'Tis the season...

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?

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!

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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

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

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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.)

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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."

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Maxine Marx, hail and farewell!

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

Marx Brothers Place Update!

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

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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

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:

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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...

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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/):

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

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

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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

(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?

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

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

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

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)

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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Monkey Business: Annotated Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

47:45 - The fifth cast member named Marx

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

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

Animal Crackers: Some final thoughts

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

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

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

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

Your honour, I rest my case.

Lillian, oh Lillian, say have you met Lillian?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Ring Thing (continued)

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

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

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

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

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

Save the Gookie!

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

Crackers at Loew's

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did you do, Cyril?

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...

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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.

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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!

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Animal Crackers: Annotated Guide

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

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

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4:46 - What is this line?

The crowd sing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis Carroll, but you knew that.

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

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

Quite why Harpo is being likened to one here, though, I do not know. (One interesting possible explanation has since emerged, however: see here.)
.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 Eugene O'Neill's four hour ball-buster Strange Interlude in 1928. Hence...
l.

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the official Fuller Brush website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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36:48 - Harpo scrumbles them up a little bit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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58:56 - Why Am I So Romantic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Corey Ford, The Time of Laughter

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

The Campbells and Vermicellis

All form a part of my tenement symphony

The Cohen’s pianola

The Kellys and their victrola

All warm the heart of my tenement symphony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hail and farewell.

Whatever happened to Cyril Ring?

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

The answer is Cyril Ring. Poor Cyril Ring.

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

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

In the last post we observed how relative lack of familiarity with the Marx Brothers in Britain at the time of The Cocoanuts meant that the artists responsible for designing the posters basically drew what the hell they liked when tasked with caricaturing the team.

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Even odder, now, seems the fact that the original stage play by Kaufman and Ryskind was viewed not as a Marx Brothers property from the first, but as an original stage play by Kaufman and Ryskind.

As a consequence of this kind of thinking, came perhaps the oddest and least-recalled chapter in the entire history of The Cocoanuts: the 1928 British stage production with an all-new cast.

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It opened at London's Garrick Theatre in March of '28, and it's hard indeed to imagine what such a production could possibly have been like. Our only means of guessing is by watching the cast in later film appearances, in the hope that we might get a vague sense of how they may have interpreted the 'roles'.

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Least accessible to us, sadly, are Leonard Henry and Max Nesbitt as Chico and Harpo - and yes, that is how they were billed.

Nesbitt was one half of the brother act Harry & Max Nesbitt, a musical comedy duo. Sadly, the pair made only a few rare film appearances between 1927 and 1934, giving us little chance to assess just what kind of a Harpo Max would have made - a pity since, of all the roles, Harpo's is surely the hardest to conceive being played as anything other than outright impersonation.
The British Pathé library has a couple of extracts of the pair performing, from which these small images are taken (Max is the one with the uke):
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Do you see a likely Harpo here?
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Chico's was presumably seen as a relatively straightforward comic dialect role, which is presumably how Leonard Henry would have approached it. Henry made eight films during the thirties, the most accessible to us today being his last, the Tod Slaughter barnstormer The Face at the Window (1939). The fact that this melodrama is supposedly set in Paris, and Henry is cast in what sounds like the comic relief capacity of Gaston the cook, made me wonder if dialect comedy was his stock-in-trade. In fact it's a light but not quite comic role, and Henry, like the rest of the cast, uses his own British accent.

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In the Mary Eaton ingenue role was one of the most vivacious and versatile of British actresses, Enid Stamp Taylor.

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Fortunately, posterity has left us many opportunities to enjoy her work, between her film debut in 1927 and her last in 1946, the year in which she died as the result of a fall at the age of only 41.

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She appears with George Formby, Lupino Lane, Gordon Harker, Claude Hulbert, Gracie Fields, Flanagan & Allen, Jessie Matthews and the Aldwych Players, as well as alongside Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc in The Wicked Lady, her penultimate film, and the last to be released before her death.
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But for reasons I shall shortly come to, by far her most useful appearance from the point of view of this enquiry is in the 1937 film Okay For Sound. Before going further into why, let us meet our Groucho, Mr Fred Duprez.
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Fred was an American vaudeville comic who built a successful career in Britain (as well as the father of feline actress June Duprez). In fact, it was in his capacity as a British comic draw that he accompanied Will Hay to America for his oddball co-production Hey! Hey! USA (1938), and it was on the ship coming back again afterwards that he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of fifty-four.

Did he do the full Groucho bit in The Cocoanuts, greasepaint moustache and all? The same goes for them all, actually - remember the Marxes were not remotely familiar at this time, so they would have had to have gone to America and study their performances if they were going to impersonate them.

It seems far more likely that they interpreted the 'characters' (!) in their own way. And if so, we can get a good idea of what Duprez's 'Groucho' may have been like from Okay For Sound, in which he too appears.

