Monkey Business (1931)
SB: Monkey Business is where the Marx Brothers legend really begins. It's as if the Marxes in Animal Crackers were wind-up dolls that Hollywood grabbed and ratcheted up their pace a few notches. Viewing the two movies in chronological order is like being Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, going from a nice, homey starting point to a Technicolor land of comedy.
The Marxes are stowaways on an ocean liner, passing the time singing "Sweet Adeline" while hiding in herring barrels, after which they take off the barrel lids and are even polite enough to bow for a non-existent audience. (They love applause in this movie. At one point, the four of them interrupt their own chase to noodle around on some instruments for thirty seconds, which gets them more audience response. And don't even get me started on Harpo's attempts to get undue attention.)
The ship's captain is oddly wishy-washy about finding these stowaways. After spending the first few minutes of the movie declaring his vengeance on these guys, Groucho and Chico come into his quarters and blithely eat his lunch, at which point the captain declares his suspicion (twice) that Groucho might be one of the stowaways. The captain's relationship to the stowaways turns out to be like Tom's relation to Jerry; he acts like he wants to catch them, but he really doesn't, because then the fun would be over and he'd have to go back to running the ship.
As always, the ostensible plot is in the movie mainly for the purposes of getting tossed aside. Seems that two rival gangsters are on board, and each needs a bodyguard. How do we first get a hint of this? It's when Groucho, trying to escape the captain, ducks into the room of one of the gangsters, who is so macho that he doesn't even let this intrusion break the pace of his ongoing argument with his wife (Thelma Todd). Groucho eventually makes whoopee with Todd in one of the finest courting scenes that doesn't star Margaret Dumont. Then Groucho's supposed to be all scared when the gangster returns and points a gun at his kisser. Hey, big fella, you didn't notice this guy slipping into your closet earlier?
Later, the Marxes trump the captain's apathetic attitude by being cavalier about the possibility of getting caught. When the ship is ready to unload the passengers, Zeppo discovers that Maurice Chevalier is on the ship and takes his passport. Groucho, Harpo, and Chico take this news blithely, as though Zeppo had just announced that the morning paper had arrived. How often do celebrities go around waving their passports to get them stolen, anyway?
As if that affront to reality isn't wacko enough, the four of them decide that the only way they can possibly make it off the ship is to present Chevalier's passport to the clerk and then present themselves as Chevalier by singing one of his songs. It's not enough for one person to impersonate a celebrity--all four of them decide to play the same celebrity, and to do so by singing a song to some disinterested passport clerks. Offhand, I'd say that the Marxes don't really want to get off that ship anymore than that captain really wants to catch them.
Monkey Business is like a great freeing of inhibitions, not the least of which are the Marx Brothers' own hang-ups. You'd never guess these were the same guys who politely walked through Animal Crackers. If there's any single scene that symbolizes the movie's spirit, it's that of Harpo dreamily exiting a Punch-and-Judy show on a kid's cart--a beautiful long shot observing his wheeling away, as though the cameraman can't believe it anymore than we can.
(Trivia: Arthur Sheekman, a good friend of Groucho's who is credited in the movie with "additional dialogue," was married to 1930's actress Gloria Stuart, who made a memorable impression six-and-a-half decades later as the woman with a past, in James Cameron's Titanic. Good thing the Marx Brothers weren't stowing away on that ocean liner.)
JB: No disagreements. Gotta say, though, I always get a kick out of the gangster scenes. They are almost as funny as the Marx Brothers' scenes. "Don't get cocky with me, Briggs!", "So, you brought your gang with you, eh??" You wonder why Warner Bros. even bothered to make gangster movies after Monkey Business made the genre look so completely silly.
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