Born on February 25, 1901, Herbert Manfred Marx—better known as "Zeppo"—was the youngest of six brothers and along with Leonard, Adolph and Julius Henry—Chico, Harpo and Groucho to the rest of us—made up the greatest comedy team in movie history, the Marx Brothers.
Zeppo's father Sam was a tailor, but his mother Minnie had show business in her blood and she pushed her sons onto the stage at an early age. More than a decade junior to his older brothers, the Marx Brothers were already an established vaudeville act before Zeppo joined the group, and he might not have entered show business at all but for the fact that his brother Milton (a.k.a. "Gummo") joined the army during World War I.
Perhaps because he joined the act so late, Zeppo never really established a strong stage presence and mostly wound up playing the straight man to his brothers. He also sang and when the occasion demanded played the male half of a romantic subplot, but mostly writers didn't know what to do with him and he was shunted the far corners of the action. Nevertheless, Zeppo was around for the Marx Brothers' Broadway successes and their first five movies, made at Paramount Studios.
Zeppo's best roles were in the movies Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. For the former, the Brothers finally hit on the rather obvious idea of letting Zeppo handle the chores of wooing the obligatory girl in their musical comedy routines. I can't say he's great as he chases the girl (Ruth Hall), but he's better than either Oscar Shaw or Hal Thompson who performed the same thankless chores in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, respectively.
In Horse Feathers, he played Groucho's son, a college student for twelve years and running, "a disgrace to our family name of Wagstaff," Groucho complains, "if such a thing is possible." Zeppo involves his dad in a plot to hire ringers for the big game against rival Darwin. He also sings and woos the "college widow," played by Thelma Todd.
I have heard tell that Zeppo was actually a very funny guy and that from time to time he successfully understudied for Groucho, but the fact that the Brothers let writers such as George S. Kaufman (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) stand Zeppo in the corner without protest leads me to believe that either he was never that integral to the act or that he was already tired of performing and was looking forward to the day when he could work behind the scenes.
Once again relegated to a nearly non- existent role in Duck Soup, Zeppo left the act in 1933 to become a theatrical agent. A mechanical whiz, Zeppo also invented a watch to monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and founded Marman Products Co., which designed and manufactured, among other things, the Marman Twin motorcycle, and the Marman clamp which held the atomic bomb inside the B-29 used on the U.S. raid on Nagasaki.
Zeppo played one last role with the Marx Brothers in 1938, this time behind the scenes when he negotiated a deal with RKO Pictures for his brothers' services in a movie version of the hit Broadway play Room Service. Zeppo secured $250,000 for the act, a nice payday, but the movie was not a success and afterwards Groucho said only that Zeppo should have asked for more money.
The last surviving Marx Brother, Zeppo died in 1979.
I was going to put together my list of the ten best movies of 2010, but I think I only saw two, and one of them, Hot Tub Time Machine, is such a shoo-in for the Oscar this year I thought why bother.
Instead, in the spirit of pure narcissism—and because I'm still working on my marathon essay on the years 1906-1914 and have nothing else to post—here are the ten subjects I most enjoyed writing about in 2010 (click on the highlighted link to read the original post):
She was an actress in the early days of sound best remembered now for getting her neck bitten in Bela Lugosi's Dracula. But I love her for uttering my favorite line of dialogue from the World War I flying ace movie, The Last Flight:
"What are you changing your shoes for?"
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes."
9. Norma Shearer It's fun—occasionally—to admit you're wrong and when I picked Norma Shearer as the best actress of 1931-32 for her performance in the comedy Private Lives, I had to admit I had been wrong in dismissing her so quickly in the past.
8. Ham Actors You remember that Oscar ceremony where Wallace Beery beat John Barrymore around the head and shoulders with a rotary dial telephone? You don't? Well, it happened, at least here at the Monkey.
7. Movie Lists I think I once vowed never to do a list—so, of course, this year I did two. Or three, counting this one.
6. The Aging Of Greta Garbo But for an anomalous couple of weeks when somebody's droid app led to 3500 hits a day on my post about Popeye the Sailor, this post—a chronological series of photographs of Greta Garbo, ranging from childhood to old age—is the most popular one I've ever written.
5. Anita Page Did you ever fall in love with a hundred year old dead actress you're not married to? You did? What are you, some kind of freak?
