No Value To Anyone'.

How wrong can you be?

The closest I've come to seeing it is this eight minute condensation issued as a home movie, unfortunately robbed not only of about two thirds of its length but also the original soundtrack where Groucho speaks at the end.

Come on, copyright holders, give us a proper release for this thing. Don't put any extras on it if you don't want to and charge us twenty quid.

We're idiots.

We will buy it.

Duck Soup: Annotated guide

2010-03-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

.
Once upon a time, there was a Marx Brothers film called Duck Soup.
Irving Thalberg thought it defined everything that was wrong with the Marx Brothers, and for decades they agreed with him.
Groucho once described the film as "lousy".
Then, in the late nineteen-sixties, the Marx Brothers were rediscovered by the university generation, who - with the boundless confidence of youth - fancied they saw something of their own superficiality in the artistic profundity of the team's comic invention. Duck Soup became a favourite because, as well as merely anti-establishment, it appeared explicitly anti-war. They also liked the fact that it did away with various other things they were too hip for, like romantic subplot and musical solos. From here, it began its swift mutation into the greatest Marx Brothers film of them all, an opinion Groucho lived to endorse just as heartily.
Tellingly, perhaps, it is cited as evidence for both the unfair dismissal and the wilful misappropriation that the film flopped at the box office on original release, when, in fact, it did not. Behind both lies a fine, if imperfect comedy film. Let's have a look at it.
..
0.01 - Duck Soup

.
...
As we know, the title Duck Soup did not originate with the Marx Brothers, having already been used for a Laurel & Hardy short, reappropriated here by the film's ex-Roach director, Leo McCarey.
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It also turned up in the title of this 1941 cartoon (mingled with the title of a second Laurel and Hardy film).
But what does it actually mean?
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According to Michael Quinion's World Wide Words site, the phrase is a synonym for 'an incredibly easy task', along the lines of 'a piece of cake'. Hence this tin of 'Duck Soup hand cleaner' ("It's duck soup with Duck Soup!")

But as for its actual origin, Qunion draws a blank:
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Could the image be of a sitting duck, one that was on the water and easy for a hunter to shoot? Could it be that duck soup was especially easy to prepare? (I’m told that isn’t so.) Might it even refer to a pond with ducks floating on it, which figuratively was already duck soup? All these have been tentatively put forward by various writers who were feverishly exercising their imaginations in the absence of solid fact.
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Groucho, the legend goes, preferred a simpler explanation:
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Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life.
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2.20 - Who is the first guest announced at the Firefly reception?
According to the published script (a transcription, not the original screenplay) it's the sensible-sounding "Honourable Secretary of Finance and party." The DVD subtitles prefer a joke, and signal it as such with a foxy little exclamation mark: "The Honourable Secretary of Finance and Parking!"
I'm sticking with the script.
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2.59 - "This is Miss Vera Marcal"
. .
I'll say she is.
The harp and piano solos are not the only casualties of this pared to the bone screenplay.
With the return of Margaret Dumont to the Marx family, there is also precious little room for this character, cut from the Thelma Todd cloth but played by the scorching Mexican spitfire Raquel Torres.
A short-burning Hollywood flame (after debuting in 1928 she made ten of her remaining eleven films between '29 and '33), Torres rode the wave of Hollywood's first Latin-American craze. An unmistakably pre-Code presence on screen, Raquel specialised in uninhibitedly sexual characters, and performed with a candour contrived to drive the Breen Office to distraction; Soup was one of four she slinked through in '33. Excluding an uncredited bit in Mae West's Go West, Young Man in 1936, it proved to be her final year in Hollywood.
. .The same year, she also appeared as the leader of a tribe of hot Amazonians alongside Wheeler & Wolsey (and future Marx associates Esther Muir and Henry Armetta) in So This Is Africa, written by Norman Krasna. Other films include 1931's Aloha (also starring Thelma Todd), 1930's Estrellados (a Spanish-language Buster Keaton film, also starring Carlos Villarías, Hollywood's Spanish Dracula) and 1930's The Sea Bat ("the Jaws of its day" according to Halliwell, and according to the posters: "THE MOST STIRRING ROMANCE ADVENTURE YOU'VE EVER GASPED AT!") She's particularly good, as an extremely annoying character, in The Woman I Stole, as Fay Wray's rival for the affections of stolid Jack Holt.
Gorgeous she may be as the duplicitous Vera, but she might as well be Zeppo for all the use the film seems to have for her. It looks at one point as though we're in for some good hi-jinx when she joins Harpo and Chico in their efforts to rob Mrs Teasdale's house but the script, as ever, gives her virtually nothing to do and soon excuses her from the fun. Perhaps without that mirror scene we'd have had the musical solos and some more of Raquel. .
. .
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/

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3.44 - "I want you to meet His Excellency's secretary, Bob Roland..."
...
Just one more time, Zep...
I understand you've had it with the outfit and you don't want to make movies anymore. Well okay then. Just come on once more, introduce your big brother in song and then let him completely take over.
Tell you what, we won't even make you hang around while he's doing it: it'll be just like in Animal Crackers... You can disappear completely once you've done your bit, then stay out of the film for as long as you like, just pop up here and there when you're needed to take a letter or something...
What's that? You were a fully-fledged member of the team and a passable romantic hero in Monkey Business? We know you were; we know you were. And what? You sang a solo number and joined in at the climax of Horse Feathers? I hear you, Herbie, I hear you. Yeah, I did hear that you're said to be the funniest off-screen brother, too. Whattaya know, eh Herb? But this script has no room for you to do anything other than introduce your brother. Them's the breaks, I guess. Better luck next time, maybe. Huh? Oh sorry; yeah, I forgot. Well, it's like I say. Them's the breaks, kid; them's the breaks.
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Zeppo Marx's Film Career (1929 - 1933)
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4.00 - The clock on the wall
A curious reversion to the structure of Animal Crackers, that is to say to the structure of a stage show, where the previous two movies had been so fluently cinematic: another long introductory song to announce Groucho. This one, however, is a bit of a dud. It's not funny. It doesn't try to be funny. It just wastes time.
Then we have 'Hail, Hail Freedonia' repeated several times as Groucho fails to show up. This is presumably inspired by the bit in Crackers where the guests keep interrupting Groucho to sing 'Hooray for Captain Spaulding' over and over again when he tries to speak. But in that film they are being irrational, so it's funny. Here they're doing it for a reason. And it doesn't even pay off comedically. Dumont simply spots Groucho in the line and the film proceeds. Compare all this to the opening scene of Horse Feathers.
At least the film is free to begin now, six minutes and ten seconds in, with some prime Groucho-Dumont banter:
"Oh, your excellency!" "You're not so bad yourself."
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6.45 - "You better beat it: I hear they're gonna tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing!"
Or, as the DVD subtitlers apparently consider more amusing, or perhaps just less taxing to type: "You better beat it or they'll tear you down and put up offices."
A quintessential Groucho line, I thought - until I heard Roland Young deliver it almost word for word in another Paramount comedy made the year before. This Is The Night is directed, intriguingly enough, by Frank Tuttle, who had originally been assigned Horse Feathers.
As a Groucho line, I always thought that the idea of Dumont being torn down and replaced by an office block was a cruel jibe at her bulk. (It's preceded by the line "Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself...") But here, delivered by Roland Young to willowy Charlie Ruggles, it's just a meaningless gag, as Young threatens to "tear you down and put up an office building where you now stand."
The way it plays, you'd think Groucho said it first and Young is cribbing, but no. Incidentally, This Is The Night also features Thelma Todd at her most bewitching, and is heartily recommended to all.
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12.00 - "If you run out of gas get Ethyl, if Ethel runs out get Mabel."
..
Ethyl being Ethyl fluid, which any dunce can tell you is our old pal Tetraethyl lead, blended gaily, not to say impishly, with 1,2-dibromethane and 1,2-dichlorethane, as patented with typical devil may care abandon by the Ethyl Corporation of Virginia.
If you want to know more, ideally in the words of someone who takes this kind of thing more seriously than me, you may find yourself itching to click here.
Ethel, on the other hand, is a girl's name, hence Groucho's joke. I spell this out not because I ordinarily have a low opinion of your capacity to unravel puns, but merely as a precaution, because the DVD subtitlers spell it 'Ethel' throughout, thus taking a simple gag and burying it alive.
Lou Costello experiences similar confusion in Hold That Ghost (1941):
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BUD: If a car drove up here and asked you for ethyl, what would you do?
LOU: I'd say that she don't work here anymore.
BUD: No, no, no, you'd put ethyl in the car!
LOU: Why would I do that? I don't even know the girl. She's got no right hanging around here.
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12.20 - Sylvania
Literally forest land in Latin, indicating that the ancient Romans used the phrase 'forest land' rather more often than we do, seeing as they felt the need to invent a specific word for it. It's been used in a variety of fictional contexts, don't ask me why, as well as being the real name of several towns in Australia, Canada and the US.
Our first visit to this Sylvania makes for an interesting scene for a couple of reasons.
First, because it has the great Leonid Kinskey in it as the agitator. Always welcome, Kinskey was at his best at this time, as Paramount's in-house wild-eyed revolutionary loon. Lubitsch had just finished using him to wonderful effect in Trouble In Paradise. ("Phooey, phooey, phooey!")
Second: note that Trentino is plotting the overthrow and conquest of Freedonia. So Firefly is right to go to war, isn't he?
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13.03 - Spy stuff
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Chico at last! And in a glorious sequence, kicking off with Harpo entering backwards with a mask on the back of his head. (The revelation here that Harpo is spying for Trentino makes relevant the odd touch of his taking Groucho's photograph in the earlier 'His Excellency's car' sequence.)
This moment is duplicated, somewhat more elaborately but still with deerstalker hats, in the Three Stooges short We Want Our Mummy (1939). Here all three Stooges enter in like fashion, complete not only with reverse masks but reverse jackets and shoes as well.
The ensuing dialogue with Louis Calhern here is among the very best in the Marx canon. Calhern is the best straightman the team had enjoyed since Louis Sorin in Animal Crackers, and the scene has breathless energy, invention and good jokes. It's also a reminder of how funny, and how uniquely funny, Chico can be when given the right material, and how wrong it is to write him off as 'the third one', or even - as some seriously claim - Groucho's straightman. Atsa some joke.
Bask in a little of it:
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Monday we watch Firefly's house, but he no come out. He wasn't home. Tuesday we go to the ball game but he fool us: he no show up. Wednesday he go to the ball game and we fool him. We no show up. Thursday was a double-header; nobody show up. Friday it rained all day. There was no ball game, so we stayed home and we listened to it over the radio.
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17.05 - Groucho in the Chamber of Deputies

