THE MARX BROTHERS

Cinema

Over 90 years ago, four New York brothers changed the parameters of comedy forever. Olivier Woodes-Farquharson explores their unique impact on the early world of talkie cinema and their continuing legacy

hen moving my family to Manhattan

Won a diplomatic posting a few years ago, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office allocated for us a spacious threebedroom apartment on the 28th floor of a typically vast block on the Upper East Side. More specifically, it was at the corner of East 93rd Street and 2nd Avenue, and despite having never actually visited New York until then, East 93rd Street rang the vaguest of bells in my usually dependable memory. A quick stroll through the mind palace and I stumbled across it. I was giddy in realising that I was to live on the very street where my lifelong heroes the Marx Brothers had been brought up. “Despite Harpo’s silence, he is the beating heart of the movies, even when he is chasing whichever pretty blonde girl is nearest, honking his horn in blissful innocence, because he clearly would have no idea what to do next if ever he caught her”

Chico Zeppo

The Marx Brothers were initially four and latterly three, youngest brother Zeppo leaving after 1933’s Duck Soup. Each of the four took an utterly different angle when bringing their unique hi-jinks to the screen. And this was reflected in the clothes they wore – clothes which were effectively a uniform, as they each donned essentially the same outfit in every movie, from 1929’s The Cocoanuts to 1946’s A Night in Casablanca.

Their father Samuel was a moderately successful tailor. But the driving force behind their initial stage success was their mother Minnie, like her husband a German Jewish arrival to the US in her youth, who cajoled, inspired and ultimately acted as manager to her sons – originally including fifth brother Gummo, who soon left to join the army during World War I. The hard-worked personas that the brothers presented on screen were first honed on the exhausting vaudeville circuit spread-eagled across the US, eventually breaking into Broadway in the 1920s, meaning that the brothers segued into the era of talkie movies with one of the slickest acts anyone had ever seen. So what did each brother bring to the revelry?

CHICO

The eldest, nicknamed Chico, was born in 1887 as Leonard. His movie character, as with each brother, was essentially identical in every film: whether going by the name Ravelli, Chicolini, Fiorello, Tony or Panello, the template never changed: a pork pie hat, a scruffy jacket and shapeless checked trousers, colours now unknown through the black and white lens.

Chico always played a slightly unsavoury and untrustworthy charmer, with a subtle Italian accent, ready to scam at a moment’s notice, and always armed with a barrage of puns: some very clever, others knowingly lame. We’d call them ‘Dad Jokes’ now, but dads don’t have the awareness that Chico does when delivering them. Often, he actively wants you to groan.

Off screen, he would live up to his nickname because, despite being married to the long-suffering Betty, he had the most immense difficulty keeping his trousers on around the ladies. An angry Betty once caught him kissing a chorus girl. ‘I wasn’t kissing her,’ came the effortless reply, ‘I was whispering in her mouth’.

This risk-hungry approach to life didn’t end there. Chico relentlessly gambled all his money away, again and again. In fact, the last two Marx Brothers films were made specifically because he was massively in debt and persuaded his kindly brothers to help rescue him from his predicament. As his brother Groucho once remarked, ‘There are three things that Chico is always on: a phone, a horse or a broad’. Yet, for all his shortcomings, the brothers still clearly adored him and forgave him everything.

Groucho

“After dinner, news arrived of the heavy raid on London. There was nothing that I could do about it, so I watched the Marx Brothers in a comic film which my hosts arranged. I went out twice to inquire about the air raid and heard that it was bad. The merry film clacked on, and I was glad of the diversion – Winston Churchill”

HARPO

Born in 1888 as Adolph, which he changed presciently to Arthur in 1911, Harpo was by all accounts an angel of a man. No digging by any unscrupulous journalist could ever find the merest hint of dissent against him. He was devoted to his wife Susan, he adored his four adopted children, and made lifelong friends everywhere he went.

This innocence is echoed in every Marx movie, with Harpo essentially playing a mute, pantomime clown. His get-up has become iconic: trousers that would look rough even on a homeless man; an off-centre tie and checked shirt, not even trying to match, and largely covered by an ill-fitting and incongruous raincoat, the cavernous pockets of which contain, among other things, a fish, a flute, a sword, a cup of steaming hot coffee, and a candle burning at both ends. The look is finished with either a blonde or red curly wig and a top hat that appears to have spent a week in a skip.

Harpo carries a cane that is topped off with an old-school car horn which, along with whistling, is Harpo’s main form of communication. For throughout their 13 movies, he doesn’t utter a word. In fact, go onto YouTube and you’ll find only one known recording of his voice – 30 seconds of a deep, rich and slow drawl, with the most delicious New York vowels, discussing – of all things – being thrown out of a brothel in his younger days.