4. Leave It To Beaver In Japanese Actually, I mean Yasujiro Ozu's classic comedy I Was Born, But ..., the story of a couple of mischievous boys who discover their dad is a middle management toady who survives as the butt of his boss's jokes. Why? "He pays my salary."
"Then don't let him pay you," his son says.
"Yeah!" the little brother adds with the implacable logic of a six year old. "You pay him instead!"
2. Very, very old movies I still say a rocket hitting the moon in the eye is one of the greatest images in the history of movies.
1. The Marx Brothers Only a fool would write an eight-part, 12,000 word essay and not claim it as his favorite post of the year. Well, the Monkey may be crazy, but he's no fool.
Last week's poll question—"Which is your favorite Hollywood movie of the early sound era?"—resulted in a record turnout.
How you voted:
Duck Soup—14 King Kong—8 City Lights—7 Grand Hotel—6 Other—6 All Quiet On The Western Front—5 Trouble In Paradise—5 Frankenstein—2 Scarface—2 The Jazz Singer—0
Wonder what movies those six voters had in mind when they opted for "other." There are a lot of good choices, I have to admit. If you want to stop by and tell us, we at the Monkey would like to know.
In the meantime, you might well ask, where are the real blog entries? I'm working on it—two thousand words on the Nickelodeon Era and counting. Should be up tomorrow. Here's a taste of things to come:
If you don't already follow The Marx Brothers Council of Britain, you should. Matthew Coniam has just posted not one, but two, essays on the Marx Brothers' first MGM movie, A Night At The Opera. Indispensable reading if you're a fan of the Marx Brothers, comedy or good writing.
To read "A Night At The Opera: An Overture," click here. And to read "A Night At The Opera: An Annotated Guide," click here.
[To read an eight-part biography of the Marx Brothers, click here. To read about Margaret Dumont, my choice for best supporting actress of 1932-33, click here. And to read about the drafting of Duck Soup's screenplay, click here.]
The award year running from September 1, 1932 through the end of 1933 was an unusually rich one for both comedies and musicals with more than a dozen must-see movies, including a pair from Ernst Lubitsch, three by Busby Berkeley, comedies starring Mae West, Charles Laughton, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, Laurel and Hardy, and even a groundbreaking cartoon short from Walt Disney. But the best work of the year came from the Marx Brothers, who contributed two indispensable classics, Horse Feathers and my choice for the best comedy of the year—or indeed, any year—Duck Soup.
In case you don't know, the Marx Brothers—Julius, Leonard, Adolph and Herbert, better known to the world as Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo—were the premiere comedy team of an era that also boasted such classic acts as Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges. Duck Soup was their fifth film and despite being delayed for nine months by a contract dispute with Paramount, proved to be the best of their career, featuring some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon.
Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: Freedonia's economy is in shambles, with a prohibitive increase in taxes ("I've got an uncle in Taxes—Dollars, Taxes!") in the offing if the rich widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) won't come through with another $20 million. And if that's not enough, Freedonia's bellicose neighbor, Sylvania, is massing troops on the border, threatening not only death and destruction, but also to introduce a plot into the picture's foreground, a development which in previous Marx Brothers movies tended to bring the comedy to a grinding halt.
With a month's rent already paid on the battlefield, war seems inevitable and the country teeters on the brink of anarchy. Desperate for a savior, Freedonia turns to that fearless man of the people, Rufus T. Firefly.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
Playing Firefly is Groucho Marx, he of the lacerating wit, the greasepaint moustache and the most impeccable timing in the history of comedy. While the chief obstacle to achieving peace in our time is ostensibly Sylvania's conniving ambassador Trentino (Louis Calhern), in fact, it's Firefly himself—his temper, his paranoia, his inability to make heads or tails of things a four year old child would understand.
"I'll be only too happy to meet Am- bassador Trentino, and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure that he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered. But suppose he doesn't. A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it! ... Why the cheap, four-flushing swine—so you refuse to shake hands with me!"
And thus just like that, Freedonia finds itself at war.
