Got to watch some of their classics over the holidays. Not only were they funny, but I had forgotten what incredibly talented musicians they were.
I agree. Which ones did you watch? I think they are hilariously funny, and I am not very happy about the person years ago who told me they were “just like the Three Stooges”. Marx Brothers were real comedy! 3 Stooges is just stupid.
Groucho’s one-liners are amazing, and Harpo’s skills on the…erm, harp…leave me breathless.
Make that 3 hard boiled eggs.
And one duck egg!
Finally, Chico gets some lines–
See my comments here: SFF Net
HUH?!?!
Why a duck?
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
OOOO! Sucks like a Hoover-O-Matic.
I’ll pass…
So, you’ll pass over that?
Must be the Jewish section.
I actually saw *The Story of Mankind once. As I said, it’s as bad as you’ve heard it was. Claude Rains and Ronald Coleman debate whether mankind should be allowed to live, with each bringing vignettes showing the good and the bad. The Marx don’t appear together, and are given absolutely nothing to do. It doesn’t work as drama – it’s just a listing of highlights and lowlights – and it’s not funny at all (though Groucho tries hard). No one seems to care enough to bother to put in a performance, and if it wasn’t for the footnote of being the Marx’s last film “together,” it would have been justly forgotten.
The three did appear together one more time, in a TV show called “The Incredible Jewel Robbery,” though it was like Love Happy – Harpo and Chico, with a cameo by Groucho. I haven’t seen it, but some say it was quite good, and probably deserves to be dug up and rescued.
Fine, more Marx Brothers for me then.
It’s actually not as terrible as the article makes it out to be. It’s far from a wonderful film but it’s more than watchable and if you’re a Marx Bros completeist must-see. TCM showed all of the Marx Bros films in blocks over several nights a few years back and I got all of them on tape. Outstanding stuff.
For the completists:
All 13 Marx Brothers films have been released on DVD.
The first five, Paramount, films are on The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection.
The next seven are on the badly titled The Marx Brothers Collection.
Their last film, Love Happy, you have to buy on its own.
Just to confuse everyone, there is a second, totally separate, DVD box set also titled The Marx Brothers Collection. It doesn’t have any films, but does contain the kinds of odds and end usually included as extras on real DVD sets.
Some of this stuff, like the trailers, is on the other Marx Brothers Collection box set (which is only 6 DVDs not seven since one DVD holds two films), but most is not.
Several box sets of Groucho’s You Bet Your Life programs have also been issued. Single DVDs of documentaries about them can also be found.
It would be nice if all the films and extras could have been put together, but too many different movie studios seem to have been involved for that to happen. It’s still a lot better situation than in the old days, when their stuff was impossible to find.
“Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped!”
“I’ll teach you to kick me.”
“You don’t hafta teach me; I already know how.”
Groucho making a speech about a chest he got as a present in Animal Crackers…
“This magnficent chest”
Points to Margaret Dumont
“No, this magnficent chest”
Points back to chest
“No, this magnificent chest”
and from the same movie…
“One day I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How the elephant got in my pajama’s, I’ll never know”
A Night At The Opera and Duck Soup were their best.
You can throw in A Day At The Races (though the ‘happy ol’ n*****s down on de ol’ plantation’ song-and-dance bit makes one cringe now) and The Big Store (though ‘Tenement Symphony’ must be one of the worst songs ever written) as makeweights.
Much as I love the Marx Brothers, I can’t allow this asparugus on the Howard Brothers (and Fine) to pass unrelented. IMO most of Chico’s and Harpo’s humor was physical, and “stupid” in the sense that the joke often revolved around someone’s inability to “get” what was going on. As for miming I think Curly, at least, could do so at least as well as Harpo, though you only see him do it in one or two shorts.
In this I agree with you, the Stooges had nothing to match it. But don’t forget that a lot of the jokes were written, usually by Kaufman and Ryskind, and if you watch other movies which they wrote, you will recognize much of the humor.
Both of those songs are horribly embarrassing. Personally, I think the best Marx movies after Opera and Duck Soup are Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.