While we here on the East coast batten down the hatches, why don't the rest of you watch Buster Keaton in his classic comedy about the weather, Steamboat Bill, Jr., courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.
I promise to get back to the serious business of blogging next week ...
[Click here to read more about Buster Keaton's performance in Steamboat Bill, Jr.]
I have to confess that a movie like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, a bitter condemnation of, among other things, prison chain gangs, is not typically my sort of thing. To me, message pictures often have the taste of medicine that's supposed to be good for me but sticks halfway down—not because I necessarily disagree with what the film is saying but because the message is often delivered with all the subtlety of an ad for a personal injury lawyer.
I seem to remember Ernest Hemingway once saying something to the effect that if you tell your story about the way people really behave and if you get the details right, all the politics you'll ever need are already in it; the rest is just gilding the lily. But while art works best in the gray area that characterizes human existence, that sort of ambiguity doesn't lend itself to a clarion call to action, and unless a director is the caliber of John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein or Vittorio de Sica, he runs a real risk of burying his point if he allows his story to go where it wants to go.
Which is what makes I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang such a remark- able movie in my book. Because despite clearly having an axe to grind, the film steers clear of preaching, focusing instead on the man at the center of the story and in the process delivering one of the most gripping tales to emerge from the pre-Code era.
Based on the autobiography of Robert Elliott Burns, who twice escaped from a brutal Georgia chain gang, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang tells the story of James Allen (Paul Muni), a returning soldier who wants to better himself after the war, finds opportunities wanting and then is sentenced to a decade of hard labor for a robbery he didn't commit. A prison blacksmith welds manacles to his ankles and shackles them together with a chain exactly thirteen links long.
Thus begins a life of merciless suffering at the hands of a state-sanctioned sadism that at the time passed for justice in many parts of this country. Like Marley's Ghost, wearing the chain he forged in life, Allen will remain fettered every moment of every day for the entire ten years of his sentence.
I won't spoil the ending for you except to say it has justly become one of the most famous in film history.
Given that the name of the movie is I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that after enduring the unendurable, Allen escapes to lead the life of model citizen, only to be betrayed to the law by a gold-digging wife (Glenda Farrell). Allen agrees to return to prison on the promise that he will receive a full pardon within ninety days. What happens then I leave to you to discover, but let's say that he finds himself once again betrayed, as frankly he was betrayed when he (and millions of men) returned home from the war.
"The state's promise didn't mean anything," he says in a moment of clarity. "It was all lies ... Why, their crimes are worse than mine, worse than anybody's here. They're the ones that should be in chains, not we!"
He's speaking of the actions of the parole board, yes, but he could just as easily be speaking of a government that had turned its back on the veterans who had served their country only to find themselves unemployed and homeless as the Depression dragged on. The film's production began just a month after President Herbert Hoover had ordered an attack on 8,000 veterans marching in favor a "bonus" bill then pending in Congress—two police officers and two veterans were killed—and the full meaning of Allen's words would not have been lost on an audience of the time.
Such a story could easily have become either shrill and histrionic or unbearably grim if the director or actors had strayed too far in one direction or the other. That it is instead enthralling from beginning to end is a testament to both Mervyn LeRoy's expert direction and to Paul Muni's pitch-perfect performance.
LeRoy, who is best known now as the guy who green-lighted The Wizard Of Oz, chose both by design and by circumstance to let sound and images tell much of his story. The sound of clanking chains are more eloquent than a page of dialogue, and when you see that even the mules are chained together, you know you're bearing witness to a justice system founded on the most inhuman sort of cruelty. That censorship forced the studio to remove some of the more incendiary dialogue explicitly condemning chain gangs actually improved the movie—without unctuous, oily speeches to get in the way, the images speak for themselves, and speak powerfully.
But primarily, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang works because we come to care about the man underneath the story, the man played by Paul Muni.
Muni was born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund of Polish-Jewish decent in what is now Lviv, Ukraine. In 1902, at the age of seven, he immigrated to the United States with his parents and came of age in New York. Muni learned the craft of acting in what was then known as "the Yiddish theater," and because he was so skilled at the art of makeup, he was dubbed "the New Lon Chaney."
Despite being nominated for an Oscar, Muni's first screen performance, 1929's The Valiant, was a box office failure. When his second film was also a flop, Muni returned to the Broadway stage and didn't make another movie until writer Ben Hecht recommended him for the lead in Howard Hawks's gangster classic, 1932's Scarface. When he followed that box office smash with an Oscar-nominated performance in I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, his Hollywood career was set. In the course of a career that ran until his retirement in 1959, he was nominated for four more Oscars, winning in 1936 for The Story Of Louis Pasteur.
Today, opinions about Muni's abilities are split, with many critics echoing British film historian David Thomson who calls Muni "awful" and "a crucial negative illustration in any argument as to what constitutes screen acting." Me, I'd call him "theatrical"—he worked like a Method actor, immersing himself in a role, but he learned his technique on the Broadway stage and despite years in Hollywood, never strayed far from his origins.
But does that make him, as Thomson and others contend, a bad movie actor?
Well, Muni's acting reminds me of something that Katie-Bar-The-Door was reading about wine in the Washington Post Magazine a couple of weekends ago, that a wine that tastes good when you're sipping it on the back porch won't necessarily taste good when you're drinking it with a meal. Turns out the flavors in the wine when combined with, say, red meat create a different sensation on your taste buds than they do when combined with peanuts at a cocktail party. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the wine. Just means that there's no simple one-size-fits-all way to rate a bottle of wine.
In the same way, there's no one-size-fits-all way to rate acting either. And to insist that the only good acting is realistic, underplayed Method acting is like saying the only good wine is a Bordeaux, whether you're drinking it with beef, fish or a blonde in the backseat of a Thunderbird. I wouldn't want to see Paul Muni in Schindler's List—but then neither would I want to see Robert De Niro in Duck Soup, Marlon Brando in It's A Wonderful Life or Dustin Hoffman in High Noon. Context is everything, or nearly so, and I can't imagine any of Muni's contemporaries in the role of James Allen—Cagney was too gleeful, Robinson too menacing, despair wasn't in Cooper's make-up and I don't believe Gable could have been pushed around by anybody.