The humorist Roy Blount, Jr., in his recent book Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, called Duck Soup "the greatest war movie ever made," and while I wouldn't say Harpo carrying a sandwich board reading "Join the Army and See the Navy" around a battlefield is as harrowing as the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, I will agree that it's the best treatment ever of the causes of war. As a student of history, majoring in the subject in college and maintaining a lifelong interest in the to-ings and fro-ings of elected officials, I've concluded that nobody has ever launched a war thinking it was a bad idea, no matter how uninformed, misinformed or half-formed his reasons may have been for thinking so. (Yes, yes, I'm thinking of the War of Jenkins' Ear. Sue me.)
Don't get me wrong. Occasionally the world finds itself in a death match with, say, fascism, and it would be futile, not to mention suicidal, to sit on the sidelines, but more often than not, from the Crusades to Iraq's invasion of Iran and a hundred other major conflicts in between, the thinking leading to war is typically characterized by ego, paranoia, stupidity and shortsightedness, with very little afterwards to show for it but a pile of corpses, and when the smoke clears, everybody scratches their heads and promises to do better—until the next time, that is, when they go off and do it again.
And thus I believe Rufus T. Firefly when he says, "There's no turning back now! This means war!" Or I believe he believes it anyway. But a classic movie, like a well-written history, strips away the comforting lies and the self-delusion and leaves only the truth—in this case, that Rufus T. Firefly might not have been, shall we say, the best choice to lead a country in crisis. (Filmed shortly after the Nazis seized power in Germany, Harpo said later he and his Jewish brothers listened to Hitler's speeches on the radio between scenes and were quite consciously targeting both him and his fascist ally Mussolini with their humor. Indeed, Mussolini banned the film in Italy as a personal attack.)
Egging Firely on are Chicolini and Pinky (Chico and Harpo), who serve not only as Secretary of War and chauffeur, respectively, but also as the most incompetent double agents in history, infiltrating Freedonia's government on behalf of Trentino only to get sidetracked by scissors, doorbells and a cantankerous lemonade vendor.
"Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said follow him? Well, we get on the job right away and in one hour—even-a less than one hour—"
"Yes?"
"—we lose-a da picsh. That's-a pretty quick work, heh?"
Providing brilliant support are Margaret Dumont and Edgar Kennedy. Kennedy was a veteran of the Hal Roach Studios, and a master of what is known as slow-burn comedy, with laughs derived from a gradually increasing show of anger. Dumont, simply put, was the most talented straight-(wo)man in the history of movie comedies.
In consciously setting out to make the best Marx Brothers movie ever, director Leo McCarey ruthlessly streamlined the story, eliminating every element not directly related to producing laughs. In addition to cutting the usual harp and piano solos, he also cut a scripted romance between Zeppo and Raquel Torres (who played dancer Vera Marcal) as well as Zeppo's number "Keep On Doin' What You're Doin'" (recycled a year later for the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy, Hips Hips Hooray), effectively reducing the youngest Marx Brother to a bit player in his own movie.
McCarey also beefed up the supporting cast, calling in veteran actors Calhern and Kennedy for key parts, writing two classic sequences involving Harpo, Chico and a lemonade stand for the latter (it was Groucho himself who talked Margaret Dumont into playing Mrs. Teasdale). As a result, the Brothers finally found themselves working with a cast of expert straightmen whose set-up lines and reaction shots heightened the payoffs of the Brothers' already brilliant jokes.
In addition, McCarey's experience as a director of top comedy acts (Laurel and Hardy especially) shows in his ability to tether otherwise unrelated gags and one-liners to the framework of the story. On paper, Duck Soup is no more cohesive than Monkey Business or Horse Feathers, but McCarey is forever stitching scenes together with repeated dialogue, visual cues and recurring gags. $20 million is mentioned several times and many scenes are introduced with the Freedonian national anthem. Three times you see Groucho in bed, three times you see Chico or Harpo at the peanut stand. Several scenes involve eating—peanuts, donuts, crackers, apples. We see Groucho at his desk more than once—first in the newspaper photo that introduces him, then for a cabinet meeting, then yet again for a conversation with Zeppo and a sequence involving Harpo and the telephone. For that matter, we see Harpo on the telephone in two scenes, and Chico once as well. And, of course, there are recurring gags involving Harpo and scissors, a blow torch, a motorcycle, an alarm clock and Edgar Kennedy's hat.
These links, though unobtrusive, satisfy the mind's instinctive need for order and create a resonance that keeps the momentum of the picture from jerking to a halt every time the story changes gears.