In it he plays a Jewish film mogul who keeps his studio from bankruptcy by conning his backers and disorientating them with wordplay. Though it lacks the self-defeating absurdism, there is a large measure of Groucho's screen persona here - it's certainly a lot like Gordon Miller in Room Service - and the Jewish dialect helps a lot too. (Duprez is rather reminiscent of that splendid Jewish comic actor Harry Green, the Marxes' fellow Paramount contractee in the early thirties.)
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There are many odd similarities between this film and The Cocoanuts. Both were hit stage plays adapted for the movies. Both were shot in the afternoons while the stars were performing on stage in the evenings. But the connection runs deeper than these mere coincidences. For not only does the film feature the London Cocoanuts ingenue Enid Stamp Taylor, and provide a good comic role for its Groucho, the main stars, likewise making their film debut, are the only British comedy team to ever approach the wild, iconoclastic style of the Marxes: The Crazy Gang.

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The six core members of the Crazy Gang were, in fact, three discrete double-acts: Naughton & Gold, Nervo & Knox and Flanagan & Allen. But while the three acts dispensed basically traditional music hall material on their own, when all six men got together they morphed into a six-headed animal possessed of qualities far greater than the proverbial sum - and no stage, or screen, ever proved quite big enough for what was unleashed.
Their comedy relies greatly for its effect on pace, and rapid transitions between wordplay, slapstick and farce, their physical comedy was often highly elaborate and acrobatic, their verbal comedy often extremely clever, just as often groaningly corny. But the really important thing is that with six of them at it at the same time, there was frequently more going on than could be fully taken in, resulting in a kind of sustained delirium that, once up and rolling, gave audiences little time to breathe between laughs. For this reason, there is little doubt that what we see of them on film, through technical necessity as much as anything, simply cannot be the full-strength entertainment enjoyed by stage audiences when they were really firing on all cylinders. But then, this is just as true of the Marx Brothers. Okay For Sound shares with the Marxes a frantic pace, a tangible sense of energy, a distinctly modern kind of absurdity to their humour and a boisterous iconoclasm along with, more specifically, the scenes of theatrical destruction, the addresses to camera and the deliberate baiting of pompous authority.

Unlike the majority of British stage to film crossover comics, no attempt is made to turn them into comic characters able to function within a narrative. Like the Marxes at Paramount (and not at MGM) they are placed in a realistic fictional narrative yet never quite integrate into it, they move parallel to it, as if they have landed from some indefinite elsewhere, remaining hermetically sealed from the world around them until it dares to rub against theirs, and then watch out. No convincing characterisation is offered or necessary; they are simply let loose, their job to pull rugs, blow raspberries, deflate authority, and generally clog the wheels of genteel society.

As already noted, Okay For Sound, like The Cocoanuts, was shot in the afternoons and days-off during a smash-hit stage run, and is basically a ragbag of disconnected routines taken directly from their revues. The plot such as it is lets them wangle their way into an ailing British film studio and take over the productions being shot, causing various kinds of chaos and alienating just about everybody but ending up with a film that somehow proves a huge hit and revives the studio’s fortunes. It could easily be adapted into a Paramount Marx vehicle, since there is no logic to it; no reason whatever why these six obvious reprobates are allowed to virtually destroy a film studio without ever being restrained, while their final triumph is as absurd as the football victory at the end of Horse Feathers.

Unlike the Brothers, however, they also enjoy the unusual freedom of being able to assume different roles in comic sketches. The best of these is the sequence in which Teddy Knox provides both American and hilariously vague British commentary to a wrestling match: "If we only had the River Thames running through here and a few boats on it you'd think it was boat race day". There is also much saucy humour of a kind that would probably not have passed US censors: a character called Farquhar is asked "How are the little Farquhars?", a scene in which the blasting of a dam is delayed is met with the observation "There's no dam blast!", and Enid Stamp Taylor has her skirt ripped off three times.

Squint a little, and you could almost be watching the British version of The Cocoanuts.

The Cocoanuts hits London!

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

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

The other one is more straightforward:

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

Mary Eaton: Glorifying the American Girl

Glorifying the American Girl (1929) makes for a fascinating companion piece to The Cocoanuts. It was made the same year, again at Paramount's Long Island studios, again photographed by George Folsey and with musical contributions from Irving Berlin and, most exciting of all, with the same female lead.
Mary Eaton, the somewhat wan and lifeless Polly Potter in Cocoanuts, was in truth a lively and vibrant performer, as well as an exceptionally gifted dancer, whose talents, including her trademark pirouettes, are far better displayed in Glorifying.

With various brothers and sisters she had been one of 'the Seven Little Eatons', but also found considerable solo success on Broadway, notably in several Ziegfeld Follies revues, and with Eddie Cantor in Kid Boots and Sunny. Like her co-star Oscar Shaw, Mary was not in the original Broadway cast of The Cocoanuts but debuted in the film version, drafted in by Paramount to exploit the popularity of their latest contractee.

