“Monkey Business”
Hmmm.....Whereas the genius “Animal Crackers” was lifted to glory by some divine wordplay and verbal gag routines, Here Groucho seems to have an awful lot of not very much to say and the film is hurt badly by it.
It seems all the good gags were used in the previous film and here Groucho fires off weak material at lightening speed to little effect, he’s also playing it very childish.
Zeppo has slightly more to do but of course all of it is straight, Harpo and Chico are pretty much wasted though.
The sexy presence of the tragic Thelma Todd gives Groucho’s words some spark later on...but he can’t work off a pretty young woman anything like as well as a middle aged dame like, the much missed here, Margaret Dumont.
Todd infamously died not that long after “Horse Feathers” by carbon-monoxide poisoning in her locked garage.
Suicide and Mob murder were the more acceptable rumours but it seems to be the case she was accidently shut in the garage (with the car engine running) after she fell asleep drunk following her lover’s storming out after she supposedly bit him during a drunken attempt at oral pleasuring!
Whatever the truth of her demise, she adds lots of spark to her Marx Brothers appearances (all flighty fun and bra-less jiggling in low cut dresses).
In the end “Monkey Business” may be madcap, fast and crazy...but it’s just not very funny.
“Horse Feathers”
WHOOP! Back on form!
From bland verbal gags in “Monkey Business” Groucho is here spoiled for choice as far as great verbal gags go.
From the fun opening song till the end credits “Horse Feathers” fully delivers the laughs.
Grouch is in top insulting form as far as the college Professors go (“Why don’t you go home to your wife? I’ll tell you what, I’ll go home to your wife, and outside of the improvement she’ll never know the difference”) and Chico and Harpo have some good scenes with and without him.
All three are great in the hysterical schoolroom scene, Groucho and Chico have a very funny, superbly absurdist, scene together involving the password to a speakeasy and Harpo has fun with an extended one armed bandit gag.
Even Zeppo does far more here to good effect.
The football match finale is crazy fun and ends the film on a fast moving high.
One of the greats, but amazingly under-appreciated.
“A Night at the Opera”
The film that really made The Marx Brothers stars is also stunningly frustrating.
When the full-on madness and almost plot-less anarchy of “Duck Soup” failed to hit big, it was (rightly, it has to be said) decided, by the young MGM genius Irvin Thalberg, that the Marx’s needed a real plot and a real image of being good guys to make their films (and their brand of anarchic comedy) a hit with large mainstream audiences.
As such the films that followed had ‘proper’ plots with a proper conclusion, obvious bad guys and young love couples that need help from our crazy sidekick heroes.
As such The Marx’s became...er....like John Candy in “Splash” only with Tom Hanks levels of screentime.
The move to MGM also meant that the much loathed musical numbers became longer and more lavish (often sickly sweet as well if it was the two lovers warbling at each other) so the scope for endless Marx madness was curtailed.
But this is not all bad. Fine honing of the new routines means that some of the Marx’s best ever verbal and visual sequences exist in these films, the obvious budget increase helped, the technical side improved and it has to be said that the ‘normal’ plots help the actual routines truly stand out.
You basically just have to (unless you like them, in which case you’re in heaven) fast forward past the song and dance moments, starry-eyed lover songs and extended Harpo harp moments (yes, he’s good and it shows another side, but that still does not make these scenes welcome in a comedy imho) to get to the real good and tasty Marx nourishment.
Here we have the fun (but overrated for me) stateroom sequence, the truly classic ‘Sanity Clause’ routine between Chico and Groucho, the great Police/hoping rooms chase routine, some fun stunt/slapstick gags as Harpo destroys the opera and some classic Groucho lines;
“You’re willing to pay him a thousand dollars a night just for singing?
Why, you can get a phonograph record of ‘Minnie the Moocher’ for 75 cents. And for a buck and a quarter, you can get Minnie”.
Cop - “You live here all alone”?
Groucho - ”Yes. Just me and my memories. I’m practically a hermit”.
Cop - “Oh...A hermit? I notice the table’s set for four!
Groucho - “That’s nothing, my alarm clock is set for eight”.
It’s nice to have Margaret Dumont back, but her scenes with Groucho are not very long and not as good as their earlier ones.
But the warbling Allan Jones (one half of the love birds who would return in the excellent “A Day at the Races") actually works well with the 3 Marx’s during the comedy routines and you can see that Zeppo’s point he made to Groucho when he quit, “You could have had anyone play my roles”, was correct.
Damn fine Marx Brothers overall . But you have to grin and bare those non-Marx songs and MGM dance routines.
