The Marx Brothers, Then ... Then ... and Now

Filmfax Interview Yields Much Marx Lore

A long and happy arm of coincidence: I had just watched A Day At The Races on VUDU-HD, then by chance came upon Filmfax #25 (Feb./March 1991), which featured an in-depth chat with Allan Jones about working with the Marx Brothers in Races, plus earlier A Night At The Opera (conducted by Gregory J.M. Catsos, an always expert interviewer who contributed often to Filmfax). Made me realize again what treasures lie in back issues of a venerable mag that thrives to the present (#154 due in July). Races was the Marxes’ second for Metro, regarded by many as their final go of merit. They viewed it so, Groucho saying to his end that Irving Thalberg’s death put paid to studio effort made on Marx behalf. Sharks swam round the Bros. as a next three were made cheaper, called less upon writing talent, “retirement” for the team an eventual out. I was years since attending Races, so much as to forget bulk of it, and daunted besides by 111 minutes between start and a finish line. Could I last and take the pennant? Aftertaste from 1972’s Hollywood --- The Dream Factory was of fun so manic as to no longer be fun, the boys as bogus medicos let loose in an exam room where little they did made sense, and went too long beside MGM portions more bite-size. The ABC special, narrated by Dick Cavett, was how a lot of us first came by the Lion’s library, at least highlights of it, and what a thrill to see star faces, so many!, cascading over an hour’s length. Hazard for the Marxes was their stuff out of context, so the Races excerpt seemed little more than formless chaos. Some might say well, that’s the sort of comedy the Marx Bros. did, but where the idea was to interest outliers less familiar with their work, this was no ideal start. It was a same snakebite Robert Youngson took with his Big Parade of Comedy, where sampling of Go West implied Marx humor as mere variant on Sennett slapstick. Did Hollywood --- The Dream Factory or Big Parade of Comedy swell the ranks of Marx Bros. fandom, or reduce it?

I watched A Day At The Races alone. Does anyone see it in crowded theatres anymore, and would viewership wrap arms around the Marxes if they did? These are old, gone comics now, not emblems of protest and up-yours to authority. I miss that for having known, at least encountered, the attitude, my own a same then as now … whatever gets the stuff before an audience will do. So does A Day At The Races click today as in, say, 1974? Short of the Marxes as ongoing kindred spirits with youth, I suspect not. Picture a once-hep prof, long since tenured toward decrepitude, laying Races or Opera before students with way different concepts of protest, none expressed through vehicle of comedy half-a-century older than even it was when anointed by 60/70’s hipsters. I’d no more spring the Marx Brothers on a college crowd than take rat poison. Has anyone out there tried, and don’t say yes, in 1992, or 2003, because at a pace modern culture runs, those might as well be years we still lived in caves, or used rotary phones, and what’s the difference between such epochs to a modern observer?

So I’ve got myself in a froth when the idea was to talk about A Day At The Races and Allan Jones. Found to my liking that for all its length, Races does not lag. Jones and Maureen O’Sullivan supply “relief” from the comedy, per formula Thalberg insisted on, and the Marxes did not resist, but past two music recitals, one of which integrates Chico and Harpo, there is surprisingly little to distract from the comedy. As to that, I would guess the show is funny, but how to be sure without an audience to confirm or deny? This was why MGM sent the team on theatre tours to test material. There was no trusting individual judgment as to what would earn laughs. Jones said they were on the road for eight weeks, five shows a day, six days a week, trying out material for A Night at The Opera. The writers sat offstage clocking laughs. I wonder if other film companies dispatched road crews to sift content for comedies. I’ve not heard of it. Was MGM and the Marx Brothers alone for using this device? The expense alone may have prevented rivals from trying. Having gone through such a process for Opera and Races (Allan Jones was not part of the second live troupe, being engaged at Universal for Showboat), we might assume that these two represent gilt-edge, absolute sure-fire mirth-makers for their respective years of 1935 and 1937. Could there have been a more efficient means of insuring a public’s glee for your effort? An only disconnect might be the response a routine would get on a stage as opposed to the screen, as where Jones noted Opera’s stateroom set-piece “didn’t go over well with the audiences,” causing Groucho and Chico to suggest the segment be cut, “but Thalberg calmly explained to them that in a theatre, on a full stage, audiences could not visualize the perspective of a small crowded stateroom. Thalberg insisted that on film, the stateroom would look small, and the scene would work.” From anecdotes like this came Thalberg enshrine as a genius. Would Groucho, based on such a lesson, regard the producer’s instinct for comedy superior to his own? Lifelong esteem the comedian felt for Thalberg makes sense where we consider such an incident as related by Allan Jones.