"Duck Soup," wrote Roy Blount in Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, "is a seamless blend of just about every form of American comedy up to its time," and I attribute this versatility to Leo McCarey. As a source of inspiration for many of Duck Soup's gags, McCarey dipped into the bag of silent comedy tricks he had learned at the legendary Hal Roach Studios and came up with several scenes crucial to the film's success, including the three-hat gag, the break-in scene from Laurel and Hardy's Night Owls and most unforgettably, the mirror scene, which the Schwartz Brothers originated for the stage, and which showed up again in Charlie Chaplin's The Floorwalker and Max Linder's Seven Years' Bad Luck, but which was never essayed more brilliantly than by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
Most importantly, McCarey provided visuals that for the first—perhaps, only—time in the Marx Brothers' career matched their subversive, surreal wit. I'm thinking particularly of the battle scenes at the tail end of the movie, when Groucho changes uniforms with every shot and the army of elephants, monkeys, dolphins, swimmers, fire engines, etc. that responds to his call for help. But there's also the scene where a dog emerges barking from Harpo's chest, and another scene where Harpo climbs out of Edgar Kennedy's bath in full-dress uniform. (That McCarey used these tricks to turn what in previous movies would have been a plot-heavy resolution into an surrealist's dream is just another reason why he was the best director the Marx Brothers ever worked with. In fact, I'm willing to bet all the surrealists' efforts combined had less impact on attitudes about war and authority than this one Marx Brothers movie. But I digress. Again.)
But of course ultimately Duck Soup is about the Marx Brothers and simultaneously reigned in and unleashed by an expert director of comedy, they were never better. Groucho was never more comfortable in front of the camera. Harpo, the act's unrestrained id, is not as wild as he was in such movies as Animal Crackers, but his bits are better integrated into the flow of the film than ever before. And Chico has the best role of his career, serving not just as a foil for Groucho's wit and Harpo's destructive impulses, but as a showcase talent in his own right. (If you want to read more about the Marx Brothers themselves, click here, but I'm warning you in advance, few who venture there ever return to talk about it.)
In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a modest profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. Ironically, we most desperately seek meaning at those moments when the world most forcefully reminds us that life has no meaning, and in 1933, as the world teetered at the edge of the abyss, audiences had no taste for Duck Soup's bitter recipe. Because let's face it, while at first blush Duck Soup is delightfully silly and absurdist, its underlying riff—that our leaders are fools, that our institutions are corrupt, that young men and women die in wars for no reason, and that, above all, people are born to torment each other without hope of ever getting along—is as bleak and jaundiced a world view as Hollywood ever committed to film. That's not a message a paying audience is prepared to receive on an empty stomach, and in 1933, there were plenty of empty stomachs to go around.
Fortunately, the Marx Brothers signed with Irving Thalberg shortly after Duck Soup's premiere and at MGM, the Brothers made two of their most successful movies, A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races. Audiences were in the mood to laugh at the Marx Brothers again. They've been laughing ever since.
The latest poll results are in. "Of the five movies the Marx Brothers made at Paramount Pictures, which have you seen?" Thirty-one of you responded, with 28 saying you had seen Duck Soup, 25 Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and 21 Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts.
Three admitted "I have not seen any of these movies!" which I choose to interpret as meaning three lucky souls still have a chance to experience their first Marx Brothers movie—or at least their first Marx Brothers movie from the Paramount Pictures era. Do you remember your first Marx Brothers movie? I do. Monkey Business on PBS one Saturday afternoon, initially because my parents insisted, but soon enough because it was so much fun to watch. And the first one in a theater? A midnight showing of Animal Crackers when I was a teenager.
As for the new poll? It's Carole Lombard's birthday. "Of these classic Carole Lombard performances, which is your favorite?" Your choices: 1) Twentieth Century 2) My Man Godfrey 3) Nothing Sacred 4) To Be Or Not To Be. As always, vote in the poll at the top right-hand side of the page.
The Monkey's Top Five Marx Brothers movies: 1) Duck Soup 2) A Night At The Opera 3) Animal Crackers 4) Horse Feathers 5) A Day At The Races or Monkey Business or maybe The Cocoanuts. But definitely not Love Happy.
I've been writing about him for six weeks. Might as well wish him a happy 120th birthday while I'm at it.