The momentum is maintained in this wonderfully spiky dialogue scene, with Groucho getting his first chance to let fly with a few insults. "Sir, you try my patience!"
"I don't mind if I do, you must try mine some time."
And Zeppo's back for his quarter-time pit-stop, albeit sat there like a lemon not saying anything.
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23.07 - "You know he went with Admiral Byrd to the pole?"
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He being Chico's dog, and here's the photo to prove it!
Actually, though experience has taught me to mistrust consensus and never give with confidence an opinion based solely on the certainties of others, it apparently seems overwhelmingly likely that Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr. (1888 – 1957) did not, in fact, fly to the North Pole in 1926 at all, but rather got pretty near before turning back and falsifying his log-book.
A man after Chico's heart, then: you can't help wondering if the dog put him up to it.
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23.20 - Chico vs. Groucho
If I had to choose the one regular feature of the Marx Brothers formula I love the most, I think it would just have to be the Chico-Groucho duologues. I love the way they spiral off from prosaic beginnings to the wildest flights of absurdity; I love the way each man keeps topping the other in comic invention, and I love the fact that Chico usually wins. Only Chico can beat Groucho at his own game, and reduce him to shivering frustration with the obtuseness of his logic.
Like almost everything that's good in Duck Soup, this one is rushed, way shorter than their classic encounters in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, but fully as inventive in the word play. The ending is magnificent: Chico suggests the deployment of a standing army on the grounds that they will save money on chairs, whereupon Groucho grabs him in a stranglehold and kicks him out of the room. It can only be because he didn't think of the joke first.
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20.05 - The dog in Harpo's chest
A very effective process shot, and the moment, used in a trailer to advertise a season of Marx Brothers films in the Christmas of 1983, that first attracted me to the team.
A strange little joke, probably McCarey's, very effective, perhaps his best original contribution to the film.
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26.30 - Zeppo enters wearing half a hat
Bit late in the day to start getting laughs, son. Take a letter!
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34.38 - "I'm letting you off easy: I was going to ask for the whole wig."
Groucho's typically gallant codicil to his request for a lock of Mrs Teasdale's hair is a pretty straightforward insult gag, until one remembers that it is generally believed that Dumont was genuinely bald and always wore a wig for real. True, myths grow around this woman like fungus on a log, but I've never read of this claim being challenged. So which is it: Dumont myth or almost unbelievably cruel joke?
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35.40 - "The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that's why darkies were born."
..
Like laughter when Kitty Carlisle begins to sing, we must now accustom ourselves to the sharp intake of breath that invariably accompanies this line whenever the film plays in rep. But in the first place, Groucho is not using the word 'darkies' himself, merely citing the title of a popular song.
Second, he is citing it for no contextually valid reason whatever, but merely for the hell of it, in exactly the same way that he says "be alert or papa don't go out at all" and "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You from the opera Aida".
In the third place, the song That's Why Darkies Were Born (written by Ray Henderson and Lew Brown, and first featured in the 1931 George White's Scandals) is plainly intended to satirise complacent attitudes, with only the use of the word 'darkie' itself lending itself to any other possible reading:
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Someone had to pick the cotton,
Someone had to pick the corn,
Someone had to slave and be able to sing,
That's why darkies were born.
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Though most famously performed by Kate Smith, it was also recorded by Paul Robeson, everybody's favourite Stalin apologist.
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39.30 - The harp and piano solos that never were
Apparently there is still some uncertainty as to whether they were shot and edited out or never shot at all. It seems certain that they were not edited out of the finished film itself, though it is possible that they may have been shot and then the surrounding footage re-shot without them. Whichever is the case, it is obvious that it was at this point that they were intended or at least suggested for inclusion. It is generally believed that they were excised on McCarey's orders.
Photographs exist of Chico playing the piano on this set, but then, he would. I for one would rather they had been included, though I accept that "I for one" may on this occasion the literal truth.
.40.25 - Chico applies a greasepaint moustache!
It takes a moment or two of reflection for the funniness of this to strike. In order to imitate Groucho, Chico does what he would do if he was improvising the facial appearance of any moustached man: he draws it on with greasepaint. But he's sat at Groucho's own dressing table, and the greasepaint is on the table... So this must be the greasepaint that Firefly himself applies every morning...
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44.40 - The Mirror Scene
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Here are two interesting features of this sequence not always recognised on a first watch. Firstly, the mirror is not on a wall but in what should be the doorway between two identical rooms. Secondly, the broken glass, clearly visible when Harpo first breaks the mirror, instantly disappears.
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47.10 - Chico on Trial
The trial receives front page coverage on The Freedonia Gazette, a newspaper which, almost imperceptibly, is subtitled "an independent newspaper published in the interests of the people":
. Also making news in Freedonia that week: 'Foreign Radio Artists Arrive', 'Mayor and Aid in Train Wreck', and, my favourite, 'Woman Driver Gets Jail Term'.
(Later, of course, the Freedonia Gazette became the name of a long-running, well-beloved and now much-lamented Marx Brothers fanzine.)
Interestingly the paper claims that Firefly is to prosecute. In the event, so far as he does anything, he seems to be defending, with the prosecution left in the capably menacing hands of Charles Middleton, another draftee from Roach. Good stuff, this scene:
"Give me a number from one to ten."
"Eleven."
"Right!"

50.42 - "I suggest we give him 10 years in Leavenworth or eleven years in Twelveworth."
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At the time, the largest maximum security federal prison in the United States, located in Leavenworth, Kansas. Bugs Moran and Machine Gun Kelly are among its more famous guests. Nowadays it plays host to a variety of rapping bankrobbers and dogfighting sports personalities.

51.30 - "Why, the cheap four-flushing swine!"
A poker term. A four flush is a hand one card short of a full flush: four-flushing therefore means bulffing or empty boasting. I'm bluffing myself here. I'm not a poker player and I haven't the least clue what any of this nonsense means. But according to a fascinating little site I've discovered called Wikipedia, the term 'four-flusher' can also refer to a welcher, piker, or braggart. The term, of eighteenth century origin, regained a measure of popular currency when Oklahoma Governor Charles N Haskell used it to describe President Theodore Roosevelt.

51.48 - Freedonia's Going To War / All God's Chillun Got Guns

Surely the oddest song number in any Marx film: parts of it good; parts of it bad, but all of it strange. It's so strange it certainly holds your attention, and makes you feel like you're watching good stuff, but I don't know. That bit where they do a parody of Oh, Susannah in silly voices with Chico pulling a silly face. And the extras all kicking their legs up and holding contorted poses... Is it good? I just don't know.
Harpo at least has a bit of visual fun, and there's the nice bit where they all play a tune on the soldiers' helmets; this, of course, is what cheers up Woody Allen's character when he thinks he's going to die in Hannah and Her Sisters.

All God's Chillun Got Guns parodies the negro spiritual All God's Chillun Got Wings, which had also served as the title of a 1924 play by Eugene "Why, you couple of baboons" O'Neill. Rather charmingly in the present context, one verse begins "I got a harp, you got a harp / All o' God's chillun got a harp."
The song later served as inspiration for All God's Chillun Got Rhythm performed famously by Judy Garland and, of course, by Harpo and friends in A Day at the Races.

Incidentally, this whole sequence, and the above-mentioned song parody in particular, is probably the film's most generous bequest to those who would read satiric anti-war intent into the film. Slim pickings, say I.

55.30 - Harpo on the horse
A long and strikingly untypical sequence, which non-American readers may need reminding references Paul Revere's midnight ride. All very Laurel & Hardy, it features a cracking blonde (accompanied by an instrumental rendition of Ain't She Sweet) who should be, could almost be, but finally isn't Thelma Todd. Edgar Kennedy's back for more horseplay, and there's horseplay of a more literal sort as Harpo goes to bed with his horse, we see shoes and horseshoes on the floor, and the sound of neighing and comedy music fills the soundtrack. McCarey, go home!

57.40 - The battle scene
This final sequence has a few dud McCarey ideas (the library film of animals and athletes racing to Freedonia's aid certainly clangs) but overall it's as sound as a pound. The constantly changing uniforms (including, at one point, that of the boy scouts) is an agreeably carefree touch, there are some good jokes and, it has to be said, some strikingly cynical and black ones. The ending is hurried, and it just sort of gives out, but that's okay; the same thing happened in their previous three movies. It ends well.

62.02 - Chico's rhyme
What does he actually say? Well according to my script, it's:

Rrrrrrrrinspot, vonza, twoza, zig-zag-zav, Popti, vinaga, tin-li-tav, harem, scarem, merchan, tarem, tier, tore...

So now you know.

62.30 - "Goodbye, Mont Blanc, goodbye."
Here's where I show my ignorance more than usual: I'm sure this refers to something pretty straightforward, but I don't know what. Anyone?

Thin Soup?