Alas, her popularity faded quickly in the thirties. Her last stage appearance was in 1932, and her last film role (and her first after 1929) was, as a result of circumstances I have been unable to unravel, an uncredited bit in the British Flanagan & Allen comedy We'll Smile Again (1942).
Sadly, it seems that Mary did not. Enduring three unhappy marriages to three unhappy alcoholics she almost inevitably fell victim to the bottle herself, dying of liver failure in 1948 at the age of 47. (Of her fellow Little Eatons: two others succumbed to alcoholism, sister Pearl was murdered in 1958 and the crime remains unsolved, while sister Doris, the last surviving Ziegfeld girl, will celebrate her 105th birthday on March 14th.)
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Glorifying the American Girl is a Ziegfeld Follies revue for the movies, offering a "singing and dancing chorus of 75 glorified beauties" in its opening credits. It's as important as Cocoanuts to the historical record, as well as being of specific value to Marx enthusiasts as an example of exactly the format that Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers both (basically) adhered to and (gently) subverted and parodied.
In addition to a vapid plot, delightfully typical of its time (shop girl Mary dances her way to stardom but loses the man she loves), the film makes frequent halts and digressions to accommodate revue sequences featuring some of the great Broadway names of the time, notably Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallee and the magnetic Helen Morgan (star of another Paramount Long Island classic photographed the same year by Folsey - clearly as tireless as he was innovative - Rouben Mamoulian's masterpiece Applause. Marx fans familiar with the Warner Brothers animated short The CooCoo Nut Grove (1936) will recall her in animated form, sat on the piano as here, being washed away on the river of tears resulting from her heartwrenching ballad singing.) Others appearing briefly as themselves include Berlin, Ziegfeld and Zukor.

Marx fans will enjoy the scene in which Mary and her boyfriend Buddy take a punt in a little boat, the latter serenading his girl on a ukulele, a reminder of how so much of what we take for random invention in the Brothers' Paramount movies was in fact parody of well-established clichés and recurring situations; it's hard indeed not to imagine the stuffed duck following along behind.
But best of all is Cantor's Jewish tailor sketch, which not only gives us a feast of references to blue serge suits, Sweet Adeline and the phrase "that's some joke", but also partners Cantor with none other than Louis Sorin - Roscoe W. Chandler to you, uncredited here as he often was in his mere nine film appearances. Interesting to see him playing not pompous straight man, Chandler-style (a function in which he outclasses even the great Sig Rumann), but co-comic; sly and very funny with Cantor in their mutual fleecing of an unfortunate customer.

As for Mary Eaton, the best overview of her life and career I've been able to find is this essay from the blog Vitaphone Varieties.

The Cocoanuts: Annotated guide

4:33 - "Remember there is nothing like liberty, except Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post..."

Liberty, first published in 1924, was a magazine known as "a weekly for everybody". At one time second only to the Saturday Evening Post in circulation, it was accordingly known as "the second greatest magazine in America." Contributors included Robert Benchley and F Scott Fitzgerald. It folded in 1950.

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5:19 - "Couple of telegrams for you, Mr Hammer..."

As well as a rare chance to see Zeppo Marx come out from behind the hotel's reception desk, this moment gives us our first sighting of another of the most endearing features of The Cocoanuts: wet paper. Because of the crude sound recording technology then in use, ordinary paper crackled so obtrusively on the soundtrack that dialogue was completely drowned out. The ingenious solution was to douse all the paper used in scenes with liberal quantities of H2O, giving it a weird, limp quality, like rotting lettuce leaves. The inevitable problems caused by this solution to a different problem are especially enjoyable to witness in the 'why a duck?' scene, where the map Groucho is referring to visibly and repeatedly tears as he attempts to manipulate the sodden mess.

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9:19 - "John W Berryman was here last month to see it. You know, Berryman practically built Palm Beach and Miami..."

Was this a real man? Or is his name perhaps a mild parody of that of a real man? I don't know, but have fun watching Oscar Shaw grappling with that wet architectural plan.

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15:22 - "This is the biggest development since Sophie Tucker."

A pretty straightforward one, this; Tucker (1894-1966) of course being the Jewish singer and entertainer, known as 'the Last of the Red Hot Mamas', who popularised the song My Yiddishe Momme. Groucho, with characteristic chivalry, is drawing our attention to the star's considerable girth, which she herself highlighted in numbers like Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love.
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15:37 - "... entertainment, sandwiches and the auction. If you don't like auction we can play contract."

The first of many references in the Marx scripts to the tabletop diversions with which they filled their idle hours, first when they should have been at school and then when travelling the country or killing time backstage with fellow vaudevillians. Pinochle seems to have been their particular speciality, but all card games were grist to their mill, and this reference to bridge presages the classic bridge sequence from their next production Animal Crackers, and in particular Chico's line "he thought it was contact bridge".

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15:50 - "... glorifying the American sewer and the Florida sucker..."