For those of you who didn't want to wade through the eight-part, 12,000 word essay about Groucho and his brothers, here's the nutshell version (the rest of you can safely skip it—but you might like the pictures):
Born in New York to Jewish immigrants Sam "Frenchy" Marx and Minnie nee Minna Schönberg, Leonard, Adolph, Julius Henry, Milton and Herbert Manfred—better known to the world as Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo—the Marx Brothers first hit the vaudeville circuit as singer/musicians but quickly found their niche as masters of a unique brand of quick-witted improvisational comedy that bordered on anarchy.
On stage and in the movies, Chico played an Italian immigrant (he copied the accent from his barber) whose fractured English was the source of many jokes. He also played the con man on stage, alternately sharp or dim depending on whether he was conning brother Groucho or someone else. In real life, he was also a compulsive gambler and womanizer who stuck with the act mostly to make enough money to gamble and chase women.
Chico's on-stage accomplice in crime, Harpo was the pure id of the act, a hyperactive puppy, as innocent as a child, as easily distracted and just as destructive. Although Harpo was a scene-stealing machine who would wreak havoc whenever he was on stage, off stage he was a gentle man with a serious passion for the harp, an instrument he worked hard to master and he admitted later that those moments playing the harp are when you see the real man.
"Harpo was the solid man in the family," Groucho said. "He inherited all my mother's good qualities—kindness, understanding, and friendliness. I inherited what was left."
Groucho served to bridge the gap between the audience and his brothers. Where Chico and Harpo were usually off in their own worlds, motivated by impulses clear only to themselves (and often not even then), Groucho played recognizable members of society—teachers, lawyers, hotel owners, even petty dictators—who wanted the sorts of things the audience wanted, in Groucho's case, sex and money. Yet paradoxically, while acknowledging the world around him in ways his brothers rarely did, Groucho was the most hostile to the existing order, and he used his lacerating wit to keep the world—and the audience—at arm's length.
"I do not care to belong to a club," he famously wrote to the Friar's of Los Angeles, "that accepts people like me as members."
As for Gummo and Zeppo, neither developed stage characters as well defined as their brothers. Gummo was a quiet man with a childhood stammer and was never much interested in performing; he left the act in 1917 to join the army and never appeared in a movie with his brothers. Zeppo replaced him, but being so much younger than his brothers and coming so late to such a well-established act, wound up as something of an afterthought, usually singing and sometimes playing the lead in a romantic subplot. After five movies, in 1934 he also left the act.
After nearly twenty years of honing their act in vaudeville venues all over the country, the Brothers finally broke into "legitimate" Broadway theater in May 1924 with the musical comedy I'll Say She Is! A blend of standard song-and-dance numbers and the Marx Brothers biting comedy, the play was an immediate sensation. The Brothers followed up a year later with an even more successful musical, The Cocoanuts. inspired by a speculative land boom then underway in Florida, The Cocoanuts was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright George S. Kaufman and featured a song score by Irving Berlin, but primarily it proved to be another winning vehicle for some of the Brothers' best improvisational gags.
Such success quickly came to the attention of Paramount Pictures producer Adolph Zukor of who initially balked at the Brothers' asking price of $75,000, then wound up offering $100,000 after dinner with the always eloquent Chico Marx. The Brothers filmed a movie version of The Cocoanuts in New York even while performing their next play, Animal Crackers, on Broadway in the evening. Premiering just two years after Al Jolson had first spoken in a motion picture, The Cocoanuts was a smash hit at the box office.
The follow-up movie, Animal Crackers, was an even bigger hit and features the most quoted routines of Groucho's career.
"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
In 1931, with no Broadway commitment to keep them in New York, the Marx Brothers moved to Hollywood where they filmed their third movie, Monkey Business. Even for a Marx Brothers' movie, the story is tissue thin—four stowaways wreak havoc on an ocean liner, meet a couple of gangsters, go to work for them and wind up thwarting a kidnapping plot—but the first forty-five minutes of Monkey Business are as good as anything the Brothers ever did, sagging only once the Brothers leave their shipboard setting.
The idea of placing the Brothers in an academic setting for their fourth film, Horse Feathers, was an old one—twenty years before, Groucho had played a teacher to Gummo's and Harpo's students in the vaudeville show Fun In Hi Skule—and a team of writers led by ex-collegian S.J. Perelman set to work a script before Monkey Business was even in theaters.
