The Cocoanuts (1929): the Marx Brothers’ second filmĪside from Joe Adamson’s mischievous observation in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo (1973) that the film’s continued loss may be the price we have to pay “to keep silent film fanatics from saying it was the best movie they ever made,” there’s really only one persuasive reason why the possibility of its reclamation excites so little determination: what I earlier termed the practical objection.
As Variety noted: “One of the laugh hits of the picture, where the pick-pocket drops a lot of knives and forks from his sleeves has been taken bodily from I’ll Say She Is. But it’s Paramount’s Behind the Front that features the first sighting of an authentic Marx routine in the movies, and it doesn’t involve any of them. (Actually, it’s been claimed that Zeppo can be seen as an extra in Too Many Kisses, too, though the word hasn’t travelled far as yet. (Alas, they “are said to have refused the offer, at least for the time being.”) And that’s not counting both Harpo’s and Zeppo’s encounters with the silent camera, both in 1925, in A Kiss in the Dark and Too Many Kisses, respectively. Had the latter happened it would almost certainly have been largely if not entirely silent.Īs well as these near misses, the New York Evening Post reported in 1928 that the Brothers “have been offered a staggering sum by a moving picture company to appear in a screen burlesque on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte”, with Harpo as Napoleon, Groucho as Wellington, Chico as Blucher and Zeppo as King William of Prussia.
And then the screen test by United Artists, for a proposed version of The Cocoanuts itself, a full year before Paramount took them up.
Then an overture from MGM to make a series of comedies (presumably meaning screen originals) as close to the wire as 1928. There was the offer from First National that got as far as an announcement in 1926. Though the idea of a silent Marx Brothers seems an absurd one, it nearly happened on several other occasions. Each to his own, of course, but to my mind these aspects of the film are high among what makes it so desirable. Odder still is the tendency to offer the fact that it’s silent, and that the Marxes are by most accounts not playing even an approximation of their established roles, as fatal drawbacks. We are, I think, far too willing to allow Groucho’s own famously self-deprecating judgement of the film to condition our own. In the first place, we don’t actually know it’s lousy. The former seems to me somewhat misguided. There are two main reasons for this: aesthetic and practical. Whenever those lists are made of the most keenly desired lost silents, there it always is: somewhere else. We’ve called off the search, if indeed it was ever on.
But as reputations go, Hats Off (1927) or London after Midnight (1927) it is not. Humor Risk, the first ever Marx Brothers film, was here and then, seemingly, it was gone – almost immediately. All the more reason, therefore, to remember that there is also an entirely lost Marx movie out there somewhere – or not, as the case may be. Because they appeared in so few films compared to just about every other of the great screen comedians, the fact that a number of their films exist only in prints of very poor condition, or with missing and deteriorated scenes seems especially galling. The recent discovery of an uncut print of Animal Crackers (1930) at the British Film Institute in London has been greeted with justified delight by Marx Brothers fans the world over. This article was a Number 1 Pick of the Week on ’s Thumbnails chart