'Glorifying' was a fashionable buzz-word at this time; in the same year as The Cocoanuts Paramount produced the film Glorifying the American Girl at their Long Island studios, also starring Mary Eaton. Groucho's line is either a reference to it or else a second dip in the same pool of common expressions. The replication of the word 'American' and the proximity of the two productions on the Paramount shooting roster incline me toward the former. It would be interesting to know, therefore, if the line was in the original show.

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16:09 - "Take the alligator pears..."

Another name for the avocado, derived from its tendency to grow in alligator-populated areas. Groucho's bizarre use of the term to imply sexual union between pears and alligators may be informed by some residual awareness of the long-standing connection between avocados and sexual potency. Long believed to possess aphrodisiac qualities, within polite society their consumption by the virginal or chaste was generally frowned upon. Interestingly, the name comes from the Nahuatl word for testicle, a reference in this case to its shape rather than its sphere of influence.

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18:50 - Harpo's red wig

Note how late into the movie Chico and Harpo make their entrance, then enjoy the only appearance on screen of Harpo's dark red stage wig, henceforth abandoned in favour of a blonde one because it was felt the original photographed too dark. Personally, I much prefer the red one. Interestingly, Harpo is still referred to as a redhead in Animal Crackers, since the script derives from the stage production and no amendment was made to accommodate his new, lighter coiffure.

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20:18 - "Everything will be AK"

Wikipedia lists 24 possible definitions for this seeming alternative to 'ok'; the most likely to me seems to be 'Ace-King', a card combination in poker. Anyone know better?

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21:40 - "Have one of these flowers, they're buckwheat."

A mystery, since Groucho appears to be offering Harpo the plant on the grounds that it is dangerous. At least, that's how the joke plays to me; as if he were to cheerfully say "here, drink this, it's cyanide." Though buckwheat greens eaten in large enough quantities can cause excessive sensitization of the skin to sunlight, it is generally speaking both edible and widely eaten. It may be, therefore, that I have misread the joke completely, and Groucho is in fact offering Harpo some kind of poisonous plant on the spurious grounds that it is buckwheat. Or am I so wrong it's like not even funny? Let me know...

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22:20 - Chico and Harpo play the Anvil Chorus using a till and a bullhorn

The first appearance in the Marx canon of this top choon from Il Trovatore. Animal Crackers the following year sees a spirited rendition with Chico on piano, Harpo on horseshoes and Groucho on a woman's leg, while in A Night at the Opera they get the chance to disrupt a live stage performance of Verdi's undefending masterpiece.

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26:45 - Harpo's first Gookie

If you don't know why a Gookie - a grotesque facial contortion characterised by bulging eyes, inflated cheeks and visible tongue, assumed by Harpo at least once in every Marx Brothers movie - is so named, then you haven't read Harpo Speaks, so do so now and we'll meet back here when you've finished. For the rest of you, enjoy its first appearance here.

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28:39 - Harpo plays the clarinet

As well as harp and piano, the former Adolph Marx was no mean clarinetist, as this charming rendition of When My Dreams Come True reveals. In his later career he also liked to get laughs with a prop clarinet on which he would play I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles while a cascade of soap bubbles streamed from the instrument. Nonetheless, this is the only time he played it on film, and it was always the harp that remained his first love and daily source of recreation, relaxation and contemplation, thus sparing us the potential necessity of having to refer to him as Clarineto.

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30:47 - Groucho and Margaret Dumont enter stage right

Often cited as one of the most amusingly hackneyed moments in the film, this delightful sequence shows Groucho and Mags walking on-set in long shot before cutting to a medium shot as they begin their dialogue. The point, of course, is that the walk on is a purely theatrical convention quite unnecessary in a film, which might more zippily have cut straight to the dialogue. For exactly this reason, I find it absolutely charming. What we can all agree on, however, is the excellence of the ensuing, our first Groucho-Dumont wooing scene. There is nothing tentative or embryonic about it; both are on top form.

Dumont, I need not add, is Groucho's celebrated statuesque straightwoman, imported from the Broadway cast, who would go on to endure his crude insults and even cruder sexual advances in a further six films. So fine are their performances together that she is frequently referred to as "practically the fifth Marx Brother" or "the honorary Marx Brother". However, this billing - which would in any event have come as news to Gummo and, presumably, her gynaecologist - was never made official, thus sparing us the potential necessity of having to refer to her as Practicallyo, or possibly Honoraryo.

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31:29 - "If we could find a little bungalow..."

This Groucho line anticipates one of Irving Berlin's songs from the original show excised, presumably for time, from the screenplay. Several other lines from A Little Bungalow, for so it is called, find echo in Groucho's dialogue in this scene:
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A little bungalow an hour or so from anywhere

A little cozy nest, the kind that's best for two

Among the shady trees, with birds and bees, and lots of air

And just enough o' ground to fool around with you

Away from all the crowds we'll watch the clouds go drifting by

And when the moon above presents a lovely view

There'll be a room in blue, the one that you would occupy

It's understood that I would occupy it too.

