by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The
Cocoanuts, produced at Paramount’s
Astoria studio in Queens, New York in 1929 and starring the Four Marx Brothers
(as they were originally billed until Zeppo Marx dropped out of the act) in a
film version of their hit 1925 stage musical, produced by Sam H. Harris (George
M. Cohan’s former partner and, according to Marx Brothers biographer Joe
Adamson, so terminally kind that the nastiest thing anyone could remember him
saying about anybody was when he responded to the change of government in
Germany in early 1933 with, “Hitler is not a nice fellow”) and written by
George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Apparently it was so extensively rewritten by the Marx Brothers, who according to some
accounts were so fond of improvising and keeping their funniest improvisations
in the script that when Kaufman and Ryskind went to see The Cocoanuts midway through its original run, Kaufman turned to
Ryskind during the second act and said, “Hey, I think I just heard one of our
original lines.” (According to other accounts, the Marx Brothers hated improvising and wanted their scripts in set form before they ever let the
material near a paying audience or a movie camera. That was one reason that
before A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races were filmed, they toured the shows so they could perform the key comedy
scenes before live audiences and find out literally from the horses’ mouths what people would — and
wouldn’t — think was funny.)
In his 1971 book about the Marx Brothers, Paul Zimmerman
said that aside from the Marxes’ participation, The Cocoanuts was historically important as one of the few
filmed records of a 1920’s Broadway show, complete with stilted song-and-dance
numbers and awkward alternations between songs, dances, comic scenes and plot
exposition. Later Richard Barrios said in his book on early musicals that that
was so much nonsense: he argued that audiences in 1929 who went to see The
Cocoanuts went for the same reasons
anyone would want to see it today: to laugh at the Marx Brothers. The
Cocoanuts certainly has some of the
stage-bound flavor of early musicals; it begins with a big production number
with a chorus singing the praises of “Florida by the Sea,” as Irving Berlin’s
lyric has it — the show was a satire of the mid-1920’s Florida land boom, a
classic “bubble” in which Northern promoters bought huge tracts of Florida real
estate, promising buyers year-round sunshine and stable climates — and then a
big hurricane hit, bursting the bubble and leaving hundreds of investors broke.
The film casts Groucho as Mr. Hammer (no first name), owner of the Cocoanut
Beach hotel and a lot of the land around it, which he’s trying to sell so
Cocoanut Beach can become the next great Florida development and make him and
his investors lots of money. Only no investors materialize — just Chico and
Harpo (billed under their own names because the character names they had in the
stage production, particular Chico’s billing as “Willy the Wop,” were too
racially insensitive even for 1929), who arrive at the Cocoanut Beach Hotel
penniless and with an empty suitcase. “Oh, that’s all right,” Chico says when
Groucho points out his suitcase is empty. “We fill it up before we leave.” By
the time they made this movie the Marx Brothers were already in their 30’s and
had had at least two decades of success behind them, first on the vaudeville
circuit (where they had started out as a musical act but drifted into comedy
because comedians were paid more) and then on Broadway in the 1924 revue I’ll
Say She Is (most of which is lost,
but the famous sequence with Groucho as Napoleon bidding goodbye to Josephine
as he heads off into battle was recorded years later and filmed as an animated
cartoon with Groucho voicing his original role), The Cocoanuts and the follow-up, Animal Crackers, also by Kaufman and Ryskind and also filmed by
Paramount in New York.
The Marxes were appearing in Animal Crackers by night and filming The Cocoanuts by day, and they make a few audible slips in their
dialogue — the kinds that often creep into the performances of stage actors who
have been playing the same damned script way too often — which the film’s two
directors, Robert Florey and Joseph Santley, let slip and didn’t bother to
retake. There are some O.K. songs by Irving Berlin — The Cocoanuts became famous as the only show Berlin ever worked
on that didn’t generate at least one hit song for him; for the movie he added a
big ballad, “When My Dreams Come True,” for romantic leads Mary Eaton (a
protégée of Florenz Ziegfeld — he was grooming her to replace Marilyn Miller
and that’s shown in her big number, “Monkey-Doodle-Doo,” a song Berlin wrote in
the mold of his earlier “Shaking the Blues Away” and inserted a topical
reference to monkey-gland treatments, which were supposed to rejuvenate people,
doing a dance with the Gamby-Hale Ballet Girls and Allan K. Foster Girls very much in the Miller manner) and Oscar Shaw, but it
didn’t become a hit either. The Cocoanuts suffers from its stage-bound production — even the opening shots of the
Florida beaches are clearly studio interiors with painted backdrops
representing sea and sky — and from musical interludes that are filmed rather
dully, though at least co-director Santley (who seems to have been detailed to
handle the musical numbers while Florey directed the plot and comedy scenes)
uses some three-quarter views of the chorus line, rides a crane camera and in
one scene even shoots down at the Gamby-Hale Ballet Girls from overhead and
allows them to form a kaleidoscope formation. (This is usually associated with
Busby Berkeley but there are at least three movies made before 1930, when
Berkeley made his first film, Whoopee, that feature overhead kaleidoscope shots of choristers: this one,
Wheeler and Woolsey’s Rio Rita and Albertina Rasch’s two-strip Technicolor ballets in the 1929 MGM
flop Lord Byron of Broadway.)
