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

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

Below is a invoice from Blackwell's, the famous Oxford bookseller, for one copy of Richard Anobile's book Why a Duck?
I found it tucked inside my copy when I bought it second hand on Charing Cross Road many years ago. It is dated 24th May 1973, just under a month before I was born, 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.
Marx Brothers fans, I've generally found, like meeting each other. A certain kinship is automatically assumed when a shared love of the Marxes is discovered: I'm sure it helped me to my own place at London University when I noticed that the man interviewing me had a picture of them on his office wall, and I named the film from which it was taken.
Needless to say, however, my Dr Parsons idea remained just that.
Years passed, and some fool invented the internet, and the idea occurred to me again. Now it would be so much easier.
So just over a year ago I looked up the staff of Merton College and found to my amazement that Dr Parsons was still a fellow of the college.
And again I put it off.
Finally, last week, with this site as impetus, I looked up the college again, but this time his name wasn't there. Perhaps he'd finally retired. So I wrote to ask if they could forward his contact details to me.
A few days ago I received this email from Matt Bowdler, Development Office, Merton College:

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

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

Whatever happened to Cyril Ring?

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

The answer is Cyril Ring. Poor Cyril Ring.

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

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

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


And I love that quintessentially British mix of wild hyperbole and sober grammar: "It is impossible to resist splitting with laughter."

The other one is more straightforward:

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

How the Marx Brothers and I first met

In 1983, I was ten years old. Great Britain had three television channels (or was it four by then? not many, that's the point), and they stopped transmitting around midnight (at which time the station announcer would traditionally tell us to sleep well and not to forget to unplug the tv set, before playing the national anthem).
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On December 23rd at 10.30 pm, BBC-2 showed Monkey Business. It was the first of five films being shown over the Christmas period (all the Paramounts bar The Cocoanuts, plus A Night In Casablanca).
I was intrigued by the prospect of these films. I remember the trailer shown to promote them (it certainly featured the barking dog in Harpo's chest from Duck Soup), and especially the grainy black and white images of the Brothers on the Radio Times programme page (reproduced above left).
Nonetheless, I was at some family party or something that evening, and did not particularly notice or care that I would be missing it.
I returned home at about eleven, and idly switched on my black and white portable, just in time for the Chevalier impressions.
I had never laughed so much before in my life; here was a whole new level of amusement I had never previously attained. By the time Groucho announced that "a lady's diamond earring has been lost; it looks exactly like this - in fact, this is it") I was an addict.
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During the course of that one, magical Christmas, I watched every other film in the series (and crudely copied the soundtrack of the last, Animal Crackers, on audio tape using a mic that also picked up every other sound being made in the room), wrote my first book on the subject (a little short on factual information but strong on crude felt-tipped pen illustrations) and, to my family's bewilderment, talked of virtually nothing else.
I still had a lot to learn: in fact, I thought it was Zeppo that played the piano. But I soon caught up.
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The next year I learned all the basics from a chapter of a lovely book called Movies of the Thirties and found Harpo Speaks almost as exciting as the films themselves. (I still do.)
Over the next two or three years I caught up first with Love Happy ("one of the more famous of the Marx Brothers' later films" was how the BBC continuity announcer described it before its Saturday morning showing), then The Cocoanuts (Saturday afternoon on Channel Four and fully as magical as the first batch), then the rest (which still seem to me to be just that: 'the rest').
Since then, I have seen each dozens and dozens of times. I have been fortunate to have seen them all at least once at the cinema, where they belong; A Night at the Opera at least ten times. On television: each beyond counting.
I never turn down an opportunity to see them, but I always make sure I watch the Paramount ones at Christmas time, as near as possible to those magical, original 1983 dates and times of transmission. The following year, BBC-2 introduced me to Hammer horror films, and that's an intense and special memory, too. But first and foremost, Christmas is the Marx Brothers and the Marx Brothers are Christmas.

Introducing The Marx Brothers Council of Britain

Welcome to a site devoted to discussion of the Marx Brothers.