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In particular, the third couplet evokes his memorable line, "when the moon is sneaking around the clouds, I'll be sneaking around you..."

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32:45 - "A 'yes' like that was once responsible for me jumping out of a window."

A Groucho line which, depending on your preference, is either gloriously meaningless or evocative of some unspecified but clearly disastrous sexual indiscretion. There are many anecdotes concerning the brothers' erotic escapades that frequently end in such compromising manoeuvres, but they tend to involve the more incorrigible Chico than bookish, less experienced Groucho.

One exception, however, is the story of Groucho and Chico enjoying the afternoon attentions of the daughters of a prominent Jewish businessman who had invited them to dinner on the sabbath. His unexpected return led to just such an escape, and Chico's enquiry "are we still on for Friday?"

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36:50 - The Connecting Door Sketch

This beautifully played scene, with Dumont having to resist the attentions of Groucho and Harpo, Kay Francis having to resist the attentions of Groucho, Harpo and Chico while looking great in a slinky gown, the first of a number of dumb Irish cops called Hennessey or something very similar rushing ineffectually from room to room, and Zeppo presumably downstairs manning the lobby, is notable partly for its excellence, and also for its being revised by Kaufman to equally fine effect in A Night at the Opera.

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42:45 - "I can let you have three lots watering the front, or I can let you have three lots fronting the water."

Is this a misdelivered line? Joe Adamson certainly thinks so in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, surely the worst book ever written on the team and their films. Clearly the obvious way of phrasing it is the other way around. But is it funny this way? Yes, it is. Is Adamson funny ever? No, he is not.

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43:58 - "You know what a blueprint is?" "It's oysters."

Chico's error here is to confuse a blueprint with a bluepoint, a bluepoint oyster being a type of oyster named, pleasantly enough, after the Blue Point area of Long Island, where the film was shot.

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44:32 - "Come over here, Rand McNally."

Groucho mocks Chico's inability to get to grips with the details of his map of the locality by referring to him as America's most famous publisher of maps and atlases.

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44:42 - "Is there a remote possibility you know what 'radius' means?" "It's-a WJZ."

Chico compounds his blueprint/bluepoint error with a further confusion, this time between radius and radio. WJZ refers to a New York radio station based at that time in Newark, New Jersey. According to Wikipedia "the call letters stood for their original home state, New Jer(Z) sey", which to these English eyes at least makes about as much sense as Groucho's rejoinder "that's a rodeo you're thinking of."

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46:06 - "I'm not playing Ask Me Another"

From The Time of Laughter: A Sentimental Chronicle of the Twenties by Corey Ford:

"So great was the parlor-game craze in the twenties that Viking Press brought out a question book called Ask Me Another. To arouse added interest, the editors tested the questions in advance on various celebrities... George Kaufman (was tested) on geography, a subject which bored him thoroughly. When asked 'what is the longest river in South America?' Kaufman pondered a moment, and then countered, 'Are you sure it's in South America?'"

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47:52 - "Be alert - or papa don't go out at all."

A (presumably) meaningless reference to the song Mama Goes Where Papa Goes, made famous by Sophie Tucker ("Mama Goes Where Papa Goes / Or Papa don't go out tonight"). First published in 1923, Tucker also recorded a Yiddish version the following year.

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63:29 - Harpo offers sobbing Polly a lolly

This utterly disarming moment in which Harpo abandons all trace of lechery and mischief, and manages to be affectingly sweet without any hint of unwelcome pathos (the blank facial expression is the trick) is both one of the most celebrated moments in the film and an interesting anticipation of a moment at the very other end of their film career, when he produces a second lolly during the Who Stole That Jam? number from Love Happy, leading to the song line: "I don't want that lollipop!"

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65:00 - "Hey, Paisan!"

Chico's term to summon Harpo is an affectionate Italian (or Italian American) greeting meaning "brother", colloquially or, in this case, literally. Of all the things I didn't know and had to look up for the purposes of this exercise, discovering this one gave me the most pleasure.
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74:50 - Harpo's big spliff

The most eye-openingly pre-Code moment in the entire Marx canon is when Harpo enters the fancy dress wedding party dressed as a Mexican gaucho puffing on an enormous joint. Marijuana, though coming to be recognised as a social menace, was far from taboo in American popular culture, particularly jazz, and it crops up in a few other American comedies of the time. As late as 1933 Paramount's International House, a comic revue with W C Fields and Burns & Allen, includes Cab Calloway singing Reefer Man.

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79:13 - "Oft in the stilly night, the trembling of a leaf can be heard sighing through the trees, and the babbling brook.."

I think that rather than any one thing, this is a kind of generic, half-remembered conflation of several poems and poetic-sounding phrases, with 'Oft in the stilly night' derived from Thomas Moore, and the babbling brook, possibly, from New York poet Elaine Goodale Eastman.