What does hold up about The
Cocoanuts are, you guessed it, the
Marx Brothers comedy sequences, which to some extent set the template for the
entire rest of their career: the comic monologues by Groucho (who kicks off the
auction of Cocoanut Beach lots by saying, “Florida, folks, land of perpetual
sunshine. Let’s get the auction started before we have a tornado”), the
confrontations between Groucho and Chico (including the famous “Why a duck?”
sequence in which Groucho hires Chico to be a shill at his auction and bid the
prices up, only when Groucho makes the mistake of telling Chico that a viaduct
will be built across the property, Chico says, “All right, why-a-duck?,” and
they riff on that hilariously for what seems like 15 minutes) and the demonic
savagery of Harpo. It’s also somewhat ironic that Charles and I were watching The
Cocoanuts just after I’d been
commenting on this blog about the risks of hiring a relatively new director with
a hot independent film just out and entrusting them with a big-budget studio
blockbuster — like Gareth Edwards with the 2014 Godzilla remake and Josh Trank with the latest reboot of Fantastic
Four — when something like that
happened here. Robert Florey was an assistant director from France who had just
jolted Hollywood with an indie short called The Life and Death of 9413 — A
Hollywood Extra, and for the unexpected
success of that film he was rewarded with the co-director assignment on The
Cocoanuts. Only he didn’t find the
Marx Brothers, except for Harpo, all that funny; he pretty much left Groucho
and Chico to their own devices but worked on new silent gags for Harpo,
including the marvelous scene in the lobby of the Cocoanut Manor Hotel in which
Harpo drinks the ink out of the inkwells and then eats the desk telephone. (The
ink was really Coca-Cola and the phone was made of chocolate.)
The Cocoanuts has been faulted not only for the staginess when
the Marxes aren’t on the screen and the oddly belligerent characterizations
they assume when they are (both Groucho and Harpo are considerably nastier here than they were in
their later movies), but the Marxes’ scenes are hilarious and not only hold up
beautifully but set the basic tropes they’d refine and make even funnier in
their later films. Also present at the creation, as it were — The Cocoanuts was the Marxes’ first feature, unless you count a
1918 silent called Humorisk which they produced independently with their own money and then pulled
from release when their one public showing took place at the epicenter of the
1918-19 flu epidemic in New York — was Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Potter, the only
hotel guest who actually has money, whom of course Groucho is romancing in his
always twisted way (which reaches its high point when Groucho invites her to
make love to him outdoors under a full moon: “I can see it now: you and the
moon. You wear a necktie so I’ll know you”) and whose daughter Polly (Mary
Eaton) is caught between two suitors. One is Bob Adams (Oscar Shaw), the poor
but honest guy — a hotel clerk with ambitions to be an architect and
participate in a major Florda remodeling project; he’s the one Polly likes best
but the one her mom wants her to marry is scapegrace Harvey Yates (Cyril Ring)
because he’s “one of the Boston Yates,” even though he’s a slimeball, he has
another girlfriend on the side — Penelope, played by Kay Francis in her film
debut and showing herself ready for biggers and betters — and since he’s broke
and doesn’t want to wait around to marry Polly Potter and inherit the Potter
millions, he conceives the idea of stealing Mrs. Potter’s diamond necklace and
framing Adams for the crime. Of course, it all turns out right in the end —
Groucho attracts an out-of-town buyer who’s interested in taking over all of
Cocoanut Beach and developing it; Bob Adams gets not only Polly Potter but the
job of designing the new development; and Harvey Yates and Penelope get waltzed
off into jail — but it’s certainly a lot of fun getting there.
The Cocoanuts is an uneven movie (though, aside from the great
comedy sequences, the “Monkey-Doodle-Doo” number is fun and entertaining)
that’s become even more uneven from the shabby condition in which it’s been
preserved: though the version we were watching (from the MCA Universal boxed
set of all five Marx Brothers’ movies for Paramount, which I want to run in
alternation with the W. C. Fields and Mae West boxes to recreate the marvelous
comedy lineup I remember from my teen days watching Channel 36, a San José station
that for some reason came in excellently in Marin County when I was growing up
and where I saw a lot of
classic films) is quite the best-looking one I’ve ever seen, there are still
startling gaps in the photographic quality from scene to scene. The reason is
that, though The Cocoanuts was a major hit on its initial release, no one print survived complete.
The version we have was pieced together in the 1950’s (either just before or
just after MCA’s TV subsidiary, Revue Productions, bought the rights to virtually
all Paramount’s output from 1929 to 1949 for TV showings, and later assigned
the films to Universal when MCA absorbed Universal in 1962) from three partial
prints, and the image quality takes some rather startling changes, particularly
the sudden drop in clarity and definition just before “Monkey-Doodle-Doo.”
Still, The Cocoanuts is
nicely done and quite entertaining — the “Why a duck?” sequence alone would
make the film worth watching — even though just about everything in it was
refined and honed, and made sharper and funnier, in their later films.
