The stars (1962)

THE MARX BROTHERS Comedy did not die when the screen began to talk. Rather, certain marvelous comedians found that either they could not talk successfully or that talking deflected the trajectory of their humor, preventing it from reaching the hysteric heights it had once obtained. In due course, screen humor would become almost exclusively a matter of situation comedies, some of them quite good, but all of them the product of ensemble playing by comic actors, rather than the highly individualistic work of pure comedians. Before this happened, however, screen comedy was to be graced by a group of magnificent anarchists called the Marx Brothers and a nonpareil known as W. C. Fields. The Marxes had been invented by their mother, Minnie, and had straggled up from the lower echelons of vaudeville to the Broadway stage. They came to Hollywood, shortly after the coming of sound, to re-create their stage hits, two of which, Animal Crackers and Duck Soup, proved to be delicious screen fare. They stayed on to make a succession of movies which, if never totally satisfying, invariably contained sequences of lovely, awesome madness. The root of Marxism lay in the conflict of the Brothers with their setting. They appeared always as interlopers in a place of power or, at least, high fashion (at a house party; in the cabinet of a mythical kingdom of which Groucho was inexplicably the prime minister; at the opera; at a Saratogalike spa). Once established, they immediately started to destroy their milieu. Theirs was the maniac humor of nihilism. They were natural men, unhindered by those notions of good taste and proper behavior which so inhibit the world of the bourgeoisie. Immediately upon arrival, Groucho would establish (a) that he wished to steal a great deal of money by means of a complex confidence scheme; and (b) his love-hate relationship with Grande Dame Margaret Dumont. His technique for interpersonal relations was always 104