Book Review: "The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy" by Allen Eyles

I was first introduced to Allen Eyles' writing on the Marx Bros. with his book "The Complete Films of the Marx Bros.", one of the late entries in Citadel's "Films of" series. His book was more involved than most in that series, providing in-depth analysis of each of the Marx Bros. films (rather than just the customary credits, synopses, and reviews as so many others did). I was delighted to learn that Eyles had written an earlier book on the team, which I finally tracked down a copy of a couple months ago at my local used bookstore.

"The Marx Brothers: Their World of Comedy" takes a quite similar approach as "The Complete Films of the Marx Bros." in providing critical analyses of each of their movies from THE COCOANUTS (1929) through LOVE HAPPY (1949), and indeed some of the sections of this book seem to have been adapted into the entries on the films in the later book. However, the level of analysis is, overall, deeper here, as Eyles thoughtfully examines the routines and gags of each film, providing real insight into the team's humor and how it works without getting lost in the mire of trying to explain why it's funny.

Eyles deserves much credit for giving equal attention to all of the films, not just the acclaimed classics like DUCK SOUP and A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, but also such lesser efforts as ROOM SERVICE and LOVE HAPPY. In his analysis of the former, Eyles is especially interested in detailing the differences between the film and the stage play on which it was based, as well as examining where the film falls short as a Marx Bros. vehicle. And in writing on the latter film, he offers a nice appreciation of how the film serves as a showcase for Harpo's talents, despite its other shortcomings.

Even when I found myself disagreeing with Eyles (for example, he really likes THE COCOANUTS, and considers its comedy scenes, when taken as a whole, superior to those in ANIMAL CRACKERS, which I consider to be one of the very strongest comdies), I am still drawn in by his superb writing and commentary that allow me to look at these old favorite films, which I've seen countless times, in a fresh light.

Some readers may find Eyles' writing style a bit dry or clinical in talking about this madcap comedy team, but the seriousness of his approach is certainly warranted given the brilliant insights he reveals about their work. He avoids a straightforward research approach, which may disappoint readers looking for facts about the performers or production histories behind the films. However, with his thoughtful and interesting analysis of these rich and delightful comedies, the book stands as one of the essential works on the Marx Bros.

The Marx Bros. at MGM: The Big Store (1941)

A good case can be made that The Big Store (1941) is the worst film the Marx Bros. were ever associated with. I maintain that it least returns their characters to an appropriate, contemporary setting, where they are able to wreak havoc on high society types, in this case against the backdrop of a ritzy New York department store. In that regard, it is at least a step up from the previous year’s Go West, which had placed the brothers in a totally unfamiliar and inappropriate Western setting. But the film still suffers from a dearth of good comedy sequences, protracted musical numbers, and commits the particularly unforgivable mistake of making the Marx Bros. co-stars with the leading man in their own film – in this case, crooner Tony Martin.

Unlike their previous two films for MGM, which had been directed by ex-vaudevillian Eddie Buzzell, The Big Store was helmed by experienced comic craftsman Charles F. Riesner, who had started with Chaplin’s company as an actor and associate director, before going on to direct comedians like Buster Keaton (with whom he worked on Steamboat Bill Jr. in 1928). While the film is well-crafted, it lacks the comic bite and surprise that marked their earlier efforts with men like Norman McLeod and Leo McCarey, who really knew how to keep the pace going. Given such sub-standard material to work with, it is hardly fair to blame Riesner for the film’s short-comings.

Setting the film inside a lavish New York department store was a step in the right direction after the choice of putting the brothers into a Western parody the year before. The problem is that, unlike an opera house, the department store is not a sufficiently pompous or portentous target for their chaos. That said there are some good gags to be had with Groucho as the floorwalker, insulting the customers (his innuendo toward an older couple in the bed department is particularly fun). One rather significant problem that the writers at MGM never quite seemed to solve was how to make the viewers really care about the plight of the romantic couple. It worked in A Night at the Opera, if only because Kitty Carlisle’s entire singing career was at stake. But starting with A Day at the Races, the dilemmas facing the romantic couple became increasingly irrelevant to the point where, by the time of The Big Store, one has to ask the question, “who cares?”

The film demonstrates a marked improvement over Go West in its casting. Margaret Dumont makes a much-welcome return in this, her final appearance with the Marx Bros., as Martha Phelps, owner of the department store. Douglass Dumbrille, so perfect as the heavy Morgan in A Day at the Races, here plays Mr. Grover, the crooked store manager who immediately becomes a target of Groucho’s barbs. While much credit has been given to Margaret Dumont over the years, it really is worth noting just how much supporting actors bring to these films by standing in for various pretentious “types” for the Marxes to skewer.