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79:38 - "Western cattle opened at fifteen and a quarter"

Groucho goes into stockmarket talk just as he would in Animal Crackers but with one big difference - the Crash came in between.

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82:58 - "That's that good Gulf gas."

Refers to the slogan used by Gulf petrol, displayed on the side of pumps in service stations.

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83:49 - "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You from the opera Aida"

A little disappointing to learn that Groucho's hilarious intro to Chico's first piano number refers to the title of a real song. I always thought it was an incredibly inspired joke. Ah, well. But it is, at least, an absolutely adorable song. Find out a little more and, most importantly, hear it for yourself here.

In praise of The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts (1929), the Marx Brothers' first movie, is a majestic comedy that finds them at their most energetic and inspired and belongs among their very highest achievements.

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This is not, however, its reputation.

For many the fact that it is technically primitive, shot entirely on small studio sets with undiscriminating sound recording, a graceless camera and static theatrical set-ups, is for some unfathomable reason an obstacle to enjoying it.

Paul D. Zimmermann wrote: "The camerawork showed all the mobility of a concrete fire hydrant caught in a winter freeze." Thank God, then, that the Marx Brothers were in front of it at the time, being hilarious. Otherwise that could have caused a few problems.

Others, like Allen Eyles, note "its silly plot and dated musical elements". Yes, nothing spoils a Marx Brothers movie like a silly plot. And as for that dated music, the date it seems to have plumped for is 1929, so no complaints from me there, either.
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For me, the music of the Paramount Marx films is just another of their great joys, and I'll not hear a word against the second leads, either. Mary Eaton, Oscar Shaw, Kay Francis, Lillian Roth, Hal Thompson, Margaret Irving and the rest are all terrific. I know it is considered de rigeur to love the Marxes alone, and snort haughtily and derisively through the songs and subplots, but if you're one of those who do, know now that my friends and I consider your behaviour the very height of naff.

("A rendition of 'the skies will all be blue / When my dreams come true' is enough to convince us that the 1920s had their down side", suggests Simon Louvish in his book Monkey Business. It seems pretty charming to me.)

There's a feeling abroad that the free display of disrespect towards the secondary elements is what the Marxes would themselves have done, that hooting at Allan Jones is somehow of a piece with throwing fruit and vegetables at Margaret Dumont. I feel this is profoundly mistaken, and that the Brothers would have been appalled at such ignorant rudeness towards fellow showbusiness professionals.

It is sheer philistinism to be unable to see the beauty of Lillian Roth's performance of Why Am I So Romantic?, or the difference between Kenny Baker trilling Two Blind Loves and Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle's gorgeous performance of Alone. The songs in the Paramount films, including Irving Berlin's universally-mocked numbers in The Cocoanuts all delight me, and in particular Berlin's Monkey Doodle Doo boasts lyrics so weird they deserve quoting in full:

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Monkeys upon a tree never are very blue.

They never seem to be under par that is true.

Not like the ones you see on a bar in the zoo.

Monkeys upon a tree do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

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Oh, among the mangoes where the monkey gang goes

You can see them do

The little Monkey Doodle Doo.

Oh, a little monkey playing on his one key

Gives them all the cue

To do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

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Let me take you by the hand

Over to the jungle band

If you're too old for dancing

Get yourself a monkey gland

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And then let's go, my little dearie, there's the Darwin theory

Telling me and you

To do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

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Tell me that man wasn't on the same wavelength as the Marx Brothers!

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Shot not in Hollywood but at Paramount's Long Island studios (where so many of history's most beautiful and evocative films were nonchalantly tossed together) while Animal Crackers was still cutting up Broadway, the film catches the performers at the height of their powers.

It also benefits from some of the most expertly-tailored material they were ever given. The great playwright George S Kaufman is a massive part of what's so great about the Marx Brothers. His work here and in Animal Crackers helps define (or certainly refine) them as an act (and his astute recall for A Night at the Opera is probably the sole reason why that film is as bafflingly good as it is).

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It is vitally important to locate the Marx Brothers we know, the Marx Brothers leaping to life here (as opposed to, say, the Vaudeville Marx Brothers who are now lost to us but were surely a cruder and broader and in many ways less distinctive force than the one here preserved), in the tradition of twenties New York humour, that sprang from the pages of the New Yorker on to the Broadway stage and then to talking pictures. Into the world of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and Alexander Woollcott and indeed Kaufman (a world that the off-stage Harpo himself would soon crash in a kind of mascot capacity) came a wild, unpretentious but uncommonly talented comedy team. This team was then taken under the collective wing of the wits and sophisticates there assembled. Something about the unrestrained anarchy of the Marx Brothers' comic tornado appealed to their delight in disrupting propriety, and it was they who gave them the impetus, opportunity and material necessary to become the fashionable darlings of high class audiences.

