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This Friday, August 14, TCM salutes Groucho Marx as part of this month’s Summer Under the Stars. Most of the day is devoted to the classic comedies of the Marx Brothers, which regular TCM viewers have seen multiple times. One of the most rewarding experiences for any avid movie lover is to watch a familiar film with a new perspective, leading the viewer to discover new insights and therefore a new appreciation. I hope my post today offers some of you a different perspective on the Marx Brothers’ movies.
Studying and teaching art history has prompted me to look at the movies in new ways. For example, when first studying the Dadaists in graduate school, I thought immediately of the Marx Brothers, because Dadaism was intentionally subversive and anarchic. It was born out of the anger and frustration over WWI and its causes, and it was designed to ridicule artistic traditions, moral conventions, and social institutions. In cafes and theaters, Dadaists dressed in ridiculous costumes, uttered meaningless noises, or performed poetry based on puns, nonsequiturs, and the interplay of words. Visual artists created collages and sculptures that reflected Freud’s and Jung’s ideas on the subconscious. After the war, the Surrealists picked up where the Dadaists left off, though their perspective was less nihilistic and they were more interested in tapping into the subconscious for their imagery. Surrealism is really about the irrational juxtaposition of recognizable images. Normal, everyday objects lose their identity or meaning because they have been taken out familiar contexts, or because they are depicted as warped or decayed. The imagery can be disturbing, provocative, and/or humorous. The artist whose work came to define Surrealism, at least for the mainstream public, was Salvador Dali, and Dali may have been the Marx Brothers’ biggest fan.
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DALI CREATED THIS HARP, WHICH IS CONSIDERED A SURREALIST SCULPTURE, FOR HARPO.
Dali, who cowrote two experimental films with Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, loved the cinema. He not only watched experimental art films made by his fellow artists, but he adored Hollywood movies. Dali’s three favorite Hollywood figures, whom he called the movie industry’s best surrealists, were Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, and Harpo Marx.
Dali and Harpo cultivated a friendship. In the summer of 1936, when Harpo visited Europe, Dali made a special trip to Paris to meet him. Evidently inspired by the comedian, the surrealist attended London’s International Surrealist Exhibition that fall and gave the keynote address, titled “Paranoia, the Pre-Raphaelites, Harpo Marx, and Phantoms.” Dali delivered the speech dressed in a deep-sea diving suit with plastic hands glued to the torso and a dagger tucked in the belt. Flanked by two Russian wolfhounds, he entered the venue holding a pool cue. That Christmas, he sent Harpo a surrealist harp. The instrument was strung with barbed wire, with spoons and forks as tuning knobs. Harpo took a photo of himself “playing” the harp with bandaged hands, as though he had been practicing on this harp and the barbed wire had hacked up his fingers. He sent the gag photo to Dali as a gesture of appreciation and invited him to drop by if the artist were ever in California.
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PORTRAIT OF GROUCHO AS THE SHIVA OF BIG BUSINESS BY DALI
Two months later, Dali arrived in Hollywood. Dali would later claim that when he dropped by Harpo’s house, the comedian pulled quite a stunt in order to astonish him. Harpo greeted him in his garden completely nude except for a crown of roses. The garden was filled with harps, with swans strolling about the grounds. Harpo began petting one of the swans, then picked up a mini statue of the Venus de Milo carved from cheese to feed to the bird. Knowing Dali’s fondness for mythmaking, I am not completely convinced this happened. The nudity is believable: Once, when producer Irving Thalberg kept the Marxes waiting too long in his office, he opened the door to find the four brothers naked on the floor, roasting potatoes over an open fire. But, the statue made of cheese seems a bit over the top.
The two unlikely friends collaborated on a script for a Marx Brothers vehicle, with the idea that Dali would make an appearance, too. Titled Giraffes on Horseback Salad, the script included scenes in which burning giraffes wear gas masks, bicyclists race around with loaves of bread on their heads, and Harpo tries to catch dwarfs with a butterfly net. The process of working together was not easy, because Dali didn’t speak English and Harpo did not speak French. Harpo communicated in German with Gala, Dali’s wife, and she translated his thoughts into French, and vice versa. Still, it must have been fun for the two creative geniuses to collaborate, though the script didn’t have a chance to become a Hollywood film simply because it was conceived completely outside the studio system. And, as Groucho noted, it wasn’t funny. But, I don’t think Dali cared if it was filmable or not, because tapping into his imagination or subconscious for ideas and images meant as much as the final product—part of the legacy of the Dadaists. And, to collaborate with Harpo, someone he admired a great deal, was an end goal in itself. As Groucho recalled, “Dali was in love with my brother—in a nice way.”