2010-02-18T01:42:00.000-08:00

Okay, here we go.
The difficult one.
So before the annotated guide, let me try to explain myself.
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Duck Soup is one of those artifacts, like Psycho or the works of Shakespeare, where consensus is so rigid and passionate that anything less than adoration is taken as an insult. So unquestioned and elevated is its reputation that merely to say one likes it is taken to mean that one doesn't like it at all.
Now, I do like Duck Soup. A lot. In the first place, it's a Marx Brothers film, putting it automatically ahead of almost any other type of film, real or imaginary, in my affection and esteem. Second, it is, numerically at least, one of my favourite Marx Brothers films: my sixth favourite, of thirteen.
And yet, I do have a couple of bees in my bonnet about it that I would like to get out as quickly as possible. (It's bad enough that I'm still wearing a bonnet at my age, surely I can do without bees in it as well.)
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First bee: I do not think it is the best film the Marx Brothers ever made; I think that it is the weakest rather than the best of their five Paramount films.
Second bee: I do not think it is an anti-war satire.
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Let us begin with the first bee.
A friend of mine who hadn't seen Duck Soup for a while once reported back to me from a screening of it: "You know how it was supposedly MGM that first started enforcing rules on the Marx Brothers and messing with their comic style: well it started here!"
And this is pretty much how I feel about the movie. Regardless of what one's personal opinion of it may be, it is surprising to me that it is not more commonly seen as a reinvention of the team, a film that is for large stretches untypical of them, experimental in a sense, and that Leo McCarey deserves almost as much credit (or flak - again, delete according to preference) for taking the team and setting out to make something different of them, and more to his own personal taste, as Thalberg. He certainly made no bones about his lack of enthusiasm for the job - or the end product.
McCarey was a professional comedy director, a graduate of the Hal Roach studios and the man who teamed Laurel & Hardy. (He appears on their This Is Your Life show pissed as a fart with some yarn about how he teamed them because Ollie burned his arm cooking lamb.)
As such, he had some very fixed ideas about comedy, and he liked things done his way.
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The first sign that Leo's in charge and there's nothing we can do about it is the title, which had already seen service for a 1927 Laurel & Hardy short. Constantly throughout the film we see McCarey's hand, or more accurately his boot, tramping down and leaving its prints all over the ideas and the material. There is too much visual humour, and too much of it is silly. Too much is insufficiently tailored to the Brothers' own idiosyncratic talents. Too much of it could be done by any other comedians just as well.
For instance, consider the famous running joke where the call goes out for "His Excellency's car". Harpo pulls up in a motorbike and sidecar; Groucho gets into the sidecar and Harpo's bike pulls away leaving Groucho behind, going nowhere. A little later it happens again. Then, a little later still Groucho gets on the bike instead, instructing Harpo to get into the car, whereupon... well, you don't need me to tell you. You've seen the movie.
But here's the thing: you wouldn't need me to tell you even if you hadn't. Now, I'm not saying these bits aren't funny. I like them; I laugh at them. But this is not what makes the Marx Brothers great; it's not what they do. It's an old gag that McCarey found in the back of his locker when he left Hal Roach and it would be every bit as funny if it were Wheeler and Wolsey doing it, or Olsen and Johnson, or Hope and Crosby. Can you even be sure you haven't seen one or other of those teams doing it somewhere, or doing some other gag so similar in construction that it makes no difference? (PS: Angela has reminded me, after a first reading of this, that seventies British sitcom couple George & Mildred really do do it, in the opening credits of their series.)
But try and imagine Hope and Crosby doing the contract scene from A Night at the Opera. It would be impossible: the characters and delivery of Groucho and Chico are an integral part of the material.
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Then consider the scenes with Chico, Harpo and Edgar Kennedy. In the first place, the Brothers play best against straight straight men: Louis Sorin in Animal Crackers, Louis Calhern here, Sig Rumann. McCarey makes the elementary mistake of thinking that they'll be even funnier pitted against a supporting comic. Kennedy is a talented and likable presence in movies, and a wonderful foil to Laurel and Hardy, but he's wrong here. And the whole scene is wrong; it comes from nowhere, and the escalating aggression comes from nowhere, and it forces Chico and Harpo to behave in ways their characters are not normally required to behave.
What it is, all too clearly, is a Laurel and Hardy tit for tat routine, with the Marx Brothers grafted on. Harpo does his best to work in some original and characteristic business but it's still uphill, uninventive stuff. The climactic image of him paddling in the vat of lemonade is a wonderful one but the scene as written and developed has not earned the right to it. It's not just the strangely motiveless aggression displayed by all parties, nor the deliberate and contemplative pace, both obvious carry-overs from the Laurel & Hardy formula. Like too much else in the film it's simply not as clever as the material of their previous films. It's not as witty; not as New Yorky.
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This is the first Marx Brothers film that feels directed, obtrusively directed, where the direction is as important as the script. Their other directors either pointed the camera and just let them go off, or else took the written material, watched the performances and worked out the best way to get as much as possible of both effectively on the screen. That's certainly what McCleod did, and that's why he's my favourite of their directors. McCarey may have been more talented, but he gets in the way.
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I suppose the classic case in point is the mirror scene, entirely his contribution. This is one of those sequences usually hailed as among the team's very finest, placed alongside the stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera and the ice cream scam in A Day at the Races. These are the sequences often said to best represent the team for unfamiliar audiences.
I don't know. They may prove the most attractive to unwilling audiences, because they combine a superficial gloss of Marxian anarchy with a solid, mainstream comedy idea such as would appeal to almost anybody. But their best? Their most representative?
Yes, there are distinctive touches in the mirror sequence: the absurdity of Harpo's correctly guessing Groucho's every innovation designed to catch him out, his cheating on the 360 degree turn, their swapping positions yet still continuing the game, and best of all, the sublime moment when Chico appears. But the idea was as old as the hills, strongly associated with Max Linder but also predating him, and it is a purely technical exercise; it is mechanical comedy, a comedy idea waiting for the afterthought of a comedian.
Give me the Chevalier impressions in Monkey Business any day. Give me the auction scene in The Cocoanuts, the soiree scene in Animal Crackers. Their best material for me is by definition not to be found in those moments that convey most to unsympathetic audiences but those which most perplex and infuriate them. I've always thought they got the keenest pleasure - visibly so: watch their faces - when delivering material with the potential to annoy some audiences as thoroughly as Spaulding annoys his hosts, and Ravelli annoys Spaulding. The confusion of those unwilling to enter their world is as much a source of pleasure to them as the delight of those who feel at home there, and the confusion of the first contributes to the delight of the second.
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Much of Duck Soup, notably Chico's trial, Groucho in the Chamber of Deputies and Chico and Harpo's progress report to Ambassador Trentino is as fine as anything they ever did. But too much of it - think of the 'help is on the way' scene, or Harpo on his horse - does not play to their strengths and makes it all too easy - for them and for us.
. The only thing more likely to annoy the average Marx devotee than saying that you think Duck Soup is generally the weakest of their Paramount films is saying that you don't think it is an anti-war satire.
I, whose lot it is to believe both the statements above, am therefore a pariah twice over. My friends have abandoned me. Everywhere I go I am greeted with cold stares and mumbled recrimination. I once returned home to find my wall daubed with graffiti reading "Go Back to the Three Stooges".

So let us indulge in some context.
In 1933, the movie trade journals were buzzing about what they called the "Dictator craze" in American movies. At a time of widespread despondency, the obvious dynamism of Fascism was seen as stimulating and inspiring in many quarters of the West, including Hollywood (and Washington). In recognition of what to some degree Hitler, to a larger degree Stalin and to a massive degree Mussolini were all doing in the countries they ruled, a rash of films were produced about the vision, grit and resilience of one individual taking charge of failing institutions and revolutionising them.
There was Walter Huston as the dictatorial cop taking on organised crime in Beast of the City (1932), Spencer Tracy as the strike-breaking railroad tycoon in The Power and the Glory (1933), and Huston again as the weak President who, after a visitation from the Angel Gabriel, declares martial law, establishes himself as a dictator and saves America in Gabriel Over the White House (1933 again).
These ideas, drawn largely from the example of Mussolini, were presented as both viable and stimulating solutions to world, domestic and economic crises. A film from Columbia, Mussolini Speaks (1933 yet again!), was an unabashed paean to the virtues and achievements of Il Duce, dedicated "to a man of the people whose deeds for his people will ever be an inspiration to all mankind."
This was mainstream Hollywood: a condemnatory satire of such ideas was simply inconceivable.

Duck Soup, too, emerged in this year of the dictators: 1933. It is a comedy about the Fascist moment in Western culture, but it uses its subject without thought or true purpose. It is surprisingly frivolous about war, given its proximity to World War I, but in no way can it be called impassioned. It does not so much satirise political ideologies and programmes themselves as their manifestations in popular culture, above all in films like Gabriel Over the White House.
Freedonia as the film begins is in exactly the position of these institutions dynamised by dictators in the other movies: weakly governed by exhausted rulers, mismanaged and in economic dire straits. Mrs Teasdale, the main donor of the party, will continue to inject life-saving funds, but only if the present leaders are replaced by what she tellingly terms "a progressive, fearless fighter." ('Progressive' was the big buzz-word of Fascism; oddly it seems to have escaped its legacy.) So it is accepted that Freedonia will hand over all its powers to one man, on the grounds that he is progressive and fearless. This is the narrative of the dictator movies to a tee.
"From all reports the new leader will execute his duties with an iron hand," claims the newspaper we see announcing Firefly's appointment, and that he does, immediately making arbitrary and unjust decisions, and exempting himself from their influence. The death penalty will be extended not to those caught taking graft but only those who do not cut him into the deal. He forbids both whistling and chewing, conspicuously doing both himself, even as he lays down the injunction.
It will be recalled that the previous government had requested Teasdale's money so as to head off revolt by lowering taxes - Firefly has a more radical approach:
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The country's taxes must be fixed
And I know what to do with it.
If you think you're paying too much now,
Just wait till I get through with it.
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Few comic songs have been so genuinely sinister as well as funny; it rather resembles Ko-Ko's song ("I've got a little list...") from The Mikado, much beloved (and performed) by Groucho in later years.
. In a sense, the idea that the Groucho character would make a dictator is an obvious, irresistible one. It fitted easily with his new image, as established by Horse Feathers. Finding a plausible narrative place for Groucho - a basically impossible character in straight dramatic terms - was never a possibility (unless you were MGM and didn't give a toss). So far he had been a seedy incompetent, a fraudulent interloper and a stowaway; all of them basically excuses, the purpose of which was to allow him to be Groucho. Horse Feathers had tried something semi-new, basically by mingling Mr Hammer and Captain Spaulding, and having a knowingly anarchistic incompetent find his way to a position of overt responsibility. We don't know how on earth he got the job, but we don't ask.
It had worked well, so the transition from Professor to statesman in Duck Soup plays quite seamlessly by the same rules (or lack of rules). If Horse Feathers had not come first, the true focus of Duck Soup's parody - films like Gabriel Over the White House - might have seemed more obvious. The writers are not taking the piss out of Hitler and Mussolini: they're taking the piss out of Walter Huston and Spencer Tracy.
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But there is another reason why the film should not be read as condemnatory of Fascism. Fascism was not an unequivocally dirty word in 1933. Many people were openly admiring of much of its ideology and effects, and many were to be found in the Roosevelt administration.
Let us not forget that Freedonia's is not the first proudly waving banner we see in the film - before it even begins we see the imposing eagle of the NRA, the film colony's acknowledgement of support for the New Deal.
All the major studios, including Paramount, pledged their support, and made pro-Roosevelt movies. Universal's The Fighting President (I'll let you guess the year) was promoted with the tagline "America cries out to its fighting President: Show us the way and we will follow!" At Warners, Dick Powell plays a songwriter charged with composing an anthem to the NRA. The film is called The Road Is Open Again; I forget the year for a moment. I'm sure it'll come back to me.
Roosevelt's New Deal was explicitly centralist and widely compared to Fascism in its mechanics and dynamics - and with approval, what's more. Mussolini was a fan: he praised the New Deal publicly on several occasions. Roosevelt in return explained that "what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way."
The National Recovery Act was presided over by an ardent and self-described Fascist called Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, who ensured the eagle symbol of the NRA was widely likened to the Nazi swastika, and was every bit as ubiquitous in its home country.
"When every American housewife understands that the Blue Eagle on everything that she permits to come into her home is a symbol of its restoration to security," Johnson's rhetoric explained, "may God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird." (Such as Jacob Maged, the immigrant dry cleaner sentenced to three months in jail in 1934 for not charging enough to press a pair of trousers.)
Rallies and marches were staged for the mass pledging of allegiance; boy scouts swore an oath to "do my part for the NRA" and "only buy where the Blue Eagle flies." The Blue Eagle symbol flew on the premises of stores and businesses, and its imprimatur announces Duck Soup too.
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So, the film, like its predecessors in the Marx canon, fixes on ubiquitous currents in popular culture, in this case the 'Dictator Craze' (and, just as importantly, the Ruritanian fantasies that inform its settings and look). World War II was still in the unimagined and unimaginable future, and Fascism was not at this time linked in the public mind with war other than metaphorically (Mussolini had successfully waged war against his country's problems and FDR vowed to follow his lead, assuming "unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.") The plotline of the war between the two states more likely evolved via the interpolation of ideas from the Ruritanian stories. Political intrigue, rivalry and duplicitous attempts to overthrow heads of state or gain power of neighbouring territories are all rife in these stories (which take their inspiration from Anthony Hope's 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, but grew into a massive subgenre of popular literature and cinema).

