plug: Animal Crackers (1930) + Duck Soup (1933)
A Litty Marx Brothers Double-Feature
Welcome to today’s plug, a quick recommendation of an oft-forgotten film, cult classic, or movie that is dying to be rewatched //
So Criterion dropped a “Best of the Marx Brothers” collection on their streaming service and I’ve been hittin’ that shit hard the last couple weeks. And seein’ how the Marx Brothers have brought me much joy since I was like 10 years old I thought I’d share a double-feature of essential Marx joints with y’all.
Born to Jewish immigrants, raised in Vaudeville, and “iconified” in the early “talkie” days, the Marx Brothers’ anarchic humor can be felt in everything from the absurdist mile-a-minute anti-authoritarian bent of Monty Python to the sloppy buddy comedy of Cheech & Chong and the confrontational slapstick stylings of Eric Endre (this impromptu musical number from Andre’s new Netflix joint Bad Trip feels like a direct descendant of the type of wrench-throwing, show business-skewering comedy the Marxes pioneered).
If the thought of watching two movies from the 1930s sounds like a snooze, hold up a sec ‘cause there’s like a whole universe of movies from the late ‘20s and early ‘30s that still slap because they were conceived right before the Hays Code started filtering Hollywood output into stodgy, hyper-censored, codified mush. Also, the Marx’s original run of films with Paramount are like insane — just total chaos machines that do the South Park or Mike Judge thing where the guys you’re following are looney-tune morons but then everyone around them in “polite society” is even dumber and more absurd by comparison.
Animal Crackers (1930)
Animal Crackers is the second Marx Bros. feature and pound for pound their funniest movie. It runs kinda long has a snooze of a romantic side plot with a pair of young studio actors (most of which you can just fast forward if you want and you’ll be fine) but it’s got a killer collection of classic Marx bits with each brother (both separately and together in different combinations) fully up on his respective bullshit. Groucho, the de-facto icon of the group (raise your Party City “Groucho glasses” high, folks) makes good on his fast-talking, chain-cigar-smoking proto-Rodney Dangerfield shtick (arguably his most famous one-liner, “One night I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got in my pajamas I dunno,” comes from this joint).
Chico, whose Vaudevillian streetwise-Italian immigrant persona is obviously something you couldn’t do today but also a uniquely warm, perpetually likeable character, does some great verbal sparring with Groucho, offers up one of his signature acrobatic piano numbers, and plays his usual role of long-suffering partner-in-crime to Harpo, the real gem of the group. Harpo’s childlike silent-dullard persona makes for both subtle and exquisitely bombastic physical comedy, some of the best you’ll ever see tbh.
Minute by minute Harpo will make you laugh harder than any of the other brothers, and if you have kids he’ll for sure be their favorite. Groucho’s longevity as an old-Hollywood icon and meme will always kind of dominate the Marx Brothers legacy, but when you go back and actually watch their shit, Harpo’s just the guy.
Playing an aloof straight-man of sorts to the other three brothers is Zeppo, who exited the group after their contract with Paramount was up and went on to become a legendary talent agent. When the revamped Marx Brothers trio signed with MGM, producer Irving Thalberg insisted upon a tighter Hollywood story structure that would dominate literally the next decade and change of the brothers’ films and kind of suck out all the revolutionary comic anarchy that defined their earlier stuff, so Zeppo’s presence is retroactively the first sign you’re getting a Marx joint that hits right.
Anyway, if you really wanna know what puts these guys on the Mount Rushmore of comedy, Animal Crackers is the best place to start.
Duck Soup (1933)
You may want to sit down for this, but Hollywood didn’t exactly lead the charge in denouncing fascism as it rose in Europe in the 1930s (they cover this a little bit in Mank, incidentally one of the most engaging pieces of that movie). Chaplin’s The Great Dictator didn’t come out until 1940, which I guess was about when Hollywood felt safe saying “Hitler is bad” without hurting the market’s feelings.
Always ahead of the curve, the Marx’s followed up two big hits (the straightforward-slapstick romp Monkey Business and the prohibition-era college sendup Horse Feathers) with Duck Soup, a biting screwball satire that speaks truth to the world powers of its past, present, and future. Groucho plays the new leader of the fictional nation of Freedonia, appointed by a rich socialite in exchange for financial aid to the country. In a Happy Meal Empire like the U.S. where most of our presidents have been raving “Grouchos” of one kind or another, these lyrics from Groucho’s opening number feel pretty damn evergreen:
The last man nearly ruined this place
He didn’t know what to do with it
If you think this country’s bad off now
Just wait’ll I get through with it
In an attempt to annex Freedonia, the Prime Minister of the neighboring country, Sylvania, sends his spies Chico and Harpo to infiltrate the Freedonian government. The pair go full CIA, do a bunch of bumbling spy shit and lose all sight of which side they’re actually on. Eventually a petty dispute between Groucho and the Sylvanian PM sends the neighboring nations to war.
Having come of age in the Bush era, it ain’t a stretch to watch the iconic number “This Country’s Going to War” and think of the national frenzy our government has instigated for the last 20 years, hypin’ us all up on drone-striking the Middle East, keepin’ our mitts on all that oil, and upholding the American tradition of the military industrial complex…
They got guns
We got guns
All God's children got guns
We're gonna walk all over the battlefield
'Cause all God's children got guns
…seesh, that verse gets me every time :(
Duck Soup received mixed reviews and disappointing box office returns when it came out, but it’s the reason the Marx Brothers were rediscovered as counterculture avatars by college students in the ‘60s, and it’s why my gen x uncle and I could bond over this shit when I was 12 and he was like 30. It’s an American classic and a deep well of anti-war comedy. And like every good Marx Brothers film, it’s chock fulla laughs.
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