Inside the Marx Brothers

Cafe Society
1

Last year there was a brouhaha about a “Marx Brothers Collection” 5-disk DVD which proved to contain no movies whatsoever, just a documentary and a bunch of odds and ends of clips that the Brothers had been in.

That package still has the wrong name but at least Amazon has the right info on it, and the “Inside the Marx Brothers” documentary is available separately.

It was shown last night on my local PBS channel.

As a documentary on the Brothers, it was pitiful. They got through their entire lives up though A Night at the Opera in 18 minutes and spent the other 40 minutes on their detritus.

If you’re not a fanatic collector, however, most of that last 40 minutes would have been new to you. Rare TV clips, the trailers from most of their later movies, home movies of the Brothers’ children, a mixed bag of leftovers.

Anybody else see it? If you’re only a moderate fan, what did you think?

2

…it’s too dark to read.

3

I think I saw that docu a few years ago and remember thinking, “well that sucked.”

4

I won that crappy 5-DVD set in an eBay auction, thinking I was bidding on the NEW 5-DVD set with the Marx Brothers’ actual movies. The auction title was misleading, especially because the set with the movies had just been released. After I read all the shockingly negative reviews on Amazon.com, I was aghast. Luckily, the seller was understanding and let me back out of completing the sale, without leaving me negative feedback. I would have been so pissed if I had to buy it, because it sounds really awful.

5

This documentary had a 2003 copyright, so it’s probably not the same one you saw, Eve. Not like there isn’t a plenitude of bad docs on the bros on the market.