Here, Groucho plays Professor Wagstaff, the newly-appointed president of Huxley College. The school's in trouble—it's been neglecting football for education, or possibly the other way around—and at the urging of his son (Zeppo), Wagstaff sets out to get better football players, starting with the two who hang around a local speakeasy. Of course, he confuses Harpo and Chico for the star players, who proceed to turn Huxley College into chaos. Along the way, the Brothers butt heads with a gambler who's put his money on the opposing team, Harpo and Chico try to kidnap Darwin's star players only to get themselves kidnapped instead and everybody serenades the college widow with variations on "Everyone Says I Love You," but the real point of the movie is to serenade the audience with hilariously shameless wordplay and anti-social anarchy.
Randy Williams, writing for ESPN in 2008, ranked the film's finale as "the greatest scene in football movie history."
Their fifth film, delayed for nine months by a contract dispute with Paramount, proved to be the best of the Marx Brothers' career.
Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: its economy in a shambles and on the verge of war, Freedonia is desperate for a savior and riding to the rescue is that fearless man of the people, Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho). The film features some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon. Many factors are responsible for Duck Soup's greatness, but primary among them are the performances of Groucho, Chico and Harpo themselves. Groucho, of course, was already without peer in terms of comic timing, and Harpo, though not quite as anarchic as in previous movies, is tighter here, with his antics leading directly to two of the movie's best moments—the mirror scene and Chico's trial for treason. And Chico, whose role had been limited largely to malapropisms, piano solos and translating for the silent Harpo, led entire sequences—the meeting with Louis Calhern, the peanut vendor scenes with Edgar Kennedy, the scene in Margaret Dumont's bedroom, and the trial for treason—showcasing a comic talent the equal of his brothers.
In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. Of course, Duck Soup's reputation as a masterpiece is now secure, consistently ranking as one of the greatest comedies ever made.
Soon after Duck Soup's premiere, the Marx Brothers and Paramount parted company. The Brothers signed with Irving Thalberg at MGM and made two of their best movies, A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races, but after Thalberg's death in 1937, never again hit those heights. Groucho went on to success on television and the Marx Brothers experienced a revival of interest in their films in the 1960s.
In 1974, the Academy finally acknow- ledged Groucho with a honorary award "In recog- nition of his brilliant creativity and for the unequaled achievements of the Marx Brothers in the art of motion picture comedy."
"I wish Harpo and Chico could be here to share it with me," he said.
In 1999, the AFI listed the Marx Brothers as one of the fifty greatest stars in the history of American cinema, the only group so honored.
Now that you've slogged through all 12,000 words I wrote about the Marx Brothers, I'm sure the first question that leaps to your mind is "Why, Mr. Monkey, why? Why would you write a novella about the Marx Brothers and not about, say, Charlie Chaplin or Jean Harlow?"
To which I would reply, "I did write a novella about Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow. See? Look here and here." But I wrote even more about the Marx Brothers—more about them than about anybody else so far—so it's a fair question.
To give you a fair answer, we have to go back a ways, back to my salad days when I was a young lawyer looking for a job and not finding one. I was a good lawyer, or had the potential to be—top quarter of my class, an editor on the law review, a clerkship for the chief justice of a state supreme court. But in the law, it's not what you know, or even who you know, but how much business you can bring into the firm—they're not subtle about asking the question—and the answer in my case, a poor boy who put himself through law school, was "none at all."
While I was clerking for the judge, I spent months looking for a permanent job in my hometown to no avail and then decided to aim higher—Washington, D.C. I sent out 204 (!) resumes, worked the phones, set up a sackful of interviews and flew to the nation's capital to pound the pavement for ten days, determined to come back with a job or else. It was all very old school, Horatio Alger stuff and you couldn't do it now, I don't think, with all the automated internet-driven application processes everybody seems to use these days.
And I interviewed, lots of interviews, but the one I remember is the last one on the afternoon before I flew home, an interview with a guy we here at the Monkey refer to as "Bellotoot." It was so last minute, with him tracking me down through the judge's secretary back home, that when I stepped into his office, I literally had no idea who he was or what he did—by such aimless applications of the Puritan work ethic are law offices and totalitarian regimes staffed—but you know, I needed a job and what the hell.