So Muni it was, and he was perfect in the role. He tailored his acting to the needs of the moment; when the scene needed energy, he was animated; when the scene spoke for itself, he was absolutely still. And when it was time for him to explode, it was the explosion of a man who had swallowed his rage at an unjust system until he was choked with near madness.
That he was perfect in other roles, too (Howard Hawks's Scarface comes immediately to mind), is enough to establish him in my mind as a real actor worthy of our attention.
I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang was a sensation upon its release, winning the National Board of Review's prize as best picture of the year, as well as three Oscar nominations (picture, actor and sound recording).
More important to Warner Brothers, the studio that had gambled on such risky material, the film was a big hit at the box office. Despite pioneering sound movies, Warner Brothers was considered a second-tier studio in 1932, with their fast, hard gangster pictures and sensational Code-skirting movies confined largely to working-class urban venues where patrons had little disposable income. To break into the high-rent districts where the nicer independent theaters were located, Warners needed a "prestige" project and I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang fit the bill perfectly—a case of art serving the ends of commerce.
In 1991, the Library of Congress added I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang to the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
[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.
[To read previous entries in this essay, click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
Duck Soup: The Brothers At Their Best Let's just cut to the chase. If you've never seen Duck Soup, back away from the blog, turn off your computer and go find it—right now! It's available for instant streaming from Netflix, if you're set up for that, and you can always buy it here from amazon.com if you're not.
Because the fact is there are certain works of art so essential to the human experience that, love them or hate them, not to have experienced them at least once dooms you to a life of aimless wandering in the desert of cultural ignorance. Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David. And if I had to choose just one Marx Brothers movie that meets the definition of essential, Duck Soup would be it.
Now, those of you who have been following this blog for a while know I'm not prone to dogmatic pronouncements. I'm a live and let live guy (in a live and let die world) and if you don't like the same movies I like, that's perfectly alright with me. There are no wrong answers, I always say, just movies you haven't seen yet.
So when I tell you in such uncertain terms that this is one of the movies you should see, well, you know I'm not kidding around. Go. See the movie. Then come back and read this post. We'll wait.
For everybody else, here's a quick reminder of why Duck Soup is so wonderful:
Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: Freedonia's economy is in a shambles, it's treasury depleted, and only the largess of a wealthy benefactor, the rich widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) keeps the country afloat. Moreover, Freedonia's bellicose neighbor, Sylvania, is massing troops on the border, and with a month's rent already paid on the battlefield, war seems inevitable. The country teeters on the brink of anarchy.
Freedonia is desperate for a savior and riding to the rescue is that fearless man of the people, Rufus T. Firefly. A fighting progressive—or an iron-fisted dictator, depending on which news source you follow—Firefly takes office pledging broad reform.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
If this sounds like a cynical critique of every head of state since Pontius Pilate last washed his hands, it is. It's also the funniest. That Duck Soup seems as fresh now as it did when it first premiered seventy-seven years ago is a testament both to how well it was made and to how little human nature ever really changes.
The film features some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon, especially the mirror scene, but also Chico's trial for treason, a running battle with the owner of a lemonade stand, and the wild finale where the besieged Brothers are rescued by, among other things, a school of dolphins. Many factors are responsible for Duck Soup's greatness: Leo McCarey's face-paced direction; the expert supporting work of Margaret Dumont, Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern; and a top-notch screenplay that despite contributions from many sources—not just credited writers Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, but also Grover Jones, Norman Krasna, Herman Mankiewicz, Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers themselves—was the most cohesive and inventive of the Paramount era.
Above all, though, Duck Soup works thanks to the performances of Groucho, Chico and Harpo themselves. Groucho, of course, was already without peer in terms of comic timing, and his delivery could take jokes that on the printed page were pretty flat—asking Margaret Dumont to take a card, for example ("Keep it. I've got fifty-one left")—and turn them into brilliantly absurdist gems. But in Duck Soup, he also looks physically comfortable for the first time, no longer worried about hitting his mark (always a problem for him), inhabiting his character and commanding the screen like a seasoned movie actor instead of a transplanted theater performer.
Harpo's business is not quite as anarchic as in previous movies (personally, I think Animal Crackers is his best showcase), but it's tighter here, tying back into the plot. He's just as easily distracted as ever, but now, for example, when he tries to crack a safe and winds up breaking into a radio by mistake, there are consequences which lead directly to two of the movie's best moments—the mirror scene and Chico's trial for treason. And, to reiterate an earlier point, he for once has a nemesis (two, actually, in the persons of Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern) worthy of his antics.
As good as Groucho and Harpo are, though, the real surprise of the movie is Chico. I'm not suggesting Chico wasn't good in previous movies, but his role had been limited largely to malapropisms, piano solos and translating for the silent Harpo, a role Chico seemed content to play as long as he got his paycheck on time. In Duck Soup, however, entire sequences that have nothing to do with tormenting Groucho or supporting Harpo—the meeting with Louis Calhern, the peanut vendor scenes with Edgar Kennedy, the scene in Margaret Dumont's bedroom, and the trial for treason—are built around him and in these scenes, Chico showcased a comic talent the equal of his brothers.
In part, Chico's expanded role was an unexpected dividend of the Brothers' otherwise unsuccessful radio venture. Without Harpo and the piano to fall back on, the show's writers (Perrin and Sheekman) were forced to devise new ways to feature Chico and to beef up his role to equal Groucho's and many of these new sketches, including the "Shadow-day" business in Calhern's office and the trial scene late in the movie, wound up in the movie to Chico's benefit.
Leo McCarey was the other driving force behind Chico's more visible role. A veteran of the Hal Roach Studios, McCarey had his own comic sensibilities and the confidence to impose them on the Marx Brothers. He perceived that the perfect complement to their comedy of aggression was the comedy of the "slow-burn" reaction—what Houghton Mifflin defines as "a gradually increasing sense or show of anger"—perfected by such Hal Roach acts as Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields. To that end, he brought in veteran performers Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern, adapted bits from the silent era such as the three-hat gag to bring them to a slow boil, and let Chico and Harpo go to work on them.
I wish I could tell you Zeppo fared as well. 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.