If anything is being satirised in Duck Soup it is generic cliches; in so doing, themes such as war, dictatorship and Fascism are likewise subjected to Marxian irreverence, but they are not - surely - being scrutinised as such. They're just tossed into the pot along with everything else.
The Marxes win their war as cheerfully and foolishly as they wage it.
They are also, incidentally, right to go to war in the first place. Trentino really is plotting the overthrow and invasion of Freedonia - another point conveniently forgotten by those who would have us believe the film decries the futility and absurdity of militarism.

Marx Mysteries Solved While You Wait! Just ask the council...

2010-02-17T05:25:00.000-08:00

Hurrah!
The man I feared was destined to be known forever as Weirdo, the illusory sixth Marx Brother, has been identified, apprehended and charged.
If by any chance you've no idea what I'm talking about, you can either go back to here and start again, or if you'd rather, here's a quick update.
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Earlier this week, my friend Richard alerted me to this CD, on the EMI label, which proudly offers the purchaser some Groucho Marx Madness and isn't joking, since it insanely opted to put a picture of someone done up like Groucho on the cover rather than the genuine article:
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I was amused to see so prestigious an outfit as EMI making so elementary a gaffe, and was also keen to know just who it is under the greasepaint.
Since then, I've learned that the same mistake has been made many times, such as here:
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... and even, recently, by Penguin Books, who have reissued their Essential Groucho anthology with the same pesky interloper front of house:
. Under the circumstances, a somewhat ironic choice of title.
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Then, in what seemed like a couple of days, and not without reason, the answer arrived, courtesy of council member Tom, who wrote:

"Mystery solved! I know who this person is. He's Life Magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. I bought a copy of the book Life goes to the Movies back in 1976. The picture is on page 222."

And he's right, even about the page number, which is the sort of thing I'd be just as likely to get wrong, figuring that it doesn't really matter and it's easier to just guess if you've already put the book back on the shelf in another room. (I should perhaps stop and explain here that I keep most of my books in a different room from the one the computer's in, hence the scenario outlined in the previous sentence.)
And as proof, if proof be needed, and I always think proof be welcome even if it not necessarily be needed as such, we have this. (Thanks to council member and fellow Marx blogger David for the link. And for the Manly Blogger Guy Award, but that's another story.)
Or if you prefer your proof a little more visual, techno-savvy and eerie in a way you find it difficult to fully put your finger on, here's a picture of Eisenstaedt taken accidentally when he mistook his mirror for Groucho pretending to be him without make up and raised his camera in an effort to burst the illusion, followed by council member Damian's ingeniously photo-shopped moustache-free version of the CD cover pic:
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It makes you wonder if all men look like they're sucking an enormous gumball when you photoshop their moustache off or if there was something special about Alfred. Nonetheless, nasty swelling or no, the jury don't need to retire long before reaching their verdicts here.
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So thanks to Tom, Damian, David, Richard and everyone else who helped to make this half-century-old puzzle such a Rider Haggard-style page-turner.
And I leave you with the news that Penguin books have finally selected the cover photo for their forthcoming re-issue of The Groucho Letters:
. Apparently it was taken during an ad break on You Bet Your Life.

(Hey, David! Does this entitle me to a second Manly Blogger Guy Award?)

Because a picture of Groucho would have been too obvious...

2010-02-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

My friend Richard just alerted me to this.
I've heard of The Great Animal Crackers Doppelganger Mystery but this is ridiculous:
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A nice new CD of Groucho radio extracts - always welcome, always nice. I like listening to them as I drift off to sleep at night.
But who - I say who - is the half-arsed would-be lookalike on the cover???:
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We've all dressed up as Groucho at some point in our life, either for a party, to amuse our colleagues and loved ones, or to try and get free meals in hotels and restaurants.
But we don't end up on the front of official Groucho CD releases.
Which is ironic, because the chances are we look more like Groucho than this ding-dong does.
Let's see him again:
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Now come on! This guy looks more like Groucho than he does:
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And this guy looks a lot more like Groucho than he does:
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Let's face it, even this guy looks more like Groucho than he does:
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Somebody knows who he is. I wonder if David does, for instance. (I'm off to ask him as soon as I post this.)
It's not just someone dressed as Groucho for fun. My guess is it's someone who played him on tv or the stage once. He's obviously doing it professionally... which is more than EMI are, clearly.
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Oh, okay. Just once more:
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'Tis the season...

2009-12-22T10:27:00.000-08:00

Okay. I already wrote here about how my first encounter with the Marx Brothers was at Christmastime back in the dim distant prehistory of what, with pre-Orwellian irony, I still like to think of as 1983.
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I also mentioned, sort of casually, kind of half-jokingly - the way I do when I'm being deadly serious and fanatical - that I try to recreate that exact experience by rewatching the same films on the same nights at the same times.
And this year will be no exception.
But this time there's a big difference. I'm running a blog with 28 followers.
So I hereby invite you all to partake of the great annual Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1983 Basically Futile Watching Specific Marx Brothers Films At Specific Dates and Times Challenge.
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You may think it's a near-alarmingly pointless thing for a man like me to still be doing at my age. If so, think how much more idiotic it would be if you did it too! Without even the pathetic, skeletal pretence of justification that animates my poor tortured brain. I don't have much of an excuse, but you'll have none at all. So come join me! Let me know how you got on, what it was like and what kind of transcendent state you reached. Send me photos of yourself with the film clearly visible on a tv screen, holding a watch to confirm the time and the newspaper to confirm the day. We can do this!
In my case, the situation is made even more complicated by the fact that the following year BBC2 introduced me to another passion: Hammer Horror films. And needless to say, I try to do exactly the same thing with those. I detail this challenge over here, on my horror movie blog Carfax Abbey. Where there are clashes, I'll let you know how to get around it, should you wish to compound the absurdity of even contemplating actually doing this by contemplating doing both.
So get your diaries out; here come the dates. Cancel that party! Forget that Gordon Ramsay's Christmas Celebrity Foxhunting on Ice Special you were planning to watch instead.
Imagine by contrast the warm fraternal glow, imagine how - in the profoundest, most Dickensian sense - Christmassy it will feel, to be part of an esoteric community, all over the world (well, Britain and America, and one in France, oh - and an Australian), all linked in this one common aim. If any one of you actually does this, even with just one of the films, or even is still reading this now, as opposed to having given up somewhere back when I started going on about taking photos of yourself holding a newspaper, I will be both profoundly delighted and frankly surprised.
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23rd December, 10:30 pm: Monkey Business
.This was the one. I actually came in late for this one, somewhere around the Chevalier impressions. I'd seen the trailer for them all several times but was only mildly curious, had been out to some family party or other, and switched on casually when I got back home - only to encounter the funniest men of all time being funnier than anybody has ever been in the history of people being funny.
You can, if you wish, recreate the exact experience by starting your recording at 10.30 but leaving the television switched off until about five past eleven. Sometimes I like to do that; other times I just watch from the start. I say this to assure you that I'm not some kind of fanatic.
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Christmas Day, 11pm: Duck Soup
.Now, this is the curious one. My memory tells me that after cursing my ill-judgement and coming in late on Monkey Business I made sure I didn't miss a second of any of the rest. And yet, I have no specific memory of this first viewing of Duck Soup. I remember other things about that night: like, for instance the fact that my mother wanted to watch the All Creatures Great and Small special on BBC1 while my grandfather wanted to see Jimmy Tarbuck on ITV. But of watching Duck Soup later that night I recall nothing. Further, one of my clearest memories of Horse Feathers was of being surprised when Groucho begins singing at the start, and not realising that they did this. Perhaps I again missed the beginning? Or perhaps I really did miss the whole film? I just don't know. However, for this reason, it is permissible to watch it at 12.20 am on New Year's Day, when BBC1 showed it in 1984. I know I didn't miss it then. It's okay if you want to stretch the rules a little and do this. I won't mind. Too much. `
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28th December, 11.15 pm: Horse Feathers
.Here, perhaps, was the moment that a temporary fixation became a lifelong obsession. I just didn't know that anything could be this funny. And my father began watching them with me at this point. He likes to pretend he doesn't much care for them now, but the truth is we were weeping with laughter. When Harpo cuts the cards he rolled off the sofa on to the floor.
The bad news is that this clashes with a Hammer Horror double-bill over at Carfax Abbey. But I didn't actually watch those 'live' as it were. We got a video recorder in 1984, so I had the luxury of watching them the following morning. Feel free to do the same.
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29th December, 10.50 pm: A Night in Casablanca
.The BBC decided to test me by throwing in a late non-Paramount and see if I'd spot the difference. I did, but I couldn't quite place why. I remember my dad saying that it wasn't quite as good this time, and I think we both concluded that they were just not at their best the day they made this one. The truth is that the film is really pretty damned good to compare so favourably with the early-thirties faultless masterpieces. Not many of the MGMs would have stood up so well in such company. For that reason I've always had a soft spot for this film.
Hammer fans will note a thirty minute overlap between this and the 1984 showing of The Mummy, which began at 11.45 pm. Fortunately, however, I missed the first half hour of The Mummy, not by pretending to watch A Night In Casablanca instead, but because my sister wanted to record a programme about Duran Duran on ITV. So again, history solves a dilemma with almost eerie precision.
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30th December, 11.55 pm: Animal Crackers
.The last, and still, for me, the best. I realised by this time that I could not bear to say goodbye to these boys. So, placing a curse on all my friends with video recorders - I basically spent the whole of 1982, 3 and the first half of 1984 fantasising about video recorders; I still love handling those tapes - I rigged up my little portable cassette recorder and taped the soundtrack. No direct linking cables or anything, just a tiny little mic inset in the machine, capturing the full gamut of household sounds along with the movie. So many times did I play it over the following years (until we finally got a Betamax video and I made the film one of my first purchases) that I still find myself mildly surprised that a door doesn't slam when Harpo makes his first entrance.
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So there we are. All you need for the merriest Christmas ever. You may do more important things this year. But it's unlikely you'll get a chance to expend energy achieving anything quite so senseless.
Let's go!
And we'll be back in the new year with an annotated Duck Soup, that long-promised discussion of the Marx Brothers' films and the rise of European fascism, and lots more!
Thanks for making this first year of the Council such fun.
Merry Christmas,
Matthew.

Uncut "Night at the Opera" discovered! Can "Humor Risk" be far behind?

2009-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

The ever-excellent Jennifer, normally to be found holding court at Flappers and Flickers and Silent Stanzas, brings me the momentous news that the uncut and free-to-make-references-to-Italy version of A Night at the Opera has finally been found - and right where I always thought it would be.

Hungary.
Follow the link to read the full story, and then petition MGM or Warners or whoever the hell it is that owns the rights to put out a new DVD featuring both versions.
And happy birthday, Groucho!

Stop Press 15/11/9:

Original council member and all-round good egg Eugene Conniff has brilliantly celebrated the find in splendid illustrated form over at his blog The Poison From My Brain.

I cannot recommend it highly enough, and my only question is what you're still doing here, trying to decipher the miniscule text on my reproduction, when all you have to do is click on the link and there it'll be, all big and colourful.