Unfortunately, The Big Store is also the most “music-heavy” film of the MGM period, with a wide range of numbers. Some, like “Sing While You Sell”, would have been more enjoyable had they been reduced in length; as it is, the number goes on entirely too long, even managing to find time for an interlude in which Virginia O’Brien delivers her deadpan, jazzy rendition of “Rock-a-bye Baby”. Others, such as “If It’s You”, crooned by Tony Martin to Virginia Grey, are pleasant enough. I am perhaps in the minority when I say that I enjoy and even look forward to the musical numbers in the Marx Bros. comedies – they were, after all, an integral part of their Broadway shows and musical comedy background. The difference is that, in these later MGM films, the songs are featured seemingly for the sole purpose of being plugged to sell sheet music, rather than contributing to the entertainment value of the show. Thankfully, Chico does get two chances to show off his unique piano skills (including a duet with Harpo), and Harpo has one of his best harp solos in any of their films, playing with his reflections in surrounding mirrors. The most outrageous music number has to be the infamous “Tenement Symphony”, a well-meaning if rather cloying piece preaching racial harmony among the diverse ethnicities in New York’s lower east side. As with every other aspect of these last three MGM films, the number suffers from being ludicrously over-produced, with Martin accompanied by an entire boys’ choir and symphony orchestra!

Which, when you get right down to it, sums up the problem with the final three films the Marx Bros. made for MGM. The studio seemed to be willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money on everything but quality comedy writers. The Big Store in particular feels like a second-rate (though still costly) MGM musical in which the Marx Bros. provide the comic relief.

The Marx Bros. at MGM: Go West (1940)

With Go West (1940), the studio at least had the sense to allow the Marxes to test their material out on the road again. Unfortunately, the final results hardly seemed to justify the effort. Go West remains one of the dullest and uninspired films the team appeared in. Frustratingly, it actually opens with a very solid and funny scene, of the kind in which Chico and Harpo manage to pull one over on Groucho (in this case, while waiting at a train station to make the journey west). If the rest of the picture had managed to sustain the level of wit present in its opening scene, it might very well have turned out to be a perfectly enjoyable comedy. Instead, Groucho (in particular) gets mired down in painful one-liners that turn his normally fearless and cavalier screen character into a coward.

The unfamiliar setting of the old West no doubt works against the film as well, since the Marx Bros. were always more at home in contemporary surroundings, where they could wreak havoc on the established order of society. The writers fail to get any real mileage out of the Western genre as a subject for parody, instead simply dropping Groucho, Harpo and Chico into a routine Western backdrop without really making them integral to it. Add to this the fact that far funnier Western satires had already appeared – most notably Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West (1937) – and Go West seems even more tired and ineffective in comparison. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, nearly every major comedian appeared in a Western parody at some point, though perhaps only Bob Hope’s Paleface films approached a level of real brilliance.

The generally humorless supporting cast doesn’t help matters any, either. Robert Barrat is hardly the comic foil that Sig Rumann was for the Marx Bros. in their first two MGM films. Walter Woolf King, who had appeared as a sufficiently unlikable heavy in A Night at the Opera is wasted here. And the romantic couple is bland and colorless to the point of being almost totally forgettable, making it even harder than usual to get invested in the film’s subplot (though leading man John Carroll is granted a nice tune, “Riding the Range”, which allows for a fun moment when Groucho and Chico join in).

As a result of its lackluster plot and performances, Go West plods through its 80 minute running time before arriving at its climax, involving a fast-action chase on a locomotive. Like the finale of Laurel and Hardy’s County Hospital and W.C. Fields’ Man on the Flying Trapeze, what makes this scene work so well is the obvious use of special effects and sped-up action, combined with casual cutaways to Groucho’s throwaway one-liners. It's not a bad comedy scene, though it perhaps seems better coming after so much lackluster material during the preceding 80 minutes.

Ultimately, Go West suffers from all the constrictions and restrictions of studio-era production, and is characteristic of the kinds of challenges presented by trying to produce a free-wheeling comedy within the confines of MGM’s factory system.

The Marx Bros. at MGM: At the Circus (1939)

When the Marx Bros. signed on with MGM in 1935, producer Irving Thalberg suggested a new formula designed to “fix” the disappointing box office results of their last Paramount comedy, Duck Soup, which had come out in 1933. Thalberg proposed softening the edginess of their comedy, and adding elements such as romantic sub-plots and musical numbers, to broaden their appeal, particularly with female moviegoers.