Duck Soup premiered on November 17, 1933 to mixed reviews. The usually supportive Mourdant Hall of the New York Times called it "noisy" and not nearly as funny as previous efforts. Variety complained that the movie "could easily have been written by a six-year-old," but overall recommended the film. Everybody loved the mirror scene.
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. In part, the movie was done in by Paramount's financial difficulties which left little money in the budget for promotion, but the Marx Brothers were also victims of bad timing—as Tim Dirks at The Greatest Films put it, "audiences were taken aback by such preposterous political disrespect, buffoonery and cynicism at a time of political and economic crisis, with Roosevelt's struggle against Depression in the US amidst the rising power of Hitler in Germany."
Of course, Duck Soup's reputation as a masterpiece is now secure, the sort of movie that—as Woody Allen posited in Hannah and Her Sisters—can give you a reason for living even on the worst of days. In 1990, the Library of Congress selected Duck Soup for preservation in the National Film Registry. Ten years later, the American Film Institute ranked it as the fifth best American comedy of all time. Personally, I rank it even higher than that.
Despite its status as an essential film classic, the experience of making Duck Soup was not a happy one. The Brothers and Leo McCarey did not enjoy working together—and indeed never worked together again. Chico and Harpo missed the piano and harp solos, and Zeppo was so miffed, he left the act permanently and never performed in another movie.
In addition, shortly after production began, the studio fired producer Herman J. Mankiewicz. Although he and Mankiewicz remained friends for life, Groucho was blunt in describing Mank's efforts as a producer, calling him "an irritating drunk who didn't give a hang about the movie project." (Apparently a typical day at the office would consist of napping, drinking and talking to his wife on the phone, and Mankiewicz only kept his job because Paramount executive B.P. Schulberg owed him large sums of money from their frequent poker games. When Paramount reorganized in 1933, Schulberg lost his job and Mankiewicz soon found himself on the curb.)
Mostly, though, the unhappiness on the set was a direct result of the Brothers' deteriorating relationship with the studio and soon after Duck Soup's premiere, the Marx Brothers and Paramount Pictures would permanently part company. For the first time in more than a decade the Brothers found themselves out of work and at a crossroads.
Trivia: When watching Hollywood films made between 1933 and 1935, you're likely to see the "NRA" logo before the opening credits. No, that's not an endorsement of the National Rifle Association, but instead refers to the National Recovery Administration. Part of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" effort to lift the country from the depths of the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act allowed the NRA to negotiate with various industries on behalf of the federal government to establish codes of "fair competition," including a minimum wage for workers and collectively-agreed-upon prices for goods and services.
Participation was voluntary and those businesses which adhered to the negotiated fair competition codes displayed the NRA logo on their products. (Those that didn't participate often found themselves subject of a boycott.)
In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared the NRA an unconstitutional delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch. Although the National Recovery Administration ceased to operate, several of its basic concepts, including the minimum wage, were included in the National Labor Relations Act (a.k.a. the Wagner Act) passed later that same year.
[To continue to Part Eight, click here. To read more about Duck Soup, click here.]
[To read previous entries in this essay, click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Contract Disputes, Radio Shows And The Return Of Gummo Nearly simultaneous with the August 1932 release of the Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathers, Paramount's publicity department announced the Brothers' next project as Oo-La-La, a comedy set in a mythical Eastern European kingdom, with Ernst Lubitsch slated to direct. Mythical kingdoms were right in the wheelhouse of the already-legendary Lubitsch—see, e.g., The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant—and it's intriguing at first blush to imagine the what-might-have-been collaboration between the studio's best comedy director and its best comedy act, but on further reflection it's hard to picture the happy wedding of Lubitsch's cool, precise, sophisticated style with the Marx Brothers' free-wheeling, free-spirited anarchy. In any event, the script for Oo-La-La never got past the talking stage and Lubitsch was eager to move on to his next project, what would turn out to be the best film of career, Trouble In Paradise.
Production of the new film, now called Firecrackers, was further delayed by a contractual dispute between the Brothers and Paramount Pictures. Under the terms of their contract with the studio, the Brothers were entitled to a percentage of the profits from their pictures, but not only had they never seen a dime of that money, by 1932 they were worried that the financially-shaky studio—its principal owner, Adolph Zukor, had borrowed heavily against over-valued company stock during the Roaring Twenties only to find the debt unsustainable during the Depression—would never be able to pay.
Zukor eventually led the studio out of bankruptcy in 1936, but in the meantime, the Brothers formed their own production company, The Marx Bros., Inc., with brother Gummo as one of the executives, and began casting about for the company's first project. They very nearly worked out a deal to star in a film version of George Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing, but wound up signing with the National Broadcasting Company to produce a thirty minute radio program. Because Harpo's talents wouldn't translate to radio (and because Zeppo evidently didn't have any), the resulting show, about a comically-shady law firm initially called Beagle, Shyster and Beagle, featured only Groucho and Chico. The Brothers' rate of $6,500 per episode was an astronomical sum for thirty minutes work at a time when Greta Garbo was receiving little more than that for forty hours a week on the set of Grand Hotel. (After a New York lawyer named Beagle threatened a libel suit, the show was renamed Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel.)
During the long delay, a rotating team of writers continued to work over the script. The title changed from Firecrackers to Cracked Ice to Grasshoppers, but the essential storyline remained the same: Groucho would play the leader of a fictional Eastern European state who leads his country into war. (For more on the writing of Duck Soup, click here.) Once Lubitsch left the project, Leo McCarey took over the helm. Unlike the directors of the Brothers' previous films, McCarey was an experienced director of comedy, getting his start as a writer at the Hal Roach studios where he eventually wrote for and directed Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields.
After the death of their father, Sam Marx, on May 10, 1933, and the cancellation of their low-rated radio program a couple of weeks after that, the Brothers settled their dispute with Paramount and returned to Hollywood. The settlement was more a matter of necessity than a real meeting of the minds—Marx Bros., Inc., lacked the operating capital to get its ambitions off the ground.
The resolution to the dispute over profit-sharing was temporary as it turned out—eighteen years would pass before the Brothers received their contractually-promised profits—but in the meantime, the script of their next movie, now titled Duck Soup at McCarey's probable suggestion, was completed on July 11 and the film went into production shortly thereafter.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, here; Part Three, here; and Part Four, here.]