If you've ever been lucky enough to meet him, you know Bellotoot is a wonderful guy, with one of those rare grins that makes you happy just being in the same room with it. More to the point, he's also a movie fanatic who knows more about them than I ever will, and while he's talking about them, he does marvelous imitations, among them Don Rickles, Jimmy Stewart, Groucho and Chico Marx, and on and on. His "Curly Howard reads the works of Henry Miller" will put you in the floor.
None of which I knew when I sat down to talk to him, and he didn't know me, and for the first five minutes we talked about the sort of things you talk about in an interview. But as I was talking to him, I couldn't take my eyes off a makeshift nameplate sitting on the corner of his desk. "Rufus T. Firefly," it read, and even though I was desperate for a job, I couldn't think about anything else and finally I had to interrupt:
"I can't help but notice—Rufus T. Firefly. That's Groucho Marx in Duck Soup."
Bellotoot's eyebrows went up and that grin split his face. "You know, you're the first person ever to walk in here and know who Rufus T. Firefly is." And for the next forty minutes we talked about nothing but the Marx Brothers. We never did get back to talking about the job. And on the following Monday, he called me and made me an offer.
The rest is history. I moved to Washington, looked up a woman I knew from college—you know her as Katie-Bar-The-Door—we started dating and got married two years later. Bellotoot and I, of course, are still great friends, and he introduced me to the guy who actually made the Rufus T. Firefly nameplate for him, Mister Muleboy of The Mouth O' The Mule, the guy who a year ago buffaloed me into starting this blog. I wrote a couple of novels (unpublished, so don't ask), lived overseas, litigated million dollar cases in federal court, met or renewed friendships with all the other people I hang out with.
Et cetera et cetera et cetera. None of which would have happened without my obsession with Duck Soup and the Marx Brothers. And that's why I wrote 12,000 words about them.
This week's question was inspired by a conversation I had recently with a lifelong pal. "Of the five movies the Marx Brothers made at Paramount Pictures, which have you seen?"
Vote in the poll at the top of the right hand column. Choose as many answers as apply.
[To read prior entries in this essay, click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
The MGM Years And Beyond Their association with Paramount Pictures at an end, the Marx Brothers found themselves without a steady gig for the first time since vaudeville impresario E.F. Albee had blackballed them from the circuit over a decade before. Harpo traveled to the Soviet Union to commemorate the normalization of U.S.-Soviet relations, Groucho performed in a repertory production of Twentieth Century in Maine, and both Groucho and Chico starred briefly in a radio program called The Marx Of Time sponsored by American Oil.
In the meantime, the Brothers (minus Zeppo, who officially left the act in March 1934 to form a talent agency) approached Samuel Goldwyn seeking a new film deal. Goldwyn wasn't interested, but suggested the Brothers try Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder producer who had enjoyed such success at MGM. Tired of life under Louis B. Mayer's thumb, Thalberg was looking to sign talent to personal contracts with the idea of forming his own studio.
Chico made the initial approach to Thalberg over a game of bridge. Groucho described the subsequent meeting in his autobiography, Groucho and Me:
Thalberg said, "I would like to make some pictures with you fellows. I mean real pictures."
I flared up. "What's the matter with Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers and Duck Soup? Are you going to sit there and tell me those weren't funny?"
"Of course they were funny," he said, "but they weren't movies. They weren't about anything."
"People laughed, didn't they?" asked Harpo. "Duck Soup has as many laughs as any comedy ever made, including Chaplin's."
"That's true," he agreed, "it was a very funny picture, but you don't need that many laughs in a movie. I'll make a picture with you fellows with half as many laughs—but I'll put a legitimate story in it and I'll bet it will gross twice as much as Duck Soup."
The result was A Night At The Opera, and Thalberg was right, it and its follow-up, A Day At The Races were smash hits, reestablishing the Marx Brothers as Hollywood's top comedy act. The former is preserved in the National Film Registry and ranked twelfth on the American Film Institute's list of the best American comedies of the 20th century. The latter received the only Oscar nomination in Marx Brothers history, in the short-lived category of dance direction. (I'll write more about A Night At The Opera when we reach 1935.)