Sam Wood directed Opera and Races, badly, as described by Jones. I had read that Groucho was put out with him, as in Wood saying you couldn’t make an actor out of clay, and Grouch answering that you couldn’t make a director out of Wood. Allan Jones supplied the basis for complaints: Wood requiring “about twenty takes, or more.” Not having gone with the road tours, Wood was oblivious to the routines being well-honed and camera ready. Jones: “We did so many retakes, we became disgusted and bored with our dialogue. Even our funny lines became dull with all this repetition.” So how many times could you tell a joke before it stopped being funny? This was burden upon any performer's feel for good material. To do a gag twenty times was surely to kill it, plus whatever spirit of fun prevailed on the set. Was this why the Marx Brothers engaged so much mischief between takes? Sam Wood would appear to have been the worst possible choice for a director, and yet Thalberg assigned him twice. Did Groucho suggest a change and get rebuffed? A better ramrod might have been W.S. Van Dyke, who was fast, and understood comedy besides. Could he have supplied a congenial enough atmosphere to make Opera and Races twice as good as they already were?

Thalberg’s idea, according to Jones, was to make the Marx Bros. “sympathetic characters,” and “involve the audience emotionally, particularly the female members.” Later generations would come to deplore this method, especially “the new concept of (the Marxes) being helpers to the romantic leads.” None of this was new to feature comedy. Most figured nonsense tendered non-stop was no good beyond two reels. Even Buster Keaton admitted need for a strong plot to sustain his hour-long output. MGM’s policy could be argued to the mat, but weren’t they but maintaining what impresarios on stage had done for a last hundred years? Melodramas and even Shakespeare were often broken up by song and silly bits. Audiences were understood to be put off by too much sameness. Even the Marx Brothers must be thinned at least somewhat to avoid overkill. Was there, then, such a thing as excess gaiety? Perhaps mirth should be doled out in the interests of propriety. Was there actual harm in “laughing yourself sick,” or comedy inducing “pains in the side?” One reason I’d say Martin and Lewis clicked so well was because one did the comedy, the other romance and tunes. It wasn’t necessary for M&L to use an Allan Jones. What’s interesting is that right through the 50’s, Thalberg’s formula was still being applied.

Groucho, said Allan Jones, was a most distant of the Marxes, “ … very caustic, serious most of the time, and usually aloof,” but “really warm-hearted and sensitive” once you got to know him. Jones remembered Groucho ad-libbing lines in Opera and Races. I often wonder how much of wit in any of the team’s films were Groucho’s own creation. Given enough of it, was there any move to assign him a writer’s credit? Jones recalled Groucho trying out jokes on him and looking bereft if Jones did not laugh. Is there worse instance of being put on the spot than someone coming to you with a story they think is hilarious, telling it to you, then waiting for you to react? Nothing short of a guffaw will do, and should you fake that, they are more affronted than if you don’t laugh at all. It must have been a no-win situation for Groucho, who according to Jones, worried constant about whether his material was any good. Maureen O’Sullivan by her own account did not find anything Groucho said to be funny. The poor man must have been crushed. If Groucho was dour offscreen, which many agree he was, then we should take into account the burden of expectation, his friends’, the public’s, was so great that he could never hope to meet it. I read of fans approaching Groucho in hope he would insult them, just like in the movies. Must have been exhausting. I assume he could go more-or-less incognito during stage and early screen days when the Groucho face and costume disguised him well, but what of a You Bet Your Life era when Grouch was more or less himself on-camera? With that came surely his total loss of privacy.

FUN FACT involving our Liberty Theatre playing A Day At The Races on Sunday and Monday, July 4 and 5, 1937. Flat rate as charged by Metro for the two-day engagement was $65.00. Amount spent on promotion (“posters, photos, slides”) was an additional $12.30.