Maxine Marx, RIP

2009-09-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

Another link to the Brothers is broken: Chico's daughter Maxine Marx passed away last week at the ripe age of 91.

Maxine was the author of Growing Up With Chico, a hugely enjoyable memoir and - I believe I'm correct in saying - the only book to date devoted solely to the great Leonard Marx. (Whereas books solely on the subject of brother Julius currently stand somewhere in the higher squillions.)

In the book, she recalls that one of the last things her father said to her before his death was:

"Remember, honey, don't forget what I told you. Put in my coffin a deck of cards, a mashie niblick, and a pretty blonde."

Maxine Marx, hail and farewell!

(Thanks to Jennifer at Flappers and Flickers and Silent Stanzas for the tip-off.)

Marx Brothers Place Update!

2009-08-16T08:47:00.000-07:00

The Council received the following letter today from Susan Kathryn Hefti of the 93rd Street Beautification Association (oh, and they linked to us here!):

Dear Matthew,
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We don't know whether you have had a chance to see our Marx Brothers Place videos on YouTube, but we would love to invite you & your readers to give our Channel Page a whirl whenever you can find a moment to do so: http://www.youtube.com/user/MarxBrothersPlace.

Also, as we did finally manage to get the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) Chair here this past spring (along with the politicians we have been contacting), we are now asking that folks send the follow-up message (link for the message: http://the-marx-brothers-place-report.blogspot.com/2009/05/beyond-lintels.html) which addresses the issues raised by LPC Chair Robert Tierney when he was here.

And we do have a new preservation movie coming out soon (probably the 1st week of September when most people have returned from frolicking). We plan to launch the new movie on our YouTube Channel page, but we'll be sure to include you in the Press Release announcing its debut!

Thanks again for letting folks know about our campaign to help save Marx Brothers Place!!!
Please keep in touch!

with all best wishes,
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Susan Kathryn Hefti
Co-Chair, 93rd Street Beautification Association

He's daffy over sugar in the morning

2009-08-16T01:45:00.000-07:00

Way back in the Animal Crackers annotated guide, I wrote the following on the subject of the tune Chico plays (and cannot stop) that also reappears in a number of later movies:

48:34 - Sugar in the Morning

The first appearance of what became Chico's unofficial theme tune, also known as Sugartime, reappearing in different contexts in Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and elsewhere. But there's some confusion here. The IMDB does not list this piece, and refers instead to Chico's "trademark song" I'm Daffy Over You, written by Chico and Sol Violinsky. So: huh? Perhaps some musicologist could explain...

It's almost like someone up there was listening. I've just received the following from Mikael Uhlin, of the Marxology site (http://www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/):

Regarding Chico's theme song, this is what the late Frank Bland found out:

(from http://www.marx-brothers.org/whyaduck/sounds/midi.htm)- - - -

Motion picture audiences first heard what I call The Chico Motif (TCM) in the film version of Animal Crackers in 1930. This is the tune most people confuse with the McGuire Sisters' 1958 hit, Sugartime. While Sugartime bears a strong resemblance to TCM, the fellow who wrote the former wasn't even born when Chico began playing this theme.

Over the years, this theme became closely associated with Chico and was often used to introduce him on radio and television. Always a solid businessman, Chico knew a good thing when he saw (or heard) it. By 1933 Chico had published at least two separate songs using TCM. The first is a song credited (words and music) to Chico Marx and Sol Violinsky, and called I'm Daffy Over You.

(Note: There is a published version of the script from Monkey Business that erroneously refers to this song as Sugar In The Morning, further confusing the issue. This script was published after Sugartime [aka Sugar in the Morning - MC] was released, and was probably someone's attempt to identify the tune without doing the research necessary.)

The second tune to utilize TCM is the Chico Marx, Benny Davis, Sol Violinsky collaboration, Lucky Little Penny. While there is a very slight difference in the melody during the introduction and bridge (and the introduction is much shorter), the feel and structure of this tune is identical to I'm Daffy Over You.

Horse Feathers: Annotated Guide

2009-07-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

(NB: The timings refer to the presently available Universal DVD version of the film and do not, obviously but alas, include allowances for the missing portions.)
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0:01 - Huxley College
Ah, the great days of progressivism in America. Two rival colleges, both named after proponents of evolution. For years I assumed that Huxley and Darwin were real life rivals rather than colleagues, because the colleges are rivals in this film.
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2:34 - "That's the spirit - 1776!"
No American will need this joke explained, but to we Europeans it may be worth pointing out that 'the spirit of '76' is the spirit of American pride relating to the signing of the declaration of independence. Variations on the joke occur elsewhere, one is in the Three Stooges short Disorder in the Court where, believe it or not, it is done rather more subtly than here.
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2:56 - "Hello, old timer!"
This charming introduction of Zeppo as Frank Wagstaff, Groucho's son, has for some reason been messed about with in the editing, so that this moment, obviously intended to follow the line "where is my son?" has been moved to follow the later "would you mind getting up so that I can see the son rise?" Thus Zeppo appears to get up, then instantly be sitting down again, then acknowledge the father he has already acknowledged as if for the first time.
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3:48 - Whatever It Is, I'm Against It / I Always Get My Man

The first of Groucho's fascist songs, in which he brags of being an irresponsible law unto himself with more power than he deserves and is able or willing to use wisely, and freely states his intention to put his own interests ahead of the office he nominally serves, a formula (both narrative and musical) copied even more alarmingly in the subsequent Duck Soup.
Much confusion has arisen around this aspect of the Marx legacy. My own feeling is that it is comedic, and parodic, but not satiric. In other words: in no way are the Marx Brothers standing outside of, or counselling against, the fascist moment then sweeping Europe and America. I will explain further in a separate, forthcoming post. Bet you can't wait.
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5:12 - "No matter if he's in Peru, Paducah or Japan..."
I quote this line not because it needs explanation, but merely on the off-chance that, like me, you first heard it at the age of ten and took it to be "no matter if he's imferoofadoofer or Japan". It isn't. Sadly.
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5:18 - Huh?
What do the Professors sing here? I don't know. The Universal DVD subtitlers don't know...
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5:27 - "Like Shakespeare said to Nathan Hale..."
A nice bit of historical mangling; Shakespeare obviously said nothing to Nathan Hale, who was born two centuries later.
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9:07 - Familiar Marx Face (1): Nat Pendleton
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Pendleton, as football player MacHardie, was a former Olympic wrestler turned Hollywood tough guy, who also turns up as Goliath, the villainous strong man in At The Circus. He also appeared in a few other college pictures, had a recurring role in the Dr Kildare series, and essayed one of Hollywood comedy's definitive bullying sergeants in Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates, a role he pleasingly reprised in the wistful post-war sequel Buck Privates Come Home. He died in 1967, from too many muscles.
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9:37 - Enter Baravelli
Chico's character is introduced to the delightful accompaniment of a speakeasy pianola version of his theme song I'm Daffy Over You. This and later pianola tunes heard in the film's speakeasy scenes reappear in a number of contemporaneous Paramount movies with bar-room or speakeasy settings. The tune heard at 14:40 is You're the One I Crave, sung by Miriam Hopkins in a really sexy nightclub sequence in the previous year's Paramount film 24 Hours, also starring Cocoanuts femme fatale Kay Francis.
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11:18 - "I'd walk a mile for a calomel."
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Triple confusion here between calomel (another name for mercurous chloride, used as a laxative, disinfectant and treatment for syphilis until the early 20th century, and what Baravelli takes for a haddock), caramel (you mean chocolate calomel"), and a Camel - the brand of cigarette whose advertising slogan Groucho is quoting.
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12:12 - "I'd like to get a cup of coffee."
Previous Marx films had referenced the stock market crash, now we see a typical 'forgotten man' of the Great Depression.
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16:00 - Thelma Todd, the College Widow
For years I wondered what a college widow was, and nobody seemed to know. Louvish freely admits that he doesn't. It's actually quite simple. She's a heartbreaker. A man-eater. A black widow. The girl who toys with the affections of men, then discards them when a better prospect appears. Every college has one, it seems. There is also a sexual connotation, of course. In our more liberated times, we might say 'the college bike'. A college widow in this sense is desirable enough to be hugely sought after but capable only of short-term, frivolous relationships; she puts it about for her own gain, and she's not into commitment. (Apparently, the second half of posh English Flanders and Swann-style piano duo Kit and the Widow owes his nickname to his own comparable university reputation.)
Notwithstanding its present-day obscurity, in America in the twenties and early thirties the term was widely used and understood, inspiring books, plays and films. A college widow stood for something in those days. In fact she stood for plenty.

16:30 - Herbert Marx says I love you

One of the most charming aspects of the film is the way in which all four Brothers are given their own interpretation of Kalmar and Ruby's spendid song Ev'ryone Says I Love You. Zeppo gets the first crack at it, and it's no surprise that his is the straightest version. But it's a delightful number, and he performs it most endearingly, while buttering toast and feeding it to Thelma. (Incidentally, the line "the tiger in the jungle and the monk in the zoo" does not refer to the now forgotten practice of caging monks in zoological gardens for the delectation of daytrippers, but rather to the equally forgotten popular currency of 'monk' as a synonym for 'monkey', as in the famous cartoon strips from which, according to one story, the name 'Groucho' was taken: see here.)
An instrumental version of the song is featured in a Paramount Hollywood on Parade short made the same year, danced to by puppets manipulated by Bob Bromley's Famous Olivera Puppeteers. Bromley is often credited with being the first man to introduce 'cabaret puppetry', in which the puppeteer is visible to the audience, was the first puppeteer to appear on BBC television, and created the first puppet stripper, which he presented at the Folies Bergere among other venues.
Later, of course, the song would serve as the title of Woody Allen's Marx reference-suffused musical.

17:29 - Arthur Marx says I love you

Or whistles it, rather. Alone among the four, Harpo gets two shots at the number. This first, whistling version, is dedicated not to Thelma but to a horse, recalling Margaret Irving's line in Animal Crackers: "You love a horse?" He later plays it on the harp (at 39:51), while Thelma the college widow watches from an upstairs window. Arthur is lost in music, Thelma smiles, is beautiful, and all is right with the world.

18:27 - Familiar Marx Face (2): Ben Taggart
The bulky actor, who played dozens of usually uncredited thugs and dumb cops, seen here harassing Harpo in the street, is also the rather more refined ship's captain in Monkey Business and Mr Lee, the theatrical agent, in that film's accompanying I'll Say She Is-derived promo.

20:15: Cooling heels and waxing wroth

The poor actress tasked with delivering these two utterly thankless feedlines to Groucho deserves special mention here for her heroic, unbilled devotion to the cause of groanworthy puns. (In fact the entire cast, with the exception of the Brothers, Thelma and villain David Landau, are uncredited). Her name is Sheila Bromley, and she kept busy in the industry in walk-ons and bits well into the tv era. She died in 2003. Is she any relation to Bob Bromley, of stripping puppet fame, I wonder?
As for the term 'waxing wroth', it is an old English expression; 'waxing' meaning 'growing' or 'becoming' - as in 'waxing poetic' - and 'wroth' meaning 'wrathful' or 'majorly p.o.-ed'. The phrase turns up in Edmund Spenser's Mutabilitie ("Thereat Jove wexed wroth") and reappears in Joyce's Ulysses, among others. Its appearance in Horse Feathers, however, is the only time it ever got a laugh.