Kaufman inherited a team too well-defined to reinvent, but working with what he was given it was he who who made their rough-edged style perfect, bestowing upon them the finest wordplay, wildest ideas and most sustained flights of insanity, where absurdist argument develops rigidly by its own internal form of anti-logic. The 'Why a duck' sequence, first and perhaps best of the great Groucho-Chico duologues (though I retain a sneaking preference for the left-handed moths of Animal Crackers) is justly famous, but even funnier is the auction scene to which it serves as prelude, with Chico's obtuse refusal to stop bidding up, and Groucho's deliriously exasperated attempts to maintain enthusiasm:

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What am I offered for Lot 25? Come on, folks, you know you're all allowed to bid, this is a free country. What am I offered for Lot 25? What am I offered for Lot 25 and a year's subscription to Youth's Companion? Will somebody take a year's subscription? I'm trying to work my way through college. Will somebody take a six months' subscription? I'll go to high school. Does anybody want to buy a lead pencil? I'll wrestle anybody in the crowd for five dollars.

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The script, like all early Marx material, is also satiric and rooted in the culture of its exact historical moment. The setting is the Florida land boom of the nineteen-twenties. The invention strikes me as classic Kaufman: given an act a large part of whose comic persona revolves around conning, duplicity and pretensions to affluence, status and power entirely at odds with the reality of their situation, it is both natural and inspired to look around for the perfect contemporary setting with which to transform them from sketch artists in revues to characters in musical comedy, and hit upon the Florida real estate bubble. (Sorry that was such a long sentence, but it's all over now.) Groucho's character, in particular, lends itself exactly to such a milieu (Louvish has some good material contrasting Groucho's characteristic pronouncements in the film with those of real Florida entrepreneurs), as, on a much lower level of aspiration and attainment, do those of his seedy lieutenants Harpo and Chico, the latter of whom makes no secret of his desire to fleece the fleecer, and the former of whom steals the cutlery that Groucho has himself stolen from other hotels. (Look out too for a fourth brother, Zeppo, occasionally to be seen hiding behind the desk in the hotel lobby. And make the most of him. He has even less to do in Animal Crackers.)

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To this irresistible recipe, Kaufman then adds that simplest yet most elusive seasoning: almost unbelievably great jokes. Get the most artful comedy team ever to deliver them, and you have The Cocoanuts. Woollcott raved, Broadway fell like Troy and the rest, as they say, is cliché.

The Cocoanuts is a great moment in Broadway history, and it is to the film's credit that it merely replicates the exact experience of the show and makes no effort to turn it into a movie. From Monkey Business on we have the Marx Brothers at the movies; for the time being, let's enjoy them on stage.

Director Robert Florey recalled his efforts to include real Florida location shooting being rebuffed by the studio brass with what still seems to me to be the perfect dismissal of all those who affect to having their enjoyment compromised by the artificial nature of the production:

"Why are you so concerned with having real backgrounds when one of the leading characters wears an obviously false moustache?"

Kay Francis and Pre-Code

Kay Francis plays Penelope, the vampish bad girl who inspires the jewel robbery in The Cocoanuts.

If you don’t know the name, it may be surprising to discover that she became perhaps the biggest star of all Marx co-stars bar Marilyn, though sadly few others of her magnitude have been quite so thoroughly forgotten.

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She was an amazingly chic woman, a celebrated clotheshorse who set rather than followed the styles. She thought herself of little account and did not greatly enjoy her stardom, though it lasted until the end of the thirties (despite a considerable speech impediment and a far from conventional beauty), and only slowly and respectfully tapered off thereafter in low budget variations.

She said that she couldn’t wait to be forgotten and for reasons genuinely mysterious, more or less has been.
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In the movies, when she's remembered at all, it's usually as an ultra-fashionable modern woman, a big wage earner and a big spender, confident, independent, dressed in incredible gowns, with shiny, jet black hair and soulful make-up. Sometimes this character has a big, life-defining episode to live through over the hour and fifteen, sometimes she’ll just be effortlessly elegant and life will not trouble her. Think Lubitsch’s Trouble In Paradise.
Or, just as often, she’s a bitch, a vamp, a man-eater, a conwoman even; pretending to be some kid’s mother so she can carve off his inheritance, or nonchalantly, gloatingly stealing Fay Wray’s husband away from her. These are the roles where the hair is slicked right back, cloche hats are prominent, and Francis assumes the haughtiest manner imaginable as she seduces her way to gain; this is the Francis that robs Margaret Dumont of her jewels with Harpo under the bed and Groucho in the wardrobe.

It was, in fact, her first film role; she had been part of the huge contingent of Broadway actors and actresses imported to Hollywood to cope with the new demands of talking cinema. Her slightly decadent, aloof qualities and air of European sophistication ensured that she ended up at Paramount, most stylish of the major studios.