As perhaps the biggest of the major studios, MGM had a bad track record when it came to producing comedy. The studio managed to do fine with classy, romantic comedies like Dinner at Eight and The Thin Man, but really character-driven stuff, centered around the distinct persona of the leading comedian, seemed to be beyond them. The most notorious case of MGM neutering a really unique comedian occurred with Buster Keaton, who joined the studio in 1928. After turning out one genuinely great film for them (The Cameraman, which – not coincidentally – was the last silent feature over which he had a great degree of creative control), he was shoehorned into increasingly inappropriate vehicles that turned his screen character into a bit of a dimwit, peppered with excruciating one-liners rather than pratfalls, until finally he was teamed with Jimmy Durante, whose rambunctious screen persona overshadowed Keaton’s on-camera.

However, with the release of the Marx Bros.’ first MGM film, A Night at the Opera (1935), it was Thalberg who was vindicated by the box-office receipts. The film itself is really a masterpiece of construction – an expertly structured and well-written comedy that manages to balance its different elements very well. Their follow-up film for the studio, A Day at the Races (1937), continued much in the same tradition, albeit somewhat less successfully (critics of the film rightly cite the “Water Carnival” sequence as an over-produced distraction that brings the film to a halt).

While it’s easy in hindsight to criticize Thalberg’s decision to water-down the Marxes’ comedy to heighten their box office appeal as a crass commercial move, it must be said in his defense that he recognized the need for top-flight writers like George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who had worked with the brothers on the stage and whose scripts had served as the foundation for their first two screen hits, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). Thalberg also recognized the benefit of sending the Marxes on stage tour, to test scenes that had been written for the film, in order to see how they played before a live audience. This was an incredibly wise decision on Thalberg’s part, and both A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races benefit from the expert timing and polish that the Marxes were used to developing through their work in vaudeville and subsequently on Broadway night after night.

Sadly, during production of A Day at the Races, Irving Thalberg passed away at a tragically young age. The Marx Bros. made one rather lackluster picture on loan-out to RKO, Room Service (1938), an adaptation of a Broadway show that lost much in its translation to the screen.

When the brothers returned to MGM in 1939, things had changed.

Without Thalberg, the Marx Bros. were effectively powerless to fight for top-notch writers and directors, not to mention the ability to test their material on the road before filming, all of which had been so crucial in the success of their first two films with the studio.

Between 1939 and 1941, they would star in their final three films for the studio. These films have been almost unanimously panned as artistic and comedic flops - overproduced, expensive vehicles lacking the wit and charm of the earlier Marx Bros. comedies. While the films certainly fall short of the highest standards of films like Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, let alone their first two films at MGM, they nonetheless contains moments of comedy that are too good to ignore completely.

Their first picture upon returning to the studio was At the Circus (1939). While hardly one of their best efforts, the film isn’t without its charm, and it still maintains a certain energy that manages to carry it through its dull moments.

The film was directed by Edward Buzzell, a former musical comedy performer (his best-known performance today is probably the delightfully bizarre 1930 2-color Technicolor short, The Devil's Cabaret). The script was by Irving Brecher, who had previously written the vaudeville-flavored New Faces of 1937 starring Milton Berle and Joe Penner at RKO. The problem with Brecher's script isn't that it lacks decent comedy scenes, only that the plotting is too loose to really get invested in at any level (A Night at the Opera and to a lesser extent A Day at the Races at least presented a well-structured plot with just enough sense of conflict to hold interest in it). The other qualm with Brecher's writing style is that the jokes could really be performed by almost any group of comedians, so that there are fewer of the really characteristic moments that could be found in the first five films the Marxes made for Paramount. The film was produced by Mervyn LeRoy, who produced The Wizard of Oz for MGM the same year. On a side note, the film's main titles - featuring caricatures of the Marx Bros. - were drawn by noted cartoonist Al Hirschfeld.

The plot finds circus owner Jeff Wilson (played by popular singer Kenny Baker) struggling to save his company from impending bankruptcy, turning down persistent offers to be bought out by villainous businessman John Carter (James Burke), and trying to make good so that he can marry his sweetheart Julie Randall (Florance Rice). Groucho, as attorney J. Cheever Loophole, is brought in to protect Jeff while the whole circus is en route to via train to their next destination. Of course, Carter’s henchmen have infiltrated the troupe, Jeff Wilson gets knocked on the head and his $10,000 stolen, and Groucho is too busy cracking wise to do much of anything about any of it.

In order to save the circus, Groucho secures them a booking at a big society party given by Jeff’s aunt, Suzanna Dukesbury, without telling her exactly what kind of a show it is that she’s paying for. Things almost fall apart when the maestro, Jardinet (played by that great character actor, Fritz Feld), arrives to conduct the symphony orchestra that had originally been booked to entertain at the party. Groucho instructs Chico to give him a big send-off. He leads him to a giant floating bandstand, where Jardinet begins conducting his orchestra, while the bandstand promptly untied from the dock and set afloat!