His character – variously called Stuffy, Pinky, Punchy, Wacky or Rusty – always displays immense empathy. Despite his silence, he is the beating heart of the movies, even when he is chasing whichever pretty blonde girl is nearest, honking his horn in blissful innocence, because he clearly would have no idea what to do next if ever he caught her.

To my mind, none of the Chaplins, Keatons or Lloyds of the silent world ever matched Harpo’s sublime antics. His signature move of the leg grab

Horse Feathers, 1932 Duck Soup, 1933

– where he looks his interlocutor closely in the eyes whilst surreptitiously taking their hand to hold his thigh up for absolutely no reason until they eventually notice – shouldn’t be funny the 87th time you see it, yet it is. His famous ‘Gookie’ – involving a deft mix of blowing out the cheeks, sticking the tongue out through the teeth and crossing the eyes – never fails to have anyone who watches it in stitches.

GROUCHO

Brother number three was born Julius in 1890, and with two big brothers who were borderline illiterate, Groucho was the true bookworm intellectual of the family. Although a roll call of outstanding screenwriters helped add so much shape and genius to these movies, the scripts were peppered throughout with Groucho’s self-scripted conveyor belt of oneliners which, despite the passage of time and the evolving of culture, still dazzle like no other from that era. As one wag put it, Groucho’s sentences often lose their way, fail to accomplish what they set out to accomplish, and are proud of it.

Groucho invariably wears tails, regardless of the circumstance. They are deliberately a size-anda-half too big, as though to tell us that he takes any given situation frivolously. A cigar, which doesn’t usually appear to be lit, transitions frequently from his hand to his mouth as he unleashes his next unprovoked put-down.

And then there’s his face. Without make-up, the brothers were eerily similar looking in real life. Yet the often shy and misanthropic Groucho, perhaps keen to hide behind a façade, would only go before the camera wearing small round spectacles and three great smears of black greasepaint to represent his moustache and eyebrows. Every novelty dressing-up shop is guaranteed still to have it. And it goes hand-in-hand with his bizarre walk; an athletic, stalking lope, with one hand behind his back as he leans forward almost 90 degrees. It was apparently a hugely exaggerated pastiche of a late 19th century dandy style of walking.

The characters he plays in each film range from hustler, naïve businessman to obscure politician, who almost always get conned out of something, usually by Chico. They often take him far more seriously than they should – a problem that the viewer never has, bearing in mind his characters go by such names as J. Cheever Loophole, Rufus T. Firefly, Otis B. Driftwood and Hugo Z. Hackenbush.

ZEPPO

The baby brother, born in 1901 as Herbert, got something of a raw deal. It was imperative in the comedies of those days to have the straight man. Even after Zeppo left the troupe to become an agent, his character persisted in all the subsequent films, played by different actors who were not called Marx.

A Night at the Opera, 1935

His outfit is the most conventional: a dapper, light, double-breasted suit and polished brogues. But his more pushy older brothers always managed to claim the best lines, and develop their on-screen personas further, leaving Zeppo in a vicious circle that increasingly frustrated him. When their second movie Animal Crackers (1930) was rehearsing, one of the producers challenged him to put more variety into his performance. One can only imagine the level of Zeppo’s annoyance as he quipped, ‘How many different ways are there to say “Yes”?’

When they were touring in the 1920s with their stage show of Animal Crackers, Groucho fell ill with appendicitis, and with virtually no notice, Zeppo took Groucho’s place, with the latter – recuperating in the audience – astounded that his kid brother could give a pitch perfect rendition of such a unique character.

WHY SHOULD WE STILL CARE?

Certain aspects have understandably dated from these movies. Watching a nicely choreographed song-and-dance number or a straight harp solo in the middle of firecracker comedy seems simply odd or sluggish now, and betrays both the Brothers’ musical origins and the preferences of the time. But don’t be distracted by this – or fast-forward through it if you must – because the rest is still gold.

The Brothers’ first movie written explicitly for the camera was Monkey Business (1931) and, for the first two thirds at least, it is as close to happy lunacy as you could ever hope for. Essentially, they are four stowaways on a transoceanic liner on its way to New York from who-knows-where. Neither at the beginning or end do we know who they are, what they’ve done to need to hide in four barrels marked ‘Kippered Herring’, why they want to go to New York – nothing.