She followed up her stint with the Marxes with a host of great movies: Dangerous Curves (1929) with Clara Bow, Behind the Make-Up (1930) with Fay Wray and interesting Vaudeville settings, Paramount On Parade (1930; anyone know why the Marx Brothers are not in this movie?), Ladies Man (1930) with Carole Lombard, and the amazing Girls About Town (1931). All reward the effort of tracking them down.
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Despite the length and success of her career subsequently, Francis is one of the stars who most define pre-Code as an era. She seemed the embodiment of the sultry and languorous sensibilities of Paramount, for whom she did most of her voluptuary work. Like the Marxes, Kay left Paramount for another studio (in her case Warners) and her work altered significantly in the transition. At Warner Brothers, she made her high society issue films and weepy women's pictures. But her work in her early Paramount films still makes you sit up.

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Her appeal, I think, is that she was very much an icon of the ‘lost generation’; she would have made an excellent Brett Ashley. She often plays characters of great material attainment and deep existential dislocation; few actresses of her generation so ably conveyed ennui, fatalism and erotic gloom.
Watch her in the opening scenes of 24 Hours (1931), a fantastic pre-Code society drama from Paramount, in which (anticipating Trouble In Paradise) she co-stars with an equally top-form Miriam Hopkins.

She’s at a small party, depressed, bored, incredibly alluring in a very simple white dress, clearly the most fascinating woman in the room, but crippled with dissatisfaction and a physical beauty she carries like a hernia. (You have to go back to Louise Brooks in Germany for anything comparable.)

Any dedicated Kay fan will recognise this opening as trademark stuff. This is screen presence of a very particular sort, and hugely symbolic of its cultural moment. World-weariness was in at the time, combine it with sexual independence, the very latest outfits and a willingness to seduce or be seduced, and icons are born.

It is in this respect that Kay Francis is an icon not of old Hollywood merely, but of pre-Code specifically. Her world is one of great luxury, tired of the novelties in which it trades, from which she is always an arm's length removed, bored with the parties and the good times and the infidelities and superficiality.

Penelope in The Cocoanuts is how many of her later characters must have started out, before getting fed up somewhere along the way. (Or, in a few cases, carrying on just as she was: try The False Madonna [1931].)
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In many ways, we can also consider the Paramount Marx movies as themselves representative of pre-Code. I might even go so far as to suggest that in addition to all the reasons we normally cite, a huge part of why Paramount Marx Brothers movies are better than MGM Marx Brothers movies is because they look, sound and feel like what they are: pre-Code movies.
After 1934 the Brothers stop playing their satires against backgrounds like the Florida land boom or society parties and start hanging round circuses. Several things are lost in this transition.

First, the satire is inevitably blunted: if the world being deflated is not recognisable, real and modern, then the Marx Brothers have lost a huge part of their comedic edge: who cares if they are set in the old west or some boring department store? Without the ability to play against a milieu that is recognisable to the audience the team’s power is diluted.

Even the joyous A Night at the Opera (1935) is in this sense as much a portent of what is to come as a last hurrah. The fun of seeing them take on grand opera is far cosier and more remote from the everyday experience of most cinemagoers, and panders to their prejudices. Far better have them satirise inane, popular genre cinema (as they do in Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, parodies of society gangster films, college pictures and Ruritanian fantasies respectively) or take on the Long Island set in a spirit of genuine anarchy. They are not anarchists in A Night at the Opera, merely crazies. But in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers and Monkey Business they really are dangerous to have around. The Code era takes the danger away.

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 Annotated Film Guide (or MBAFG, pronounced ‘Mbafg’)

Too much analysis, they say, is the death of comedy. Take a joke apart to see how it works, they add, and you’ll never get it back together again.

Of these people we might justifiably ask; what is 'habeas Irish rose'? What is happening when you “have a strange interlude”, and why are we fortunate Theatre Guild isn’t putting it on? What is the trial of Mary Dugan with sound? What is a college widow? Who are those five kids up in Canada? Exactly when did Don Ameche invent the telephone?

The films of the Marx Brothers are full of in-jokes and obscure theatrical, literary and topical references that can baffle modern audiences. This site will, in part, strive to explain such mysteries, and where it is unable to do so it will request that you help it out. And when it thinks it can, but you think it's wrong, it will happy for you to say so.
In so doing, I hope we will illuminate a lot of other things too, as we journey on a thorough but unsystematic ramble through the landscape of these remarkable comedies. Bring their world back to life, so to speak.

So it will hopefully become both a newcomer's guide and an addict’s resource, a source of contention and of illumination, a mire of speculation and an oasis of confirmation, and all of these things at one and the same time.
If it is aimed a little more (but I hope by no means exclusively) at the confirmed enthusiast rather than the novice, that's simply because I can’t really be bothered to repeat all those anecdotes you find in every other resource on the Marx Brothers. But if you want to know which famous sequence in one of the Paramount films features doubles miming to the Brothers’ dialogue, why it’s not clever to laugh at Alan Jones or, indeed, what the trial of Mary Dugan with sound is, stick with us. There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who love the Marx Brothers and those who have not yet seen them. This is a site for the former group, but if you are among the latter category you are emphatically welcome too.

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.