Why have I started a site devoted to discussion of the Marx Brothers, rather than post occasionally on Marx matters on a more generally-themed site?

Because the Marx Brothers are special.

So, first of all, just as it must be distinctly understood from the outset that Marley is dead, so it must be made clear now that if you ever catch me talking about ‘a lesser Marx Brothers movie’ or ‘a disappointing Marx Brothers movie’, or even, if I dare, ‘a poor Marx Brothers movie’ I mean BY THE STANDARDS OF OTHER MARX BROTHERS MOVIES.
As James Agee once observed, even the worst of their films is worth watching, more so than perhaps the majority of all other films made since the dawn of time.
I welcome, indeed ardently desire, good-natured dissent from any opinion I offer. However, it is only fair at the outset to let you know exactly where I stand on the Marx film canon. Here then is a list of our raw material - the films of the Marx Brothers - in my personal order of preference:

1. Animal Crackers (1930)
2. The Cocoanuts (1929)
3. Horse Feathers (1932)
4. Monkey Business (1931)
5. A Night at the Opera (1935)
6. Duck Soup (1933)
7. Room Service (1938)
8. A Night in Casablanca (1946)
9. A Day at the Races (1937)
10. At The Circus (1939)
11. The Big Store (1941)
12. Love Happy (1949)
13. Go West (1940)

As the site progresses, the specific reasons for my various prejudices will become clear, but here's a quick justification for what I suspect will prove the most contentious ones:

1. Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts at the top.

I suspect the very best of the Marx Brothers is lost to us. It was that perfection of their unique talents in a unique cultural moment that happened when I'll Say She Is slaughtered them on Broadway. This Broadway period, when their roots in vaudeville synthesised perfectly with the smart New York humour of Kaufman and the Algonquin set, is captured in their first two Long Island movies, and never quite regained in Hollywood.
These two films seem to me to contain the longest, purest, least diluted chunks of their humour at its most free, fresh and funny. They have the best jokes.
Weirdly, the reasons most usually offered as to why they don't belong at the top of the pile are technical ones: they are shot theatrically, unimaginatively staged, there is little camera mobility, the sound recording is poor...
Since when did any of that matter a damn when you're watching a Marx Brothers movie? If you want camera mobility, watch Touch of Evil. If you want to see the Marx Brothers at their most uninhibitedly hilarious, watch The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers.

2. Duck Soup considerably beneath the other Paramounts.

Not a popular decision. But, I have to say that, though full of good things, this film really does seem to me the weakest, not the best, of their Paramount five. There are a few really good stretches where it finds the right rhythm, but there's way too much untypical visual humour not tailored to their special talents, and a zaniness more akin to Hellzapoppin' than the more cerebral comic invention of the four it followed.

3. A pretty low showing for Day at the Races, too.

Yep. Again, it's got good bits, and again, it's a Marx Brothers movie so I can watch it twenty times in a row and not get bored. But it is a good deal less inventive than Opera, it's the one where Thalberg's less happy innovations really start to show, and though generally of a higher standard than all the other MGM's, it is overall the beginning of the end, not the end of the beginning.

4. Yet Room Service scores preposterously high!

Don't you people like screwball comedy, then? Is it just me that would kill for the chance to have seen Groucho in Twentieth Century or Harpo in The Man Who Came To Dinner? These sophisticated Broadway farces are where the Marx Brothers style migrated to. It's wonderful to see them trying it out just once. Okay, it's not their typical personae, but there are at least ten other films if that's what you're after. They may be doing something different, but they do it really well, and the film has always struck me as extremely funny. So yes, high into the list it goes.

5. Go West worse even than Love Happy?

Yes, I think so. Love Happy never ever bores me. There are lots of good things about it; it has a nice atmosphere. Go West shows the Brothers at their most depressed. The material is by and large terrible and they don't even give it their best shot. Groucho in particular, with that awful wig on.

As I say, I will elaborate on all this as we work through the films chronologically in the Marx Brothers Annotated Film Guide, the point of which I will explain in my next post.
In the meantime, do please add your own lists, and reasons, in the comments section. And keep it clean.