Music Box booker Brian Andreotti says that of all the classic comedians, the Marx Brothers are the theater’s biggest draw. From Sunday, December 25, through Saturday, December 31, the venue (3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604) will screen six features tracing the brothers’ brilliant career from 1931, when they arrived in Hollywood after two successful film adaptations of their Broadway shows, through 1938, when they lost their way. One ticket lets you watch any two movies that are screening back-to-back, so if you need to get away from your crazy family, you can kill several hours with theirs.
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In a world glutted with comedy programming the Marx Brothers’ best work is still astonishing for its velocity, aggression, and bursts of surrealism. Groucho was widely acknowledged as the best verbal comic in the business (even Bob Hope admitted it), and his older brother Harpo ranked with the great silent-movie comedians as a persona and gagman. Holding these two disparate talents together was Chico, the eldest, whose ethnic Italian character fluctuated between extreme cunning and epic stupidity. Their students are legion, but none could get his arms around the whole package: Mel Brooks captured their anarchy but never their sophistication, Woody Allen equaled their literacy but never their jubilance, and the Farrelly brothers, for all their taboo-smashing gusto, can’t compete with a fraternal unit that was consistently smart and smarter.
After Duck Soup flopped, Paramount dumped the Marx Brothers, Zeppo quit the act, Groucho tried his hand at straight acting, and Harpo toured the Soviet Union (becoming a real-life spy when the U.S. ambassador enlisted him to smuggle a letter to New York). Chico landed them a deal with MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg, who resuscitated their careers, but any radical politics had to be checked at the studio gate: Thalberg had just finished making a series of fake newsreels that smeared Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair, and director Sam Wood would later help launch the red-baiting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. A Night at the Opera (1935, 92 min.) is a more conventional but consistently charming entertainment, with excellent comic scenes set off by a straight plot, romantic interludes, and polished musical numbers (Sun-Mon 12/25-12/26, 3:30 and 7:10 PM). A Day at the Races (1937, 111 min.), completed after Thalberg’s untimely death, follows the same reliable formula, though it’s overlong and sometimes grating, particularly Harpo’s awful musical romp with some shucking-and-jiving stable hands (Tue 12/27, 3:20 and 7:10 PM).
