Is a Marx Brothers revival in the offing? You bet your life, if Universal Studios has anything to say about it. On Sunday, May 1, David Steinberg, comedian and friend of Groucho, will present a restored version of the 1932 football comedy Horse Feathers at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood. It is one of five essential Marx Brothers comedies from the late 1920s and early 1930s that have been restored by Universal—and all it takes is one look at current political headlines to know they’re coming back just in time.
Horse Feathers is an especially good gateway film to the Marx Brothers; its opening number, “I’m Against It,” serves as a crystalline summation of the Marxian philosophy, whether trampling high society in Animal Crackers, pricking the pomposity of higher education in Horse Feathers, or going to war with fresh fruit flying in Duck Soup.
“It is one of the good ones,” notes Joe Adamson, author of the indispensable Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo and archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library, in Beverly Hills. “Horse Feathers I like because it has the most surrealistic moments in the whole Marx Brothers canon—[for example,] when a bum asks Harpo to help him out to get a cup of coffee and Harpo produces one from his pocket. They build on each level of absurdity. It’s just some beautiful stuff.”
Universal completed restoration on all five films (including The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers) last year, according to Peter Schade, vice president of content management, who is charged with the long-term preservation of the studio’s library. “I go to a lot of conferences and industry events, and I’m always approached by people who ask when Universal is going to restore the Marx Brothers titles,” he said. “I think they are known to have film elements that aren’t in the best of shape, and with the studio funding and demand for the next generation of release [such as Blu-ray], we have been able to do the work.” (Plans for a Blu-ray or any other kind of release for the films have not yet been revealed.)
Schade points out that a print of Animal Crackers was located in the British Film Institute archives, and it contains bits of monkey business that were cut by American censors, including the excised lyric “I think I’ll try and make her” from the song “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” as well as a bit where Harpo, rolled-up newspaper in hand, plays “slap-ass” with a society dame.
But do the Marx Brothers still matter? The team enjoyed a renaissance in the late 1960s and 1970s, when college students found in their vintage comedies a thoroughly modern questioning of and contempt for authority and the establishment. This tickled Groucho to no end, according to Steinberg, who befriended Groucho after being recruited to write the Broadway bio-musical Minnie’s Boys. “He couldn’t get over it,” he said in a phone interview. “The Marx Brothers [began as] vaudeville stars. That was the lowest rung on the cultural ladder.”
Dick Cavett says that he and fellow Marx Brothers acolyte Woody Allen were at lunch at the bygone Lindy’s when Groucho learned of his higher-education following. “One of us said, ‘Groucho, if you appeared on any college campus these days, you’d be mobbed,’” Cavett recalled. “Without exaggeration we laid it on about sold-out houses at college film festivals, lines around the corner at commercial-theater Marx festivals, dress-up-as-the-brothers campus parties, and on and on. It was very apparent that this man who worshipped education—an eighth-grade reluctant dropout—was both delighted and astonished to learn of his and his brothers’ god-like status among the young. And it was clear that he had been unaware of it.”
But now? The Marx Brothers would appear to be made for these fractious times, when institutions ranging from the media and the political establishment to colleges are viewed with heightened partisan skepticism. It’s impossible not to think of any of the current presidential candidates when, in Duck Soup, Groucho sings, “If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it.”
Steinberg agrees that we appear to be living in a Marx Brothers movie at present, but counters that in more inhibited decades past, the brothers’ irreverence and iconoclasm was a shock to the system, even in the more liberated 60s and 70s. “No one is shocked by anything anyone does anymore,” he said, “especially in a Kardashian–Donald Trump world.”
Emmy-winning writer-director Robert Weide, whose first film was the essential 1982 documentary The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell, co-written with Adamson, believes in his Marxist heart that there will always be an appreciation of the team. “It’s been 40 years since I first viewed them, and they still bring about the same blissful pleasure that I felt in my teens,” he said. “I tend to discard the conventional wisdom about the vicarious sense of liberation we experience from the anarchy and irreverence that fuel the Marxes’ brand of lunacy. Watching somebody attack sacred cows may be pleasurable, but that alone doesn’t necessarily make you laugh. . . . I think we just have to write it off to the God-given talent these men were born with, and the brilliance of the writers and directors who joined them in putting their gifts on celluloid.”
Cavett offers a similar sentiment. “I asked Groucho about his attitude toward Marx Brothers movies as social criticism. He dismissed this by saying, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about. We were just trying to make funny pictures.’”