21:58 - "looks like a tongue war!"

Obviously a pun on 'tong war', the popular journalistic term for eruptions of sometimes murderous gang rivalry between competing factions of Chinese immigrants in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century America. Tong wars and talk of tong wars featured frequently in American films of the thirties, fascinated as they were by exoticism and orientalism.

22:13 - Harpo burns books
How many times have you read that this harmless, funny little Harpo throwaway is an ominous portent of Nazi book burning? Silly. And also ironic, considering the unacknowledged debt the film owes to contemporary American fascism (see 3:48 and forthcoming on this site...)

22:33 - "There's your coat..."

I always thought the garment that Groucho hands Chico here - a large, shapeless fur coat - was meant to be silly, the moment a mere gesture of Marxian eccentricity. In fact, it would have been instantly recognisable to any fan of the legion of Hollywood college pictures that this film satirises, or indeed to any student of a real college at around this time: in the manner of John Held's iconic illustrations, "galoshes and raccoon coats were indispensable to every male undergraduate wardrobe", writes Corey Feld in The Time of Laughter. Hence Chico's coat, hence the galoshes Groucho keeps taking off and putting back on again.

23:29 - Familiar Marx Face (3): Robert Greig

The biology professor with the bushy stuck-on beard (later stolen from him and worn, in the manner of Roscoe Chandler's birthmark, by Harpo) is this delightful English actor, frequent Hollywood butler and recurring member of the Preston Sturges rep company, who also plays Hives, Mrs Rittenhouse's butler in Animal Crackers.

23:49 - "Ten cents a dunce"

A straightforward pun on the popular song Ten Cents a Dance, which details with unsentimental realism the lot of the Depression-era taxi dancer. (Taxi-dancing figures frequently in early thirties movies, a nice example being the Thelma Todd-Zasu Pitts short Asleep in the Feet.) The song was sung most popularly by the magnificent Ruth Etting, and the year before Horse Feathers had inspired a movie of the same name, directed by Lionel Barrymore, starring Barbara Stanwyck and co-written by occasional Marx scribe Jo Swerling.

Ten cents a cigar: Ruth Etting rests her feet for a moment

26:09 - "The Alps are a very simple people, living on a diet of rice and old shoes."
I love this joke because it is such a throwaway bit of pure Groucho nonsense. It cannot possibly be scripted, and it means nothing to the audience, because it is only later that we get a good close-up of what he's talking about, by which time the joke is forgotten. It obviously occurred to him on set, when confronted with the anatomical chart to which he is referring. The 'rice' is an illustration of coiled intestines; the 'old shoes' are two internal organs which look - very, very vaguely - like a pair of extremely battered old shoes. A truly great comedian amusing himself is invariably a wonder to behold.

Harpo contemplates mortality on the set of Horse Feathers

27:44 - "According to Von Steinmetz, the eminent physiologist..."
The only eminent Von Steinmetz I have been able to track down was not a physiologist but a German general in the Napoleonic wars.

34:16 - Leonard Marx says I love you
Chico's version of the song is the most upbeat, with room found for his own particular brand of verbal confusion. (The rooster "when he hollers" says not 'cock-a-doodle-doo' but 'cock-a-doodly-doodly-doo'.) Especially worthy of note is another variation on the historical flexibility that enabled Shakespeare to say "I always get my man" to Nathan Hale, this time a hypothetical encounter between Christopher Columbus (or Columbo as Chico would have it) and Pocahontas.

14:19 - Julius Marx says I love you

Groucho's rendition of the number is the only one to offer a sour, cynical and ironic take on the sentiments of its title. It's in keeping with his screen image as the arch-debunker, but may also be read as a slightly poignant reflection on the man's own real-life sentiments. The documentary The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell uses it as counterpoint to one interviewee's claim that his third wife Eden Hartford had once said she would never have left Groucho if he had even once told her he loved her. The atmosphere in Groucho's home has been recalled by many as an austere, chilly and rather joyless one, and his off-screen persona as one that displayed affection only reluctantly and intermittently. It is telling to note that, while the philandering Chico remained married to his first wife to the end, Groucho was divorced three times. Everyone says 'I love you', but just what they say it for I never knew. It's just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who says 'I love you'...
On a lighter note, this is one of the few occasions on film where we get a chance to see Groucho playing his beloved guitar. (Other examples are to be found in his solo film A Girl in Every Port, while ridin' the range in Go West and, briefly and manically, in Monkey Business. For more on this subject, see here.

44:51: "You know this is the first time I've been out in a canoe since I saw the American tragedy?"

Groucho is here referring to the 1931 Paramount film An American Tragedy directed by Josef von Sternberg, based on the 1925 novel by Theodore Dreiser. Inspired by real events, the book pivots on a sequence in which the main character takes his pregnant mistress for a canoe ride in upstate New York, strikes her on the head with a camera, knocking her overboard, and leaves her to drown while he swims ashore. Professor Wagstaff evidently fears something similar happening to him.

46:43 - "Throw me a life-saver!"
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Boiled sweets with holes in the middle, creating a resemblance to a life-saving ring and therefore inspiring their name. Available in mint and mixed fruit flavours, they seem to be more or less the same thing as the British Polo mints and fruits.
Needless to say, Thelma was after a real life-saver, not a boiled sweet with a hole in the middle, as she has just fallen in the lake. A popular story that often turns up in writing on this film claims that Thelma in fact could not swim and is in real peril here, having to be saved by crew members. This can't be true, of course, if not for the obvious fact that she would not have begun the scene in ignorance of how it transpires then surely for the equally obvious one that there's quite a bit of dialogue after she falls in - game of her to keep going like that. However, that there may have been more to the scene originally than in the version we now have is perhaps suggested by the two shots of Groucho at 46:45 and 46:49, where he appears to have unnaturally flat and slicked-down hair, suggesting a dunking of his own, or at least a far more thorough drenching than he receives in the final cut.

46:53 - Harpo's hat
Note how, from this point on, it reads 'Kidnapper' rather than 'Dog Catcher'. Just wonderfully, wonderfully clever.

52:26 - Harpo crying
And not mock-crying or funny crying, either. For just one shot he is in genuine distress, with fat, wet tears streaming down his face. An odd decision on somebody's part.

52:50 - Familiar Marx Face (4): Arthur Sheekman

Grrr. That's all I have to say. Grrr.
There I was, watching this film to make notes for this post, and for the first time ever my eye alighted on the chap sitting next to the radio announcer, typing and smoking a cigarette. He looks like someone, I thought to myself. Rather, he looks like he is someone - an in-joke rather than a walk-on. From somewhere in my memory I dredged a vague impression of Groucho's friend, Marx script contributor and Gloria Stuart-marrying lucky bastard Arthur Sheekman. I got out my Mitchell encyclopaedia, which had a photo - revealing a striking correspondence between the two in the area of hairline and enormous ears - and an entry which made no mention of him making a cameo in this film. Hooray! I have the scoop this piece had otherwise lacked - my own big discovery! Arthur Sheekman makes a hitherto-unspotted appearance in Horse Feathers!
Then I look the film up on the IMDB and there he is: 'Arthur Sheekman: Typing Sportswriter (uncredited)'. Damn the IMDB and damn him and damn you too.
So anyway, the guy smoking a cigarette and typing next to the radio announcer is Arthur Sheekman. But you probably knew that already.

54:58 - "Hey, which way a-you going?"

Note Chico's limp as he makes for the stretcher, and the heavy-duty kneepads he wears throughout the football scene. This is because of a real traffic accident in which he had shattered part of his leg. Sad to say, but it is probably only his inability to do physical stuff in these sequences that accounts for Zeppo's pleasingly central presence in them (and may, at a push, account for the deletion of the inexplicable 'Zeppo being ironed' shot - was he originally to have been invalided out of the game???) On the very rare occasions when Chico is needed for physical action, an especially poor, obviously eleventh-hour stand-in is substituted, seen most clearly at 62:25. The hat doesn't even fit!

62:46 - Harpo wins the game
63:00 - Thelma marries the Marx Brothers

These two scenes show exactly what the Marx Brothers had in their earliest films and lost thereafter. The fact that Harpo's ridiculous behaviour with the rubbish cart and the multiple balls actually wins the match for Huxley to the satisfaction of the judges reflects the complete disinterest on the part of the writers, director and the Marxes themselves in having the movie conform in even the most cursory way to the rules of cinema story-telling. Compare it with The Freshman, where we have a real emotional investment in how the game turns out. What the Marx Brothers were offering was a different kind of comedy - totally new - in which a 69 minute feature can end with a degree of wild frivolity that other comedians could not have gotten away with in a two-reel short. This anarchistic abandon is part of that Broadway irreverence they brought to the movies, and it was not to survive the Depression. It was, indeed, one of the key aspects of their work that Thalberg targeted and dismantled. He thought it made them unpopular. Who knows, he could have been right. But look at what he made them do instead. Look at the boring, unpleasant and depressingly straight horserace finale of A Day at the Races. The difference in a nutshell.
Now let us turn to the last scene in the film, in which Thelma marries all three brothers at once, who then jump on her during the ceremony. (I say all three, because the fourth figure, stood almost unnoticeably behind Thelma and summarily pushed out of shot by Harpo when the fun begins, is presumably not Zeppo. Why on earth was he not included here?)
Now, in its own short, silly, not all that inspired way, this could be the most subversive of all Marx endings, especially coming as it does straight after the debacle of the climactic football game. This is a collective Marxian bird to all the rules of cinematic comedy, propriety and narrative convention. It is an explosion of sheer comic energy.

Say, Herbert... That you in the dark?

2009-07-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

Original council member Eugene Conniff has opened a whole new can of worms on the matter of the Marx Brothers Doppelganger Conspiracy, the scene in Animal Crackers in which Groucho, Chico and Harpo are represented by doubles (see here).
He's drawn my attention to this bit of speculative Youtubery, in which it is suggested that the fake Groucho is in fact none other than Zeppo, whose legit appearances in the film are so few in number and brief in duration that they amount to little more than a cameo.
If you look at the brightness-enhanced clip, it is true that in certain shots he does look very much like Herbie Marx.
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But then, you always have to be careful on these occasions that you're not simply seeing what you want to see.
To test that hypothesis, I watched it again, this time pretending that I was convinced it was Claudette Colbert. Ironically, I now remain convinced that it is.
Truth is, yes it looks like Zeppo in some shots, and in others it doesn't. What we're seeing here, I think, is a mingling of the now increasingly widely accepted fact that it isn't Groucho, with the old story of Zeppo substituting for him once and nobody noticing - a story which may well be apocryphal but which ostensibly took place on stage and pre-dates this film by many moons.
The Youtube posters certainly reveal something of the perils of wishful thinking when they go on to speculate that Zeppo can be discerned impersonating Groucho's voice, when one of the most obvious giveaways that it is a double in the first place is the imprecise manner in which he is miming to a soundtrack - the voice is unquestionably Groucho's own.
In addition, it is not merely Groucho but all three present brothers being doubled: if it is merely Zeppo doing Groucho as an in-joke, why the third-rate Chico and Harpo stand-ins?
Sorry, but I'm not buying this one.
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But while we're here, let's stroll down oddity cul-de-sac with some more great Zeppo moments...