The show must go on, and the curtain finally goes up on the circus, leading to a climax in which the villains try to disrupt the performance. This scene suffers from some fairly obvious uses of back projection and stunt doubles, which take away from the fun somewhat. It's really a kind of comic free-for-all, with even the circus gorilla (played by Charles Gemora, so memorable as Ethel in Laurel and Hardy's The Chimp) attempting to steal back the stolen money. Even as she watches her society party fall apart at the seams, one gets the impression that Margaret Dumont is having more fun than she lets on, particularly when she ends up getting shot out of a cannon!

The film’s big fade-out laugh comes with the unforgettable image of Jardinet set adrift on the floating bandstand, where he continues to furiously conduct the orchestra, totally oblivious to the fact that they are sailing off down the river.

While the film has some excellent gags such as this, it is also filled with moments that come very close to being solid comedy scenes, but never really reach their potential. Chico and Harpo sneaking in to the room of the circus strong man while on the train, Groucho, Harpo and Chico interrogating the midget circus performer in his tiny room, and the scene in which Groucho tries to get onto the circus train without his badge all have the basic ingredients that could have made for strong comedy, but they never quite come together. In short, the set-up is there, but the scenes lack the strong payoff of a really strong comedy sequence.

A scene was shot, but deleted, that introduced Groucho's character prior to the train sequence. The sequence took place in a courtroom, and while it might have slowed the pacing of the film's beginning down a bit, it's a shame the scene doesn't survive, as any courtroom scene with Groucho is guaranteed to be a laugh riot.

At the Circus is aided by a strong supporting cast – including Margaret Dumont as wealthy dowager Suzanna Dukesbury – that add a lot to the fun. Nat Pendleton is good as the circus strongman (probably a reference to his performance as Eugene Sandow in MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld). Eve Arden has a great turn as Peerless Pauline, whose act consists of walking on the ceiling with a pair of specially-made shoes. She and Groucho share a fun scene in which he tries to retrieve stolen money from her. After Groucho catches her stuffing the cash in her brassiere ("There must be some way I can get that money without getting in trouble with the Hays Office"), he suggests that she demonstrate for him how to walk on the ceiling. However, she talks Groucho in to donning a pair of the shoes as well, and ends up leaving him stranded, hanging upside-down from the ceiling!

This scene is reflective of a strong current of exasperation running throughout the comedy of At the Circus. Groucho is basically prevented from succeeding at any of his tasks because of he is constantly being one-upped or thwarted by another character. Groucho's entrance in the film is a scene in which he has been offered a job by his old friend Chico, traveling with the circus troupe to protect the owner. However, when Groucho arrives and attempts to board the train that is about to depart, Chico refuses to let him on since he doesn't have the requisite badge. Groucho is repeatedly pushed back out into the pouring rain. Another such instance is the interrogation scene, where all Groucho needs to secure a confession is to get the circus midget (Jerry Maren) to give him one of his cigars, so that he can match it to the one found at the scene of the crime. His efforts to get the necessary sample are repeatedly thwarted by Chico, who keeps pulling out cigars of his own to offer to Groucho. Then there is the already-mentioned scene with Peerless Pauline. These are the kinds of scenes that always made for the most memorable Groucho-Chico exchanges in earlier films. Here, though, it's as if the entire universe has it in for Groucho!

The film has at least one moment of unparalleled brilliance – the “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” musical number, performed by Groucho, and written by the team of Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, who would write “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” the same year. Along with “Hello, I Must Be Going”, it would become one of Groucho’s favorite songs to reprise over the years on his appearances on television talk shows. Aside from its brilliantly witty lyrics, the song is also a marvel of orchestration (when Groucho sings the lines about "She once swept an admiral clear off his feet/the ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat", the arrangers very carefully included the "Sailor's Hornpipe" within the orchestration). And even though it has been the target of many jibes over the years from fans of the Marxes, “Two Blind Loves” is actually an enjoyable little tune, made all the more charming by Kenny Baker (who is nowhere near as bad in this film as some critics have made him out to be). Chico is allowed an energetic piano solo, performing "Beer Barrel Polka" to the obvious delight of the train passengers (and the audience). Aside from Groucho’s “Lydia”, the best musical number in the film is Harpo’s jazzy and soulful rendition of “Blue Moon”, accompanied by a vocal chorus of black gospel singers. It is both beautiful and haunting.

If At the Circus was a generally amusing comedy punctuated with a few moments approaching greatness, then the Marx Bros.’ following film was an inversion of that – a generally dull picture that only occasionally provided solid laughs.