The Marx Brothers Meet the Killer, Irving Thalberg
By Edward Larsen Terkelsen

In 1924, the cutting, uproarious antics of the four Marx Brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo) took Broadway by storm, and trailing the induction of sound into motion pictures around 1927, Hollywood came knocking. Paramount Studios signed the celebrated comedy team to a five-picture contract, which resulted in a string of comedic successes, all culminating in the subversive 1933 masterpiece Duck Soup. A veritable banquet of unadulterated Marxist mayhem, the Leo McCarey-directed comedy received largely approving notices from America’s leading critics, prompting even customarily guarded reviewers like James Agee to praise the film for its audacious nonconformity. But despite the critical plaudits assigned to Duck Soup, the public stayed away. The country was mindful of the gory havoc dictators were wreaking around the globe, and the film’s promise of anti-war frivolity turned off potential ticket-buyers. (The movie was actually anti-fascist, though, and it should’ve pleased Americans that Mussolini banned it in Italy.) The Marx Brothers’ brashly impertinent wit may have complimented the temper of audiences during the Great Depression, but contemporary crowds were beginning to seek out less antagonistic comedies, thus languid fare on the order of Mae West’s I’m No Angel started drumming up superior box-office. This caused a major panic at Paramount, and the studio chiefs, ever watchful of the bottom line, opted not to renew the Marx Brothers’ contract. But a producer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 35 year-old wunderkind Irving Thalberg, spied the boys’ resurging box-office potential and immediately committed them to a three-picture deal. Widely regarded as a top diagnostician of moviegoing tends, Thalberg devised a sure-fire strategy to secure larger audiences for future Marx Brothers’ projects, and insured the brothers’ support by offering them fifteen percent of the box-office grosses. Only Zeppo balked, promptly forsaking the troupe to become an agent. But the remaining Marx Brothers would stand forever indebted to Thalberg for his steadfast assurance in their ability to stage a comeback. In time, though, the team’s association with MGM came with a heavy price: in an attempt to make the Marx Brothers more accessible to mainstream audiences in 1935, Thalberg significantly modified the comedy team’s once riotously subversive edge. Post-Paramount endeavors such as A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races proved to be big hits, but featured mostly diluted Marxist humor.

The first thing that Thalberg did after taking the Marx Brothers under his wing was to convince them to retool their act. He figured that audiences would respond more enthusiastically to their pictures if the team were made more sympathetic, providing middle-of-the-the-road moviegoers with more likable jokesters that could even be rooted on. Detractors found this strategy to be an out-and-out perversion of the Marx’s usual comic methodology, though, arguing that the brothers achieved notoriety as being the instigators of mayhem—not congenial figures who would resort to tomfoolery only as a means of defense. But Thalberg persevered in his mission to redefine the Marx Brothers by striking the insolence from their monkeyshines and replacing it with pathos. He also thought more women would attend screenings if romantic subplots were integrated into the proceedings, and the misogynistic elements tempered. Even more disconcerting to fans was the fact that Thalberg chose to dispense with the anarchistic, crazy-quilt style associated with the Paramount pictures, and feature more conventional plots with straight-arrow leading types and bubbly musical interludes. A script was drafted for the Marx Brothers’ first MGM outing, A Night at the Opera, by longtime collaborator George S. Kaufman, and it was laden with all of Thalberg’s dreary commercial concessions. But before the cameras rolled, the Marx Brothers were instructed to take some of the new routines out on the road and test them for comic viability before live audiences. Thalberg believed that this would help the boys reclaim their comic timing, but enthusiasts thought this to be a fool’s errand: the Marxes had reached the summit of their craft barely a year before in the socially pertinent satire Duck Soup; hence the live tests would only serve to restructure their clowning so more conservative audiences could be accommodated. A procedure that all but disemboweled the Marx’s once revered iconoclasm, the protracted dummy runs yielded routines that felt too polished, lacking the impulsiveness and daring of the gags in the Paramount pictures. But Thalberg was indifferent to the precious nuances of commedia dell’arte; his only concern was to see the boys whipped into a more profitable attraction.

And his plan worked. A Night at the Opera proved to be a towering success with mainstream audiences. But critics (well, some of them) and Marx Brothers devotees were saddened by the blandly commercial spin now put on once traditionally irreverent Marxist mayhem. The irregular tone of their previous films was supplanted with a streamlined, pointlessly handsome look; the rickety old sets and slapdash editing retired in favor of an all-too-professional-looking gleam. The crude aesthetics of the Marx Brothers’ early films appeared in step with flippant, Devil-may-care approach to moviemaking; it was a huge phlegm-globber in the face of the tedious professionalism associated with most major studio releases. But A Night at the Opera tidied up the Marx Brothers, and the new “respectable” formula fit them like a straightjacket. In the name of robust box office receipts, structure was now being forced upon the Marx Brothers. Of course, aficionados found this to be a strange incongruity because the team’s lawless strain of humor couldn’t truly succeed if it was hemmed in or tempered to placate contemporary morality. The Paramount pictures were ideal showcases for Marxist mischief because the executives remained planted in their offices and allowed the boys a great deal of creative freedom. But the MGM producers kept a conversely tight leash around the Marx’s neck, and the new constraints almost choked the life out of their shtick.

A Night at the Opera wasn’t without its moments, but the few laughs scattered hither and yon weren’t worth the horror of seeing the Marx Brothers’ subversive edge rounded away. Once a devilish prankster, Harpo had now seen his character redefined as a sad clown, and Chico’s chicanery was dropped in favor of shopworn gags that goofed on his character’s broken English. In Duck Soup, Harpo and Chico were essentially partners in crime, antagonizing street vendors and eluding the law. But A Night at the Opera saw Harpo despoiled as a lackey to the picture’s physically abusive villain, while Chico was demoted to amusing the tots with his idiosyncratic piano stylings. Groucho was still the king of acerbic one-liners, but once an unflinching comic foil, he was now often the butt of inane jokes. Worse, the Marx Brothers were no longer the center of their comic universe; they were relegated to playing second-fiddle to the dreadfully dull romantic coupling that Thalberg worked into the storyline. And many of the new musical numbers didn’t even include the Marx Brothers; they were pedestrian interludes featuring nondescript crooners that stopped the movie’s action dead and bored the audience blind. Ironically, the lavishly mounted song and dance routines were emblematic of the very bloated pomposity that the Marx Brothers once mocked mercilessly.

Irving Thalberg deserves recognition for introducing an even bigger audience to the comic genius of the Marx Brothers, but it was the comedy team’s utter indifference to popular consensus that endeared them to moviegoers in the first place. Thalberg’s unflagging attempts to bring the Marx Brothers greater marquee value also succeeded in castrating their fiendish allure. A Night at the Opera signified an artistic downward spiral for the Marx Brothers, and it eventually cast a slight pall on even the most masterful of the Marx Brothers’ Paramount undertakings. The incessantly hilarious Duck Soup has since acquired a sad undertone because most fans now know that the Marx Brothers would never be allowed to ascend to that level of inspired lunacy again.

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. all rights reserved.