Horse Feathers: Pure Marx Brothers Even before Monkey Business was in the theaters, the Marx Brothers were working on its follow-up, which Harpo announced in the July 4, 1931 issue of the New Yorker as The Marx Brothers At Vassar (Vassar at that time being the best-known all-women's university in America). The idea of placing the Brothers in an academic setting 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 Groucho's pal Bert Granet had resurrected the idea at the same time he suggested the basic plot of Monkey Business.
Somewhere along the way, the project acquired the title Horse Feathers, which, in addition to following the pattern established by the previous movies of using some sort of animal in the title, is a mild expletive, a polite variant of "bullsh*t!," the sort of comment you might mutter under your breath when you hear a particularly idiotic statement—of which one no doubt hears many while pursuing an education.
Despite the bruising his ego suffered while writing Monkey Business, S.J. Perelman took the first crack at drafting a screenplay. Perelman had railed against the corrupting influence of college football while he was a student at Brown University and he drew on old grievances to provide the backbone of the plot, the story of a college president who seeks to promote sports over academics by recruiting a couple of ringers for the school's football team.
"Only a man who was forced to endure four years in a place where he didn't fit in and that refused to graduate him," wrote biographer Dorothy Herrmann, "could have made such devastating fun of it."
Longtime Marx Brothers collaborator Will B. Johnstone updated material from Fun In Hi Skule and songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who had written the song score for Animal Crackers, provided various jokes and three new numbers—"Whatever It Is, I'm Against It," "I Always Get My Man" and "Everyone Says I Love You," the latter performed by all four Marx Brothers.
Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz and director Norman McLeod later recalled presenting the script at a meeting where the Brothers took turns spitting into a cup in the middle of the floor, wagering a dollar a piece on each bull's-eye.
Thelma Todd, who the year before had co-starred in Monkey Business, was once again cast as the female lead. Here she plays the "college widow"—which a 1935 newspaper article defined as a "maiden of a college town bereaved of graduated sweethearts," i.e., "an old maid," but which in the context of the movie suggests a sexual predator, what these days some might call a "cougar"—and in the course of the film's 68 minutes woos and is wooed by all four brothers, while also conniving with gamblers who want to affect the outcome of an upcoming football game. (See also The Marx Brothers Council Of Britain for a discussion of the term "college widow.")
In other key roles, Broadway actor David Landau plays the gambler; Nat Pendleton, who would later play police lieutenant John Guild in The Thin Man, is one of the football players; and veteran character actor Robert Greig, who had played the butler Hives in Animal Crackers, returned as an anatomy professor. Also, look for Theresa Harris of Baby Face in a bit part as Thelma Todd's maid.
The movie opens with the introduction of Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho), the new president of Huxley College. The school's in trouble—it's been neglecting football for education, or possibly the other way around—and Wagstaff is just the man to set things right.
"As I look out over your eager faces," he tells the assembled students and staff, "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."
Rebuffing the advice of the school's trustees —"I think you know what the trustees can do with their suggestions"—Groucho launches into into one of the best songs in the Marx Brothers canon, up there with "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady."
I don't know what they have to say It makes no difference anyway Whatever it is, I'm against it No matter what it is or who commenced it I'm against it.
Included in the song are some lines that could only have been written during the pre-Code era:
For months before my son was born I used to yell from night til morn "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" And I've kept yelling since I first commenced it "I'm against it!"
The son in question is played by Zeppo, a student at the college for the last twelve years and "a disgrace to our family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible." Zeppo tells his dad the only way to turn the school around before the big game against rival Darwin is to get better football players, starting with the two who hang around a local speakeasy.
"Are you suggesting that I, the president of Huxley College, go into a speakeasy without even giving me the address?"
Of course, Groucho confuses Harpo and Chico for the star players, who proceed to turn Huxley College into chaos. Along the way, Groucho butts 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.
"Oh, Professor, the Dean of Science wants to know how soon you can see him. He says he's tired of cooling his heels out here."
"Tell him I'm cooling a couple of heels in here."
"The Dean is furious! He's waxing wroth!"
"Is Roth out there, too? Tell Roth to wax the Dean for awhile."
One set piece, the classroom scene with Groucho as the professor and Harpo and Chico as his students, was lifted largely from the vaudeville show Fun In Hi Skule which the Brothers had first performed twenty years before.
"Now then, baboons—what is a corpuscle?"
"That's easy. First there's a captain, then there's a lieutenant, then there's a corpuscle."
As a matter of fact, except for the football game at the end, which features slapstick more reminiscent of the Three Stooges, Horse Feathers comes closest of all the Marx Brothers' movies to approximating the anarchy of their early vaudeville shows. Indeed, I would suggest that while Duck Soup is often credited as the "purest" of their films (more on that in Part Seven), Horse Feathers actually deserves the nod as the one that distills the essence of the act into its most concentrated form, if you agree with me that, for good or ill, the musical numbers were as much a part of who the Brothers were as the steady stream of puns, one-liners and sight gags.
Besides, as Groucho himself suggests as Chico begins another piano solo, you can always "go out into the lobby until this thing blows over." At least the chore of romancing Thelma Todd is left to Zeppo rather than being farmed out to the likes of Allan Jones or Hal Thompson.
The film premiered in New York City on August 10, 1932, to generally favorable reviews. While some critics complained that the film was formulaic, others such as Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times praised its "originality and ready wit."
More recent critics have been more enthusiastic about Horse Feathers. The American Film Institute ranked the film sixty-fifth on the list of the 100 best comedies of the 20th century. Daniel Eagan, in his history America's Film Legacy, praises both Horse Feathers and its immediate predecessor Monkey Business for shedding the trappings of the Broadway musical while pushing their subversive anti-authority tendencies to the limit. Randy Williams, writing for ESPN in 2008, chose the film's finale as "the greatest scene in football movie history."
"From Prof. Wagstaff," Williams wrote, "racing in from the sideline to make a flying tackle while smoking a cigar, to Barovelli's unusual signal calling ("Hi diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, this time I think we go through the middle ... hike!"), the Darwin versus Huxley rival game sequence could cover most of the 11 top movie scenes by itself."
And last but not least, our good friend Erik Beck of the Boston Becks picks it as the second best Marx Brothers film of all time, behind only Duck Soup.