For ages - until after I first posted it if I'm honest - I thought this image of Groucho ironing Zeppo during the football match in Horse Feathers was merely the deranged, drug-fuelled fantasy of the artist that drew this DVD sleeve. But no - the scene really existed, as shown below. Still an inexplicable choice for the DVD cover image, though.
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. Zeppo's impersonation of a Red Indian putting the move on what would appear to be Charlie Ruggles
.Zeppo's impersonation of former President Richard Nixon

OFFICIAL: The Marx Brothers Council of Britain is One Lovely Blog

2009-07-15T03:06:00.000-07:00

Lolita at Lolita's Classics, a long-standing supporter of the Council, has honoured us with the One Lovely Blog Award.
The rules state that in order to accept the award, the recipient must
a) name the person that gave it to them,
b) post a photograph of themselves driving a tractor in a pinstripe suit,
and c) pass on the award to other deserving sites, letting their authors know that they have been chosen.

It is only fair to point out that as far as passing awards on goes, I have been known to be the kiss of death. When I got a Splash Award over at Movietone News, I passed it on to this man in a cute bow-tie for his fascinating blog Laurel or Hardy. That was back in April and the poor sod has never posted since.
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So, with the utmost concern for the productivity of my chosen recipients, and, as this is a Marx Brothers blog, with a focus squarely on vintage comedy, I hereby pass the One Lovely Blog Award on to the following.
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Firstly, of course, to my fellow Marxian David, over at The Marx Brothers. Here, as I'm sure you all already know, you will find a wealth of speculation, anecdote and oddity, as well as photographs of Marx figurines stood next to small plastic ducks. David also has a site called Lugubrious Drollery that is likewise much to be recommended; I particularly liked the sausage-shaped lorries and the photograph of the small plastic rooster illuminated by a flashlight. Have a Lovely Blog Award, David!
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As to other comedy blogs, I found, alas, no really good websites on WC Fields, The Ritz Brothers, Bob Hope or Betty Boop, but anyone who salutes El Brendel deserves a rousing cheer back, so my second award goes to Louie at Give Me The Good Old Days!, a feast of all things vintage and cinematic, with a special recurring emphasis on everybody's favourite synthetic Swede. Have a Lovely Blog Award, Louie!
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Gong number 3 goes to this lovely Chaplin site which is written in Spanish, but click on the Google Translate button and you'll get an English approximation every bit as funny as The Immigrant. Lots of nice stuff on the films, plus the author photoshopped to look like Adenoid Hynkel and the theme from Limelight played on panpipes. Have a lovely Blog Award, Ruben!

Lastly, the fourth and final award goes to Christmas Cartoons Specials - a gourmet banquet of old Christmas tv ephemera. Frankly, if the sight of this doesn't lift your heart then you don't have one to lift, and you belong in Pottersville with all those nightclubs and Donna Reed in frumpy glasses and her hair in a bun. Have a Lovely Blog Award, Robby!

Smutty business at Keith's, Flushing

2009-06-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Damian, partly for designing our spiffy new header, and also for hitting upon this charming ad for one of the mini-touring shows incorporating bits of other shows that the Brothers used to do between proper shows.

The heading identifies them as the stars of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers - that, and the films listed beneath, safely dates this as 1930.

In tiny type that defies you to read it, we learn that they are appearing in person with a 17 strong cast in The Schweinerei. Schweinerei, Damian assures me, is defined in the wictionary as
mess, nastiness, smutty business, (lit:) piggishness.

We are urged to "come and greet them and get your laugh of a lifetime".

It comes from this photostream, dedicated to saving the historic RKO Keith's Theatre. The pictures, of this and other ads plus great shots of the theatre in its heyday and now in heartbreaking disrepair, are well worth a look.

Late arrival at the Animal Crackers odd advertisements ball

2009-06-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

These ones were strange, but this one is just plain strange. (And thanks for it to Louie at "Give me the good old days!")

Looks like the jungle animals from this one have been rounded up and put in a box, and they've got Lillian Roth to sit on them so as to make sure they don't escape. (Great to see a bona fide caricature of Lillian, rather than just some woman, as is usually the most you'll get from these artists.)
Harpo is his usual obliging self, opting to pull Lillian and the animals along on a rope, while Chico (the carniverous crook) and Zeppo (the zestful zaney - only slightly less bizarre than a zestful zancy, which is how I read it at first) simply watch from the middle-distance in revolutionary transparent suits and hats. Zeppo, in keeping with his reduced role in the film, has decided to leave his legs at home.
Meanwhile Groucho, true to form, leans on his famous upside-down walking stick.
But what's this? One of the tiny elephants has escaped, and is being merrily ridden from the scene by that pesky miniature Harpo, up to his tricks again.

I don't know about you, but this is a film I want to see.

Anyone know what a faint-stepping funster is, and where I can buy one?

Hot Toddy (the woman, not the drink)

2009-06-11T05:31:00.000-07:00

From At the Circus -
Groucho: You know, if you hadn't sent for me I'd probably be home now in a nice warm bedroom, in a comfortable bed, with a hot toddy. That's a drink!
Chico: At'sa too bad!
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Thelma Todd (1905-35), aka Hot Toddy, usually described (by me as much as anyone else) as 'a vivacious ice-cream blonde', was most decidedly not a drink.
One of the foremost comediennes of thirties Hollywood, she appears with the Brothers in Monkey Business and Horse Feathers and, possibly because her participation in these films is invariably - if absurdly - described as a 'replacement' for Margaret Dumont, it seems to me that she has never quite received her due for the splendid showing she gives in both movies.
As gangster's wife Lucille in Business she is a wonderful straightwoman for Groucho, while in Feathers as 'college widow' Connie Bailey she is even more; she's a fully-fledged team player.
Few female stars of thirties comedy combined her degree of decorativeness with such genuine comedic assurance.

Rare was the great comedian of the thirties who did not call on her services at least once, and they were always enlivened by the association. There are not all that many pressing reasons for watching Buster Keaton's Speak Easily (1932): by far the most compelling one is his very funny and oddly erotic drunk scene with Thelma.
She also teamed most notably with Charley Chase in twelve of his thirties shorts (see especially All Teed Up [1930] and The Pip From Pittsburgh [1931, of which more here]) and Laurel and Hardy in three shorts and the features The Devil's Brother (1933) and The Bohemian Girl (1936), released after her death.
Most important of all her comedy work, though oddly overlooked even today, are the series of shorts she made for Hal Roach starring herself and either Zasu Pitts or Patsy Kelly. Roach's aim was to create a female Laurel & Hardy; fortunately the films themselves transcend such crude mechanics and give Thelma in particular some of her best chances to shine. (I discuss this series at length here.)
What is often forgotten, however, is that she was also a more than capable dramatic actress: witness her work in the superb Counsellor At Law (1933) with John Barrymore and the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon.
Nonetheless it was with comedy that her name was indelibly associated, prompting director Roland West to change her name to Alison Lloyd when he gave her the dramatic lead in Corsair (1931), so as to shake off her pratfalling reputation. (On hearing of this, Hal Roach announced that when she returned to his studios he too would change her name, this time to Susie Dinkleberry, "so that no taint of drama will cling to her pyjamas.")
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Her work with the Brothers is superb, and characteristic of Roach's own assessment that her value to his comedies was her combination of elegance and sexiness with a willingness to fall on her ass and take a pie in the face. Because she is genuinely sexy there is a sincerity to Groucho's sexual pursuit of her that contrasts markedly with his essentially mocking wooing of Dumont, and this desirability also creates a different dynamic when time comes for her to get thrown in the lake, or jumped and sat on by all the Marx Brothers at once.
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As all Hollywood Babylon fans know, Thelma died tragically of carbon monoxide poisoning in her locked garage. It appears to be one of those occasions when the conspiracy theorists, through no fault of their own, actually got it right. Appallingly, this wonderfully talented woman was almost certainly murdered.
The garage connection makes it de rigueur to quote Groucho's line from Monkey Business: "You're a woman who's been getting nothing but dirty breaks; well, we can clean and tighten your brakes but you'll have to stay in the garage all night." But for years the line was habitually misquoted as "Now you be a good girlie, or I'll lock you in the garage." Quite why it was misremembered in this way I have no idea, but it went round like wildfire, and you can find it thus quoted in upwards of a dozen books, including Andy Edmonds's compulsive if occasionally flighty biography Hot Toddy.
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Hal Roach eulogised her thus: "She was a favourite with everyone on the lot from the lowest employee to the highest. She was always joyous and happy... She was well-loved, and we will miss her."
The 82 year-old Groucho had his own memories of her in Richard Anobile's Marx Brothers Scrapbook, an equally infuriating and invaluable book that Groucho hated because it printed verbatim several long interviews more than generously salted with ribald comments he assumed were off the record.
Discussing the Paramount years, he recalled:
You know who I thought was cute? Thelma Todd. She worked in a couple of our pictures. I wanted to fuck her.
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(Thanks to Lolita for the drunk scene!)

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

2009-05-21T09:26:00.001-07:00

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

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.

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

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).

Monkey Business: Annotated Guide

2009-05-21T03:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-19T23:11:00.002-07:00

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?

2009-05-19T23:11:00.001-07:00

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

2009-05-18T01:22:00.002-07:00

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.

The Ring Thing (continued)

2009-05-18T01:22:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-05-17T23:53:00.001-07:00

(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

2009-05-13T03:18:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-05-11T03:41:00.000-07:00

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

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?'

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'.

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..

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.

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.

What did you do, Cyril?

2009-05-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

Further to my post here about Marx mystery man Cyril Ring (sneaky Harvey Yates in Cocoanuts), I've received a fascinating communiqué from Mary O'Benar, who lives in Florida and has been pondering the Ring Enigma for some time.

Extracts from her letter follow...