Depending on your take, Thalberg either polished the Marx Brothers or neutered them—perhaps both. What can't be argued is that he rescued them from an early retirement and pointed them in a direction that kept them in the public eye for another decade, long enough for Groucho to land a television show and assure his role as a beloved icon, a role he relished and used as a platform to promote the Marx Brothers' films to a new generation of film fans. Perhaps audiences in the 1960s would have rediscovered their Paramount movies anyway, but the success of A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races certainly helped.
In any event, the Brothers adored Thalberg and showed it in their usual inimitable style—they barricaded themselves in his empty office, stripped naked and roasted potatoes in his fireplace. When Thalberg returned, he sent out for butter and joined the Brothers for a light repast.
After Thalberg's death in 1937, MGM lost interest in the act. A self-consciously glossy and high-toned studio, MGM's brass didn't know what to make of the Marx Brothers and put them in vehicles that didn't always suit their talents. First, the studio loaned the Brothers to RKO for Room Service, the first Marx Brothers movie based on a non-Marx Brothers stage play. Zeppo negotiated the deal, securing $250,000, a nice payday, but the movie was not a success and afterwards Groucho said only that Zeppo should have asked for more money.
Afterwards, the Brothers made three more pictures for MGM—At The Circus, Go West and The Big Store—with diminishing results, then retired from movies altogether. Five years later when gangsters threatened Chico's life over a gambling debt, the Brothers abruptly unretired and made A Night In Casablanca. Perhaps the best film the Brothers made after Thalberg's death, A Night In Casablanca is remembered now primarily for a series of letters between Groucho Marx and Warner Brothers, with the latter (as makers of the classic film Casablanca) objecting to the use of the word "Casablanca" in the title of the film.
"You claim you own Casablanca," Groucho wrote in response, "and that no one else can use that name without your permission. What about 'Warner Brothers'? Do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were."
Of the Brothers' last movie as a team, Love Happy, the less said the better. Remembered now for Marilyn Monroe's brief appearance, the film began as a vehicle for Harpo who wanted to film a Chaplinesque pantomime. Chico was added early in the process, again to fuel his gambling addiction, and Groucho was dragooned into filming a few scenes so that the studio could bill Love Happy as a Marx Brothers film. (The Brothers also appeared in the 1957 film The Story of Mankind, but had no scenes together.)
After their film careers ended, only Groucho found real success, hosting a popular game show, You Bet Your Life, from 1950 to 1961. Although there were contestants, games and prizes, the real point of the show was Groucho's banter and he was very good at it. The show was nominated for an Emmy six times, and Groucho himself won the award in 1951 as "Most Outstanding Personality." He also made half a dozen movies without his brothers, including Copacabana, Double Dynamite and Skidoo (playing God in the latter).
The Marx Brothers never won a competitive Oscar—indeed, were never even nominated—but in 1974, the Academy finally recognized Groucho with a honorary award "In recognition of his brilliant creativity and for the unequaled achievements of the Marx Brothers in the art of motion picture comedy."
"I wish Harpo and Chico could be here to share it with me," he said.
In 1999, the AFI listed the Marx Brothers as one of the fifty greatest stars in the history of American cinema, the only group so honored.
Postscript: And that's all I'm writing about the Marx Brothers—well, this week anyway. After 12,000 words, I need a little break. I'll return next week with a post entitled "Who Says A Movie Can't Change Your Life?" then follow it with the nominees for best actor of 1932-33 in the category of drama.
Born on February 25, 1901, Herbert Manfred Marx—better known as "Zeppo"—was the youngest of six brothers and along with Leonard, Adolph and Julius Henry—Chico, Harpo and Groucho to the rest of us—made up the greatest comedy team in movie history, the Marx Brothers.
Zeppo's best roles were in the movies Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. For the former, the Brothers finally hit on the rather obvious idea of letting Zeppo handle the chores of wooing the obligatory girl in their musical comedy routines. I can't say he's great as he chases the girl (Ruth Hall), but he's better than either Oscar Shaw or Hal Thompson who performed the same thankless chores in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, respectively.
Once again relegated to a nearly non- existent role in Duck Soup, Zeppo left the act in 1933 to become a theatrical agent. A mechanical whiz, Zeppo also invented a watch to monitor the pulse rate of cardiac patients and founded Marman Products Co., which designed and manufactured, among other things, the Marman Twin motorcycle, and the Marman clamp which held the atomic bomb inside the B-29 used on the U.S. raid on Nagasaki.