Personally, I have only one complaint about Horse Feathers, one I have aired before—that Groucho's verbal assaults which are hilarious when aimed at the impervious battleship Margaret Dumont become bullying and misogynistic when aimed at Thelma Todd. "Besides," I wrote, "the Marx Brothers are funniest when they stop making sense altogether and there's nothing nonsensical about Thelma Todd. I mean, who wouldn't want to make love to Thelma Todd? But Margaret Dumont? That's plain crazy."
But those moments when Groucho takes aim squarely at Todd are relatively few and overall, that seems like a minor quibble.
The film did solid business at the box office, but as with Monkey Business, failed to crack the year's top money makers.
When Horse Feathers was re-released in 1936, the studio was forced to make cuts in the film to satisfy the demands of the newly-enforced Production Code. Mikael Uhlin at Marxology has detailed those edits, which include Harpo as a dogcatcher luring mutts with a portable fire hydrant, suggestive comments aimed at Thelma Todd and a bonfire scene after the football game featuring the Brothers playing cards as Huxley College burns to the ground. The footage has yet to turn up despite extensive searches and is deemed lost.
Trivia: I read on the ever-reliable Wikipedia that the Brothers originally planned Horse Feathers as a sequel to Monkey Business, with more gangsters, but shifted gears after the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant son made the idea unpalatable, but I haven't found any independent verification of that claim. Given that the kidnapping took place on March 1, 1932, and that Horse Feathers went into production at the end of the month, there was very little time for rewrites—although filming was subsequently delayed ten weeks when Chico was injured in an automobile accident.
Who knows.
A Little More Trivia: Thelma Todd almost drowned while filming the scene where she falls out of the rowboat.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, here, and for Part Three, here.]
The Marx Brothers Go To Hollywood Even before the movie version of Animal Crackers was in theaters, the Marx Brothers began searching for writers for their next project, be it a new play, a radio show or another movie, finally settling on S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Nat Perrin. Johnstone, you may recall, was the author of the Brothers' first Broadway play, I'll Say She Is! Perelman was a humorist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine. He had been a Marx Brothers fan since their vaudeville days and his first collection of stories, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, published in 1928, carried on its dust jacket Groucho's famous endorsement: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
The third writer, Nat Perrin, was a law student who had bluffed his way into a writing job with the Brothers with a forged letter of introduction from playwright Moss Hart.
"You'll rue the day you ever took the assignment," producer Herman J. Mankiewicz told Perelman, warning him that the Brothers were notoriously difficult to work with. "This is an ordeal by fire. Make sure you wear asbestos pants."
The team kicked around a couple of ideas, one placing the Brothers on an ocean liner as stowaways, the with Groucho playing the president of a university. Both ideas allegedly came from Bert Granet, a lifelong pal of Groucho's, who went on to become a staff writer at RKO and later the producer of such television shows as The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone.
It was Groucho who suggested the team flesh out the stowaway idea.
The writers set to work on the screenplay while the Brothers were in London fulfilling an obligation to British stage impresario C.B. Cochran. On their return, the writers brought the finished draft to a hotel room where they met the four Marx Brothers, the Brothers' wives (the unmarried Harpo brought not one but two "girlfriends") and Zeppo's recently-acquired Afghan hounds. Perelman read the draft aloud to the Brothers who listened in silence.
"It stinks," said Groucho when Perelman was done.
For the second draft, Mankiewicz brought in writer Arthur J. Sheekman, who along with Perelman, wrote the bulk of the screenplay. The Brothers recent trip to England inspired several scenes, such as one based on a Punch-and-Judy show Harpo had seen in London—
—and another based on Groucho's own run-in with a customs agent in New York, which began when Groucho listed his occupation as "smuggler." (The subsequent investigation led to the discovery of unreported duty items, which in turn led to a stiff fine.)
The Brothers also resurrected the opening scenes from I'll Say She Is! where they pretend to be a famous stage personality, here Maurice Chevalier who had recently starred in two Ernst Lubitsch musicals, The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant.
The final screenwriting credits read "by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone; additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman," but, in fact, gags came from all sorts of sources—vaudeville veteran Solly Volinsky, cartoonist J. Carver Pusey, singer turned movie star Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers' uncle Al Shean, legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, English playwright Roland Pertwee, producer Mankiewicz (when he wasn't napping in his office) and the Marx Brothers themselves. Nat Perrin's lone contribution—a barber shop scene that featured a disastrous shoeshine—was substantially rewritten and he did not received a screen credit (he later wrote Duck Soup and The Big Store).
Perelman later described the process as "five months of drudgery and Homeric quarrels, ambuscades, and intrigues that would have shamed the Borgias."
For his part, Groucho felt Perelman's work, on both Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, was too literary and despite his on-going friendship with the young writer, was quite critical of him, both privately and publicly. "The trouble is the barber in Peru [Indiana] won't get it." Years later, though, Groucho allowed that Perelman was "a great writer with a brilliant comic mind that didn't always mesh well with the lunacies of the Marx Brothers."
Production began on Monkey Business in the summer of 1931. With no Broadway commitment to keep the Brothers in New York, Paramount insisted that they film Monkey Business at the studio's Hollywood facilities, which were undeniably superior to the sound stage in Queens they had used for their first two films. This was the first of their movies filmed in Hollywood, and the first written directly for the screen
It was also the first film that did not boast the supporting work of Margaret Dumont. Feeling the part of a gangster's moll needed a sexier actress, the studio cast Thelma Todd, a veteran of dozens of Hal Roach comedy shorts featuring Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase. She's around for two scenes with Groucho, one where she finds him hiding in her stateroom closet, the second where the flirt on the veranda at a party.
"Mrs. Briggs," he tells her, "I've known and respected your husband for years—and what's good enough for him is good enough for me!"
For the romantic lead, the studio finally got the rather obvious idea of cutting out the middle man and casting Zeppo. 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.
The expanded role didn't stop Zeppo from leaving the set in mid-production to vacation in San Francisco.
Although this was Norman Z. McLeod's first directorial effort, he quickly learned to leave the camera rolling, finding that the Brothers' ad libs were often funnier than the scripted material.
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.
"How do you know there are four of them?"
