Monkey Business
I found a copy of this 1931 Marx Bros. movie the other day at Half-Price and I've just watched it. (There's another 'Monkey Business' from the fifties with Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe which is very funny.)
As everyone knows, I'm a big fan of the Marxes but this particular film of theirs has always been something of the 'lost movie' for me. This is the first time I've watched it in probably twenty years. For some reason, it just never pops up on TV, at least that I've been able to tell. It was the very first one of theirs I ever watched... I remember when I was about 14 or so, walking into Jimmy Lehnert's room and it was on TV. He said, you've got to see this, it's hilarious.
In the years since, I came to love the Marx Brothers and eventually saw all their films, but 'Monkey Business' has always been elusive. It was never shown at conventions and an earlier videotape I had of it was defective.
Watching it now, I think there was never another Marx film as crammed full of one-liners and sight gags as this one. Hell, maybe no other film in history. Even the classics 'Duck Soup' and 'A Night At The Opera' don't come close.
The celebrated satirist S.J. Perelman wrote most of 'Monkey Business' and one can easily detect the difference between it and the rest of the team's output. He obviously delighted in writing brilliant one-liners for Groucho and devising outrageous sight gags for Harpo.
Speaking of Harpo, 'Monkey Business' catches him at his most manic. His character (if you can call it that) is crazy almost to the point of insanity. No one is safe from him, whether they are young blonde women who he inevitably gives chase to (at one point on a bicycle with a flower dangling in front of it, for some odd reason) or a poor man who complains of having a frog in his throat, or the hapless customs man who is attacked and has his bald head stamped by Harpo. Repeatedly. Harpo was never before or after as ruthless as he is here.
Something else that sets 'Monkey Business' apart is the almost complete lack of a plot. There is the barest thread of one, something to do with competing gangsters and toward the end, a woman being kidnapped, but it is so inconsequential as to be irrelevent to the movie as a whole. Even 'Duck Soup,' which is usually held up as the Marxes' best and 'craziest' film, has a definite storyline, loopy as it may be.
I suspect 'Monkey Business' is the closest document we'll ever have of what the Marx Bros. must have been like in their vaudeville shows. A series of comedic vignettes, alternately spotlighting one of the brothers and then a combination of two or more of them. It is surreal at times, and the team's boundless energy leaves one almost dizzy after watching it.
I remember a scene in 'Planet of the Apes,' when Charlton Heston's character has almost gone crazy and he screams, "It's a madhouse! A madhouse!"
That's about how you feel watching 'Monkey Business.' But in a funny way, of course.
As everyone knows, I'm a big fan of the Marxes but this particular film of theirs has always been something of the 'lost movie' for me. This is the first time I've watched it in probably twenty years. For some reason, it just never pops up on TV, at least that I've been able to tell. It was the very first one of theirs I ever watched... I remember when I was about 14 or so, walking into Jimmy Lehnert's room and it was on TV. He said, you've got to see this, it's hilarious.
In the years since, I came to love the Marx Brothers and eventually saw all their films, but 'Monkey Business' has always been elusive. It was never shown at conventions and an earlier videotape I had of it was defective.
Watching it now, I think there was never another Marx film as crammed full of one-liners and sight gags as this one. Hell, maybe no other film in history. Even the classics 'Duck Soup' and 'A Night At The Opera' don't come close.
The celebrated satirist S.J. Perelman wrote most of 'Monkey Business' and one can easily detect the difference between it and the rest of the team's output. He obviously delighted in writing brilliant one-liners for Groucho and devising outrageous sight gags for Harpo.
Speaking of Harpo, 'Monkey Business' catches him at his most manic. His character (if you can call it that) is crazy almost to the point of insanity. No one is safe from him, whether they are young blonde women who he inevitably gives chase to (at one point on a bicycle with a flower dangling in front of it, for some odd reason) or a poor man who complains of having a frog in his throat, or the hapless customs man who is attacked and has his bald head stamped by Harpo. Repeatedly. Harpo was never before or after as ruthless as he is here.
Something else that sets 'Monkey Business' apart is the almost complete lack of a plot. There is the barest thread of one, something to do with competing gangsters and toward the end, a woman being kidnapped, but it is so inconsequential as to be irrelevent to the movie as a whole. Even 'Duck Soup,' which is usually held up as the Marxes' best and 'craziest' film, has a definite storyline, loopy as it may be.
I suspect 'Monkey Business' is the closest document we'll ever have of what the Marx Bros. must have been like in their vaudeville shows. A series of comedic vignettes, alternately spotlighting one of the brothers and then a combination of two or more of them. It is surreal at times, and the team's boundless energy leaves one almost dizzy after watching it.
I remember a scene in 'Planet of the Apes,' when Charlton Heston's character has almost gone crazy and he screams, "It's a madhouse! A madhouse!"
That's about how you feel watching 'Monkey Business.' But in a funny way, of course.
posted by gbj at 4:41 PM
6 Comments:
Joe, I had forgotten until you mentioned it just now that I used to do that... make audio cassettes of movies that I liked, mostly Marx Bros. ones, as this was in the days before video recording. I used to have my tape recorder with the microphone dangling in front of the TV speaker, recording them. I even signed up for some film series at the Scott Theater in FW for the sole purpose of smuggling a tape recorder in to tape 'A Day At The Races.' They showed 12 or so films but that was the only one I went to see.
I was fanatic about them back then. I even went to a convention in Detroit for the sole purpose of seeing 'A Night At The Opera.' It was great.
Ah, those were the days, eh?
And no, I don't miss the tape of Horsefeathers... I found another copy of it.
Funny, no I never knew about that. Well, my tape of 'A Day At The Races' turned out about the same. I don't remember now where I had it placed during the showing, but mainly all you could hear is my laughing for about an hour and a half.
Gets old after the second or third laugh.
One of my less inspired inspirations.
Yep, a very strange episode, no doubt.
Very 60's.
I'm sure the guy's been around, but the only other starring role I can associate him with was 'Here Come The Brides.' I think that was the name of it. It ran for a couple of seasons back in the 60's and Jan and Kathy watched it all the time.
OMG, I had forgotten HCTBs. With that opening song about Seattle, and the premise that all these women were imported as brides for the cleanest, most polite loggers ever, but the show went on year after year and I don't remember any of them getting married . . . should've been called "Here Come Your Long-Term Dating Partners."
Bobby Sherman was a regular on that show, and as I recall, he affected a stutter, which made him even MORE endearing to all the young girls watching it.
Joe, it's really not surprising that all these same character actors kept popping up on differents shows during that period. They were pretty much all drawn from the same pool or same casting lists by the networks and talent agencies. You'll see a lot of the guest stars on Star Trek pop up on other series or even have starring roles in others.
To digress slightly, I think Leslie Nielsen may hold the record for most characters, starring, featured, and guest roles, of anybody in the history of television.
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