It emphatically doesn’t matter. But they get discovered and have to run and hide to avoid getting caught. And while avoiding the crew, they insult passengers, have love affairs, get caught up with gangsters, take over a Punch and Judy show, become barbers, impersonate Maurice Chevalier, the usual things you do on a cruise. On Wikipedia, the ‘plot’ section to describe this movie is the shortest of any such entry I’ve ever seen.

And this viewer isn’t the only person to see this 75 minutes of farce as pure balm. Here is an extract from the memoirs of Winston Churchill during

some of the darkest days of last century: After dinner, news arrived of the heavy raid on London. There was nothing that I could do about it, so I watched the Marx Brothers in a comic film which my hosts arranged. I went out twice to inquire about the air raid and heard that it was bad. The merry film clacked on, and I was glad of the diversion. Monkey Business was that film.

Movies 90 years ago were not constrained by the agonising over structure that weighs down the development of so many projects today. In the 1930s, there was much less expectation of what shape, if any, the story should take. To that end, you can look for a linear tale everywhere in Horse Feathers (1932) but you aren’t going to find it. Although the musical numbers are the part of Marx movies which have dated the most, Horse Feathers suffers less than the others. Groucho’s early number during his investiture as Dean, Whatever it is, I’m Against it, should surely be the anthem for non-conformists everywhere. Horse Feathers saw the Brothers’ star shine even brighter. They made the cover of Time magazine and the movie caught the attention of legendary Spanish painter Salvador Dalí. He had struck up a friendship with Harpo and wrote a movie script for them called, naturally, Giraffes on Horseback Salad. It was never made but, having been lost for decades, turned up in Dali’s private papers in 1996, and was turned into a graphic novel in 2019.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

The jury will always be out about which is the best anti-war satire ever committed to celluloid, but Duck Soup is definitely up there. When the film came out, Mussolini was well established as Il Duce in Italy (and it was his banning of the movie that confirmed to the delighted brothers they were on to a winner). It was also the year that saw the advent of national socialism in Germany, which makes the film that much more prescient. As one historian put it, ever since 1933, it seems that politicians have selflessly dedicated themselves to upholding Duck Soup’s truth.

We begin this time to have some semblance of a story being told. It takes place in the imaginary country of Freedonia, where dictator Rufus T Firefly (Groucho) decides to invade his neighbour Sylvania just for the hell of it. With Zeppo as his secretary, Chico as his Minster of War and Harpo as his chauffeur, there are attempts to diffuse conflicts by both sides, with Groucho always managing to grab defeat from the jaws of victory.

The film features one of the most sublime silent comic routines ever conceived, the fabled ‘mirror scene’. With Chico, Harpo and Groucho all dressed as the latter in full nightgown and greasepaint, Harpo attempts to mimic a suspicious Groucho’s every move. The increasingly implausible but near-perfect mimicry is astounding, at one stage involving eyeing each other up and each walking through the ‘mirror’ and back again; it’s made all the more powerful by the brothers’ incredibly similar resemblance in the Groucho make up.

The Brothers’ contract with Paramount Studios thereafter expired and they were courted by MGM, tempted both by the dollar signs and the presence of boy wonder producer Irving Thalberg. He suggested bigger budgets, more story and a tiny toning down of the lunacy in order to reach an even wider audience. Initially sceptical, they found a compromise: test the new material on the stage for a few months around the country to see what did and didn’t work, and keep the bits that did in the movie.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)

In this humble viewer’s opinion the most perfect movie the brothers made. Opening in Milan, Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho, of course) informs the wealthy Mrs Claypool (Margaret Dumont) that if she invests in his opera company he will make her the toast of New York society. For once, there is actually far more story than the summary suggests, more of a structured film than a selection of loosely conjoined sketches. And ‘the Zeppo role’ of Baroni is, ironically, both bigger and better than any part Zeppo himself was ever given, played charmingly here by singer/actor Allan Jones. Too many laughout-loud moments occur to mention them all in depth, but describing this film and not mentioning the ‘Stateroom scene’ would be like recounting one’s recent holiday to the Giza plateau and neglecting to mention the pyramids.

I could go on. And indeed so did the Marx Brothers, making just one more top-notch film (A Day At The Races, 1937), before the gentle rot set in and the law of diminishing returns was applied. None of the subsequent films is bad; far from it. Memorable scenes abound throughout. They just don’t hit that invisible, transcendent bullseye of immortality that previous ones had.

Yet you only have to look at The Goon Show of the 1950s, the Woody Allen and Monty Python movies of the 1970s, Airplane and Naked Gun in the 1980s, or Anchorman more recently, to realise that the Marx Brothers are still indirectly shaping brilliant movies, albeit from their film set in the sky. And you don’t have to live in an apartment on East 93rd Street to appreciate that. n