"They were singing 'Sweet Adeline.'"
The shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another, with each gag barely linked to the other. Not that this hurt the comedy any. By shedding the trappings of the Broadway musical, the Brothers' actions become even more deliciously transgressive, tormenting authority not for plot-driven reasons but simply because they can, an approach they built on to great effect in their next two movies, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.
In fact, the forty-five minutes the Brothers spend on the boat is some of the best work of their careers. But then they finally make it through customs and something unfortunate happens—the plot kicks in. The final two reels revolve around rival gangsters, a swanky dinner party and the aforementioned kidnapping, and presumably writers Perelman and Sheekman wanted to spoof the gangster movies that were then all the rage, but very little comedy arises from this set-up and ultimately the storyline feels grafted on.
Too, there's something a little off about the gangsters finding the Marx Brothers funny—the Brothers are best when they are a threat to authority, subverting the established order, and it's a little sad to see them reduced to the role of court jesters—but until then, it's a great movie and even this last act has its moments. (Harpo disguised as the bustle of a woman's dress is particularly inspired).
Monkey Business premiered on September 19, 1931, to favorable reviews, with Mourdant Hall of the New York Times favorably comparing the film to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The movie turned a profit at the box office, but despite the praise of the critics, it failed to crack the list of the year's top ten grossing films.
This pattern of decreasing box office revenue would be repeated with the Brothers' next two pictures.
Trivia: In the scene where the Brothers finally escape the near-sighted ship's officer and wave to him from the dock, the onlooker sitting on a crate in the background is none other than Sam "Frenchy" Marx, father of the Marx Brothers. He earned $12.50 for two days' work.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
While we here on the East coast batten down the hatches, why don't the rest of you watch Buster Keaton in his classic comedy about the weather, Steamboat Bill, Jr., courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.
I have to confess that a movie like I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, a bitter condemnation of, among other things, prison chain gangs, is not typically my sort of thing. To me, message pictures often have the taste of medicine that's supposed to be good for me but sticks halfway down—not because I necessarily disagree with what the film is saying but because the message is often delivered with all the subtlety of an ad for a personal injury lawyer.
Which is what makes I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang such a remark- able movie in my book. Because despite clearly having an axe to grind, the film steers clear of preaching, focusing instead on the man at the center of the story and in the process delivering one of the most gripping tales to emerge from the pre-Code era.
Thus begins a life of merciless suffering at the hands of a state-sanctioned sadism that at the time passed for justice in many parts of this country. Like Marley's Ghost, wearing the chain he forged in life, Allen will remain fettered every moment of every day for the entire ten years of his sentence.
"The state's promise didn't mean anything," he says in a moment of clarity. "It was all lies ... Why, their crimes are worse than mine, worse than anybody's here. They're the ones that should be in chains, not we!"
Such a story could easily have become either shrill and histrionic or unbearably grim if the director or actors had strayed too far in one direction or the other. That it is instead enthralling from beginning to end is a testament to both Mervyn LeRoy's expert direction and to Paul Muni's pitch-perfect performance.
LeRoy, who is best known now as the guy who green-lighted The Wizard Of Oz, chose both by design and by circumstance to let sound and images tell much of his story. The sound of clanking chains are more eloquent than a page of dialogue, and when you see that even the mules are chained together, you know you're bearing witness to a justice system founded on the most inhuman sort of cruelty. That censorship forced the studio to remove some of the more incendiary dialogue explicitly condemning chain gangs actually improved the movie—without unctuous, oily speeches to get in the way, the images speak for themselves, and speak powerfully.
Despite being nominated for an Oscar, Muni's first screen performance, 1929's The Valiant, was a box office failure. When his second film was also a flop, Muni returned to the Broadway stage and didn't make another movie until writer Ben Hecht recommended him for the lead in Howard Hawks's gangster classic, 1932's Scarface. When he followed that box office smash with an Oscar-nominated performance in I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, his Hollywood career was set. In the course of a career that ran until his retirement in 1959, he was nominated for four more Oscars, winning in 1936 for The Story Of Louis Pasteur.
Well, Muni's acting reminds me of something that Katie-Bar-The-Door was reading about wine in the Washington Post Magazine a couple of weekends ago, that a wine that tastes good when you're sipping it on the back porch won't necessarily taste good when you're drinking it with a meal. Turns out the flavors in the wine when combined with, say, red meat create a different sensation on your taste buds than they do when combined with peanuts at a cocktail party. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the wine. Just means that there's no simple one-size-fits-all way to rate a bottle of wine.
In the same way, there's no one-size-fits-all way to rate acting either. And to insist that the only good acting is realistic, underplayed Method acting is like saying the only good wine is a Bordeaux, whether you're drinking it with beef, fish or a blonde in the backseat of a Thunderbird. I wouldn't want to see Paul Muni in Schindler's List—but then neither would I want to see Robert De Niro in Duck Soup, Marlon Brando in It's A Wonderful Life or Dustin Hoffman in High Noon. Context is everything, or nearly so, and I can't imagine any of Muni's contemporaries in the role of James Allen—Cagney was too gleeful, Robinson too menacing, despair wasn't in Cooper's make-up and I don't believe Gable could have been pushed around by anybody.
That he was perfect in other roles, too (Howard Hawks's Scarface comes immediately to mind), is enough to establish him in my mind as a real actor worthy of our attention.
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.
Thalberg said, "I would like to make some pictures with you fellows. I mean real pictures."
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.)
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.
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.
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).
Let's just cut to the chase. If you've never seen Duck Soup, back away from the blog, turn off your computer and go find it—right now! It's available for instant streaming from Netflix, if you're set up for that, and you can always buy it here from amazon.com if you're not.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
The film features some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon, especially the mirror scene, but also Chico's trial for treason, a running battle with the owner of a lemonade stand, and the wild finale where the besieged Brothers are rescued by, among other things, a school of dolphins. Many factors are responsible for Duck Soup's greatness: Leo McCarey's face-paced direction; the expert supporting work of Margaret Dumont, Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern; and a top-notch screenplay that despite contributions from many sources—not just credited writers Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, but also Grover Jones, Norman Krasna, Herman Mankiewicz, Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers themselves—was the most cohesive and inventive of the Paramount era.