I've been looking for Cyril Ring for several years and still haven't got much more info than you do. I did run into one other person online, expert on Julian Eltinge, a friend of his sisters, and we agreed, speculatively, that there's got to be a scandal involved with Cyril. But neither of us can find it.
He doesn't just fail to build a thriving career. It's not a decline but sudden, in late 1921, something happened and boom! he's a non-person. Charlotte Greenwood not only divorces him in '22, but she seriously expunges him from her life.
I think he was well-accepted, comfortable in his sisters' Long Island high-end showbiz social world, but he just vanishes from NY, thereafter works about once a year in his brother-in-law's films but no others. After 7 years of that, then comes Cocoanuts. Then the one bit with WC Fields [The Barber Shop (1933); CR has speaking role as the bandit Fields accidentally apprehends - MC], then bit parts forever.
Cocoanuts was filmed on Long Island while the Marxes were also working Broadway. Half dozen people involved were close friends of his brother-in-law Thomas Meighan. Many of the films Cyril did have friendship/family connections, so that's pretty obviously how he continued after 'the scandal'.
What possibly could have been so scandalous to Broadway people in 1921 that we can't find a word on it? Those were some incredibly amoral times. The press had more mercy then, but his immediate family included 3 big stars, so what was so taboo that it would have been unpublishable and thoroughly buried, but tolerable enough that friends and family kept him in work, at least minimally, the rest of his life?
I've been researching Meighan's family and social circles for quite awhile now, all by internet due to 'enjoying poor health', the Cyril mystery really bugs me. I keep thinking if I were in New York and could get into archives of whatever papers were the nastiest then, surely something would surface. But instead, I've just been gathering his films, he's on TV a lot. I just counted up and I've passed 100 Cyril movies, TIVO, Netflix, etc-- gotten so I can pick him out in a crowd scene by instinct! He's not at all a poor actor, actually he usually blends in pretty skillfully. I don't think his decline was from a lack of talent...
Whether he was a bastard or an unsung hero, he certainly was a patient man.

If by any chance anyone out there has any more information on shadowy Cyril, Mary and I would be overjoyed to hear it...

In the meantime, The Marx Brothers Council of Britain is delighted to award Mary its Heroic Achievement Award for deliberately amassing a collection of over 100 Cyril Ring movies.

The Abe Kabibble Mystery Solved!

2009-05-07T03:06:00.000-07:00

So, Roscoe W. Chandler is revealed to be Abe Kabibble, a Czechoslovakian fish peddler, eh?
My post here listed the various reasons why this could not be so, and why it would only have taken a second's thought for all who have claimed it is so to see that it isn't.
(I didn't explore the question of how important it all really is in the general scheme of things, but you'll find as time goes on that you've come to the wrong place if you expect me to be diverted by appeals to reason of that kind.)
The other thing I wasn't able to do is tell you who Abe Kabibble was, only that he wasn't Roscoe W. Chandler.
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Then, through the wonder of electronic communication, the answer arrived this morning.
Damian - who regular readers of the comments on this site will know lives in France where the Brothers' films are scarce and so shares with me the thirst for Marx minutiae for which I have no comparable excuse - has alerted me to the existence of Abie the Agent, a syndicated comic strip popular in the first few decades of the twentieth century, created by cartoonist Harry Hershfield. Abie was a Jewish immigrant car salesman created in response to a request from Hershfield's editor to write a strip revolving around Yiddish slang, Jewish humour and the immigrant experience in America.
And yes, folks - Abie's surname was Kabibble!
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He even looks a bit like Chandler!
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...........................Top: Abe Kabibble, aka Abie the Agent
...........................Bottom: Roscoe W. Chandler, aka Abie the Fish Man
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Such was the character's popularity he was featured in two cinema cartoons in 1917, and was made the subject of a song (Abie! Stop Saying Maybe by Jo Swerling, author of Humor Risk).
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Hardened Marx obsessives will know this is far from the only time a newspaper comic strip had a hand in the development of Marx lore. The original inspiration for their -o names was the popularity of a series of comic strips by Gus Mager in which various monkey characters were given descriptive names ending in -o, such as a detective character called Sherlocko the Monk. Among many others: Braggo the Monk, Rhymo the Monk, Tightwaddo the Monk and this oddly familiar fellow...
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Who is Abe Kabibble?

2009-05-06T03:59:00.001-07:00

I've never been a great one for reading stuff into the Marx Brothers' films that isn't really there. It seems to me there's more than enough that is really there, and it's usually funnier.
You know the kind of thing I mean. Someone called Dennis P. de Loof (you just knew there had to be someone somewhere called Dennis P. de Loof and it seems there is) has argued that all of the references to sewer pipes in The Cocoanuts are examples of phallic symbolism. He is of course wrong. Groucho is talking to Dumont about sewer pipes with no hidden meaning to it at all. In fact, it is the actual absence of hidden meaning that is the point of the joke. He expects Dumont to be interested in his sample of sewer pipe. The banality is the point. It's what makes it funny.
There are probably very few occasions when you can say that the whole point of a joke about sewer pipes is that it isn't an example of phallic, or any other, symbolism, but here I confidently assert is one of those few. And it is in this rare example of a joke relying for its effect on the absence of phallic symbolism that Dennis P. de Loof affects to discern phallic symbolism.
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If you've ever read either of Allen Eyles's books on the Marxes, and they're basically very good, you'll know that he has a funny little bee in his bonnet about identity confusion. Confusion over identity is a running thread in the films, he says. Quite a lot. And he finds plenty of it in Animal Crackers, even without spotting the dark room doppelgangers (see here).
My own feeling is that if there is a deliberate vein of identity confusion in the film then somebody must have put it there. So was it Kaufman who said to Ryskind: "Hey, Morrie, you know what would go over great in this show - a running subtext of confusion over identity"? Or was it Ryskind who said to Kaufman: "Say, George, how would you feel if I introduced an undercurrent of identity confusion into this thing?" Either it's one or the other or, as Chico says in the bridge scene, atsa what-a you call coincidence.
Nonetheless, if you want to set off on a wild identity confusion chase through the Marx jungle, Animal Crackers is unquestionably the best place to start. There are characters pretending to be people they are not, there are people pretending to be characters they are not, and before the opening credits are even finished we have been told that Groucho plays 'Jeffrey T. Spaulding' and 'Geoffrey T. Spaulding'. (The 'T', of course, stands for Edgar.)
And few in-jokes have caused as much wholesale mischief as Louis Sorin's throwaway line to Chico "Say, how did you get to be Italian?" (I wade into the perennial 'Is Chico Italian?' conundrum here.)
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But if these issues inspire endless confusion, debate and dissension - and let's face it, they don't really - there is one point in connection with identity re: Animal Crackers on which everybody seems to agree.
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Glenn Mitchell in The Marx Brothers Encyclopaedia: "Elsewhere in the house, Chandler is recognised by Ravelli. He is difficult to place, never having spent time in any prisons, but a birthmark on his forearm pinpoints him as Abe Kabibble, a former fish-pedlar from Czechoslovakia."
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Simon Louvish in Monkey Business: The Lives & Legends of the Marx Brothers: "At one point he was 'Rabbi Cantor' but on screen he ended up as the ethnically neutral Abe Kabiddle."
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Allen Eyles in The Complete Films of the Marx Brothers: "The prominent art critic Roscoe W. Chandler hides the fact that he is a former fish peddler from Czechoslovakia called Abie Cabiddle."
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Okay, nobody seems sure if it's a 'k' or a 'c', 'biddle' or 'bibble', but that this man and Chandler are one and the same there is no doubt.
Sorry, but it just won't wash. This is not what happens.
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Look at the scene again.
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Chico apprehends Chandler at the end of the previous scene: “Some place I met you before because your face is-a very familiar...”
Chandler is nonchalant: “Well, after all I’m one of the most well-known men in America. The newspapers will keep on running my photograph.”
It is at this point that Chico says without a second’s deliberation: “You’re not Abe Kabibble?” (It’s not even for certain that it’s a question. It’s delivered as a statement, as if Chico were saying ‘You’re not that famous’.)
Chandler’s response is equally immediate and unflustered. “Oh, nonsense!” he says, and walks away, with irritation at being bothered but not the smallest hint that he might be someone whose secret identity has been discovered.
Here the scene cuts to another set, Chandler and Chico walk on, and it is at this point that the scene in question actually begins.
Chico continues: “If you’re not Abe Kabibble, who are you?”
Chico resumes his struggle to identify him, and it is ridiculous to assume that a name he has already offered twice has suddenly eluded him: “Some place I met you before because your face is-a very familiar. Now wait. Let me see. Were you ever in Sing-Sing?”
More deliberation and wrong guesses follow, before Chandler volunteers that he spends most of his time in Europe. This sets a train of thought moving in Chico’s mind. “Europe… I got it now! I know – you come from Czechoslovakia!”
Even now, however, he can’t quite place him. He even asks Harpo for help. “You remember him. Who was he? He comes from Czechoslovakia.”
Then, finally, realisation dawns: “He comes from Czechoslovakia and I know who it is! It’s Abie the fish peddler!”
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This, with the revelation of a matching birthmark, Chandler eventually admits to be the case. Of Abe Kabibble, whoever he may be, there is no more mention, but it is interesting that both Chico and Chandler seem to recognise the name, as if he were a famous person.
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So who the hell is he? He isn't a real famous person, I feel sure in saying. So is it just Chico being silly, just coming out with a name at random, along the lines of 'one of my own compositions by Victor Heerman', (whether he did or didn't actually say that)? Or is it Chico perhaps getting it wrong, introducing the name too early (along the lines of his famous confusion during the prison break in Cocoanuts)?
No, it can't even be that. Firstly, because the name is never reintroduced - Abie the fish peddler is never given a second name. Plus there is practiced calm in Sorin's reaction to the suggestion; he brushes it off just as he has been doing all day in rehearsal. Not only does he not call for a retake, there isn't even any surprise such as would have greeted Chico getting it wrong, especially getting it wrong in such a scene-ruining way. And he says it in two different scenes, anyway: at the end of one and the beginning of the other. There can be no doubt that Chico is supposed to say Abe Kabibble at this early stage, and that it is not the secret identity of Roscoe W. Chandler.
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The name Kabibble may, perhaps, be intended to parody the name of a real person. The original play of Animal Crackers featured a character cut entirely from the film called Wally Winston, a journalist based obviously upon Walter Winchell. And Chandler himself, unmasked in the play not as a fish peddler but as Rabbi Cantor, was originally intended as a thinly-veiled parody of Otto Kahn, the art mogul famous for his efforts to disguise his Jewish background.
But of one thing we may be absolutely certain. The heavyweights quoted above are wrong. Roscoe W. Chandler is not and never was Abe Kabibble.
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Chandler is played, in both film and original show, and most amusingly, by Louis Sorin, an actor whose very little screen work also includes Glorifying the American Girl, discussed here. But if you click here you will be transported as if by technology to the website of the Manitoba Institute for Patient Safety. And who do we find there, masquerading as the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority's Aboriginal patient advocate? None other than Louis Sorin. Will this identity confusion never end?

The Great Animal Crackers Doppelganger Mystery

2009-04-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Animal Crackers: Annotated Guide

2009-04-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

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

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

4:46 - What is this line?

The crowd sing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis Carroll, but you knew that.

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

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

Quite why Harpo is being likened to one here, though, I do not know. (One interesting possible explanation has since emerged, however: see here.)
.l

21:14 -You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the official Fuller Brush website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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36:48 - Harpo scrumbles them up a little bit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

58:56 - Why Am I So Romantic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Corey Ford, The Time of Laughter

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

The Campbells and Vermicellis

All form a part of my tenement symphony

The Cohen’s pianola

The Kellys and their victrola

All warm the heart of my tenement symphony

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

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

2009-04-20T10:01:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hail and farewell.