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ONE OF DALI’S SKETCHES FOR ‘GIRAFFES ON HORSEBACK SALAD’
On a tour of Paramount studios with Harpo, the pair ran Dali’s old friend, composer George Antheil, who was working on the score for The Plainsman, Cecil B. DeMille’s latest project. Within a few minutes, DeMille himself appeared, much to the artist’s delight. Legend has it that he got down on all fours and bowed down to DeMille, calling him “the greatest surrealist.” Why would Dali be so interested in DeMille’s films? Think about the sensationalist imagery of some of C.B.’s biblical epics, and it’s not hard to understand his fascination. The artist was particularly fond of Sign of the Cross in which Claudette Colbert bathed in the milk of asses and ferocious crocodiles devoured Christians.
However, comedy was Dali’s genre of choice, and the films of the Marx Brothers were his favorites. He called Animal Crackers the “summit of the evolution of comic cinema.” As a surrealist, Dali was drawn to the irrational mix of images, which was at the core of Harpo’s shtick as a comedian. In Animal Crackers, when Chico asks for a “flash,” meaning a flashlight, Harpo pulls a ridiculous array of items from the pockets of his trademark trench coat, including a fish, a flask, a flush (as in poker), and a flute. Out of their normal context, these items lose their original meaning. The wordplay at the core of this gag is clever, because it deconstructs language. Also, Chico’s poor enunciation creates aural incongruity. This is the type of word play associated with Dadaists and Surrealists. In other comedies, Harpo pulls a variety of threatening or dangerous items from his coat—a hot cup of coffee, a candle lit at both ends, a lighted blow torch. The humor is based on the incongruity of having something like a hot cup of coffee inside a coat, but the gag also changes the context for the coffee. Rather than a welcome way to start the day, the coffee is now a potential hazard. Again, these ideas are at the core of surrealism and prompt us to think about the nature of humor and the power of language.
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THE BROTHERS TEND TO DISRUPT POMPOUS OCCASIONS IN MANSIONS OR HOTELS, REDUCING THEM TO ANARCHY. DALI AND HIS COLLEAGUES APPRECIATED THE DEFLATING OF UPPER CLASS TRAPPINGS AND TRADITIONS.
Dali did not speak sufficient English to understand Groucho’s puns or Chico’s butchering of the English language in the films of the Marx Brothers, which is probably why he fixated on Harpo. However, other artists and intellectuals did understand and admire Groucho and Chico. The wordplay at the heart of their humor was comparable to Dadaist and Surrealist interests in deconstructing language, altering the meaning of ordinary objects by changing the context, and tearing a hole in the illusion of reality that was the foundation for traditional art. In that regard, Groucho’s puns and nonsequiturs were a Dadaist’s dream. From Duck Soup, Rufus T. Firefly tries to woo Mrs. Teasdale with this monologue: “Here are the plans of war. They’re as valuable as your life. And that’s putting them pretty cheap. Watch them like a cat watched her kittens. Have you ever had kittens? No, of course not, you’re too busy running around playing bridge. Can’t you see what I’m trying to tell you, I love you.” In Animal Crackers, Groucho talks directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall: “Pardon me while I have a strange interlude,” he says, adopting an ultra-serious face. The line is also a reference to the 1928 Eugene O’Neill play, which became famous for its use of soliloquy in which the characters speak aloud their inner thoughts as asides. Groucho’s joke not only shatters the film’s illusion of reality but is also self-reflexive, poking fun at O’Neill’s play by emulating its trademark technique. If these techniques were used in drama, they would have been considered experimental.
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CHICO LOOKS FOR A ‘FLASH,’ AND HARPO PRODUCES A FISH FROM HIS COAT.
Everyone has heard the famous joke from Animal Crackers, “This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” In addition to the wordplay, in which the second sentence changes the denotative meaning of the first, the image of an elephant in pajamas is irrational—like bicyclists with loaves of bread on their heads, or burning giraffes with gas masks.
On Friday, as you watch the films of the Marx Brothers, try to pick out the visual gags, puns, or nonsequiturs that Dali might have liked. In other words, don’t think of them as Hollywood movies but as works of Dadaist or Surrealist art.