Above all, though, Duck Soup works thanks to the performances of Groucho, Chico and Harpo themselves. Groucho, of course, was already without peer in terms of comic timing, and his delivery could take jokes that on the printed page were pretty flat—asking Margaret Dumont to take a card, for example ("Keep it. I've got fifty-one left")—and turn them into brilliantly absurdist gems. But in Duck Soup, he also looks physically comfortable for the first time, no longer worried about hitting his mark (always a problem for him), inhabiting his character and commanding the screen like a seasoned movie actor instead of a transplanted theater performer.
In part, Chico's expanded role was an unexpected dividend of the Brothers' otherwise unsuccessful radio venture. Without Harpo and the piano to fall back on, the show's writers (Perrin and Sheekman) were forced to devise new ways to feature Chico and to beef up his role to equal Groucho's and many of these new sketches, including the "Shadow-day" business in Calhern's office and the trial scene late in the movie, wound up in the movie to Chico's benefit.
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. In part, the movie was done in by Paramount's financial difficulties which left little money in the budget for promotion, but the Marx Brothers were also victims of bad timing—as Tim Dirks at The Greatest Films put it, "audiences were taken aback by such preposterous political disrespect, buffoonery and cynicism at a time of political and economic crisis, with Roosevelt's struggle against Depression in the US amidst the rising power of Hitler in Germany."
In addition, shortly after production began, the studio fired producer Herman J. Mankiewicz. Although he and Mankiewicz remained friends for life, Groucho was blunt in describing Mank's efforts as a producer, calling him "an irritating drunk who didn't give a hang about the movie project." (Apparently a typical day at the office would consist of napping, drinking and talking to his wife on the phone, and Mankiewicz only kept his job because Paramount executive B.P. Schulberg owed him large sums of money from their frequent poker games. When Paramount reorganized in 1933, Schulberg lost his job and Mankiewicz soon found himself on the curb.)
Trivia: When watching Hollywood films made between 1933 and 1935, you're likely to see the "NRA" logo before the opening credits. No, that's not an endorsement of the National Rifle Association, but instead refers to the National Recovery Administration. Part of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" effort to lift the country from the depths of the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act allowed the NRA to negotiate with various industries on behalf of the federal government to establish codes of "fair competition," including a minimum wage for workers and collectively-agreed-upon prices for goods and services.
Nearly simultaneous with the August 1932 release of the Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathers, Paramount's publicity department announced the Brothers' next project as Oo-La-La, a comedy set in a mythical Eastern European kingdom, with Ernst Lubitsch slated to direct. Mythical kingdoms were right in the wheelhouse of the already-legendary Lubitsch—see, e.g., The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant—and it's intriguing at first blush to imagine the what-might-have-been collaboration between the studio's best comedy director and its best comedy act, but on further reflection it's hard to picture the happy wedding of Lubitsch's cool, precise, sophisticated style with the Marx Brothers' free-wheeling, free-spirited anarchy. In any event, the script for Oo-La-La never got past the talking stage and Lubitsch was eager to move on to his next project, what would turn out to be the best film of career, Trouble In Paradise.
Production of the new film, now called Firecrackers, was further delayed by a contractual dispute between the Brothers and Paramount Pictures. Under the terms of their contract with the studio, the Brothers were entitled to a percentage of the profits from their pictures, but not only had they never seen a dime of that money, by 1932 they were worried that the financially-shaky studio—its principal owner, Adolph Zukor, had borrowed heavily against over-valued company stock during the Roaring Twenties only to find the debt unsustainable during the Depression—would never be able to pay.
Zukor eventually led the studio out of bankruptcy in 1936, but in the meantime, the Brothers formed their own production company, The Marx Bros., Inc., with brother Gummo as one of the executives, and began casting about for the company's first project. They very nearly worked out a deal to star in a film version of George Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing, but wound up signing with the National Broadcasting Company to produce a thirty minute radio program. Because Harpo's talents wouldn't translate to radio (and because Zeppo evidently didn't have any), the resulting show, about a comically-shady law firm initially called Beagle, Shyster and Beagle, featured only Groucho and Chico. The Brothers' rate of $6,500 per episode was an astronomical sum for thirty minutes work at a time when Greta Garbo was receiving little more than that for forty hours a week on the set of Grand Hotel. (After a New York lawyer named Beagle threatened a libel suit, the show was renamed Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel.)
During the long delay, a rotating team of writers continued to work over the script. The title changed from Firecrackers to Cracked Ice to Grasshoppers, but the essential storyline remained the same: Groucho would play the leader of a fictional Eastern European state who leads his country into war. (For more on the writing of Duck Soup, click here.) Once Lubitsch left the project, Leo McCarey took over the helm. Unlike the directors of the Brothers' previous films, McCarey was an experienced director of comedy, getting his start as a writer at the Hal Roach studios where he eventually wrote for and directed Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields.
After the death of their father, Sam Marx, on May 10, 1933, and the cancellation of their low-rated radio program a couple of weeks after that, the Brothers settled their dispute with Paramount and returned to Hollywood. The settlement was more a matter of necessity than a real meeting of the minds—Marx Bros., Inc., lacked the operating capital to get its ambitions off the ground.
Even before Monkey Business was in the theaters, the Marx Brothers were working on its follow-up, which Harpo announced in the July 4, 1931 issue of the New Yorker as The Marx Brothers At Vassar (Vassar at that time being the best-known all-women's university in America). The idea of placing the Brothers in an academic setting 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 Groucho's pal Bert Granet had resurrected the idea at the same time he suggested the basic plot of Monkey Business.
Despite the bruising his ego suffered while writing Monkey Business, S.J. Perelman took the first crack at drafting a screenplay. Perelman had railed against the corrupting influence of college football while he was a student at Brown University and he drew on old grievances to provide the backbone of the plot, the story of a college president who seeks to promote sports over academics by recruiting a couple of ringers for the school's football team.
Longtime Marx Brothers collaborator Will B. Johnstone updated material from Fun In Hi Skule and songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who had written the song score for Animal Crackers, provided various jokes and three new numbers—"Whatever It Is, I'm Against It," "I Always Get My Man" and "Everyone Says I Love You," the latter performed by all four Marx Brothers.
Thelma Todd, who the year before had co-starred in Monkey Business, was once again cast as the female lead. Here she plays the "college widow"—which a 1935 newspaper article defined as a "maiden of a college town bereaved of graduated sweethearts," i.e., "an old maid," but which in the context of the movie suggests a sexual predator, what these days some might call a "cougar"—and in the course of the film's 68 minutes woos and is wooed by all four brothers, while also conniving with gamblers who want to affect the outcome of an upcoming football game. (See also The Marx Brothers Council Of Britain for a discussion of the term "college widow.")
The movie opens with the introduction of Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho), the new president of Huxley College. The school's in trouble—it's been neglecting football for education, or possibly the other way around—and Wagstaff is just the man to set things right.
Rebuffing the advice of the school's trustees —"I think you know what the trustees can do with their suggestions"—Groucho launches into into one of the best songs in the Marx Brothers canon, up there with "Lydia, the Tattooed Lady."
The son in question is played by Zeppo, a student at the college for the last twelve years and "a disgrace to our family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible." Zeppo tells his dad the only way to turn the school around before the big game against rival Darwin is to get better football players, starting with the two who hang around a local speakeasy.
"Oh, Professor, the Dean of Science wants to know how soon you can see him. He says he's tired of cooling his heels out here."
"Now then, baboons—what is a corpuscle?"
As a matter of fact, except for the football game at the end, which features slapstick more reminiscent of the Three Stooges, Horse Feathers comes closest of all the Marx Brothers' movies to approximating the anarchy of their early vaudeville shows. Indeed, I would suggest that while Duck Soup is often credited as the "purest" of their films (more on that in Part Seven), Horse Feathers actually deserves the nod as the one that distills the essence of the act into its most concentrated form, if you agree with me that, for good or ill, the musical numbers were as much a part of who the Brothers were as the steady stream of puns, one-liners and sight gags.
The film premiered in New York City on August 10, 1932, to generally favorable reviews. While some critics complained that the film was formulaic, others such as Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times praised its "originality and ready wit."
"From Prof. Wagstaff," Williams wrote, "racing in from the sideline to make a flying tackle while smoking a cigar, to Barovelli's unusual signal calling ("Hi diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, this time I think we go through the middle ... hike!"), the Darwin versus Huxley rival game sequence could cover most of the 11 top movie scenes by itself."
Personally, I have only one complaint about Horse Feathers, one I have aired before—that Groucho's verbal assaults which are hilarious when aimed at the impervious battleship Margaret Dumont become bullying and misogynistic when aimed at Thelma Todd. "Besides," I wrote, "the Marx Brothers are funniest when they stop making sense altogether and there's nothing nonsensical about Thelma Todd. I mean, who wouldn't want to make love to Thelma Todd? But Margaret Dumont? That's plain crazy."
When Horse Feathers was re-released in 1936, the studio was forced to make cuts in the film to satisfy the demands of the newly-enforced Production Code. Mikael Uhlin at Marxology has detailed those edits, which include Harpo as a dogcatcher luring mutts with a portable fire hydrant, suggestive comments aimed at Thelma Todd and a bonfire scene after the football game featuring the Brothers playing cards as Huxley College burns to the ground. The footage has yet to turn up despite extensive searches and is deemed lost.
Trivia: I read on the ever-reliable Wikipedia that the Brothers originally planned Horse Feathers as a sequel to Monkey Business, with more gangsters, but shifted gears after the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant son made the idea unpalatable, but I haven't found any independent verification of that claim. Given that the kidnapping took place on March 1, 1932, and that Horse Feathers went into production at the end of the month, there was very little time for rewrites—although filming was subsequently delayed ten weeks when Chico was injured in an automobile accident.
Even before the movie version of Animal Crackers was in theaters, the Marx Brothers began searching for writers for their next project, be it a new play, a radio show or another movie, finally settling on S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Nat Perrin. Johnstone, you may recall, was the author of the Brothers' first Broadway play, I'll Say She Is! Perelman was a humorist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine. He had been a Marx Brothers fan since their vaudeville days and his first collection of stories, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, published in 1928, carried on its dust jacket Groucho's famous endorsement: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
The writers set to work on the screenplay while the Brothers were in London fulfilling an obligation to British stage impresario C.B. Cochran. On their return, the writers brought the finished draft to a hotel room where they met the four Marx Brothers, the Brothers' wives (the unmarried Harpo brought not one but two "girlfriends") and Zeppo's recently-acquired Afghan hounds. Perelman read the draft aloud to the Brothers who listened in silence.
The final screenwriting credits read "by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone; additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman," but, in fact, gags came from all sorts of sources—vaudeville veteran Solly Volinsky, cartoonist J. Carver Pusey, singer turned movie star Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers' uncle Al Shean, legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, English playwright Roland Pertwee, producer Mankiewicz (when he wasn't napping in his office) and the Marx Brothers themselves. Nat Perrin's lone contribution—a barber shop scene that featured a disastrous shoeshine—was substantially rewritten and he did not received a screen credit (he later wrote Duck Soup and The Big Store).
Production began on Monkey Business in the summer of 1931. With no Broadway commitment to keep the Brothers in New York, Paramount insisted that they film Monkey Business at the studio's Hollywood facilities, which were undeniably superior to the sound stage in Queens they had used for their first two films. This was the first of their movies filmed in Hollywood, and the first written directly for the screen
It was also the first film that did not boast the supporting work of Margaret Dumont. Feeling the part of a gangster's moll needed a sexier actress, the studio cast Thelma Todd, a veteran of dozens of Hal Roach comedy shorts featuring Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase. She's around for two scenes with Groucho, one where she finds him hiding in her stateroom closet, the second where the flirt on the veranda at a party.
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.
Too, there's something a little off about the gangsters finding the Marx Brothers funny—the Brothers are best when they are a threat to authority, subverting the established order, and it's a little sad to see them reduced to the role of court jesters—but until then, it's a great movie and even this last act has its moments. (Harpo disguised as the bustle of a woman's dress is particularly inspired).
Monkey Business premiered on September 19, 1931, to favorable reviews, with Mourdant Hall of the New York Times favorably comparing the film to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The movie turned a profit at the box office, but despite the praise of the critics, it failed to crack the list of the year's top ten grossing films.
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