![]() Thus, I would rather READ A BOOK ABOUT THE MARX BROTHERS THAN WATCH THIS MOVIE! A little irony? I’m with Harpo on this one The Marx Brothers are said to have become a comedy act when their audience abandoned their singing performance in Nagadoches, Texas in order to go outside on the street and look at a mule. The teenage Groucho was stranded in Cripple Creek, Colorado by his drag queen vaudeville partner and forced to get a job driving a horse drawn milk wagon, even though he knew nothing about horses. Shouldn’t Harpo play the harp in some Victorian parlor, instead of a loom on an Indian reservation, which is just weird without being funny? And you know what? The Marx Brothers had actually BEEN to the wild west, and their real life exploits are vastly better than anything in this movie. Clearly that’s the best way to make use of the greatest comedian of the twentieth century. Fields got to be in My Little Chickadee. But, nah, in this film, once again he’s just some bottom feeder lawyer who gets thrown down the stairs. ![]() Best of all, BOTH a con man and sheriff simultaneously, as W.C. Better yet, the inexplicable mayor or sheriff of the town. I’d love to see him as a successful con man or a medicine show impresario in the old west. People usually cite the opening scene, in which Chico swindles Groucho yet again as one of the movie’s halfway decent scenes. Actually, about ten steps down.Įxcept for maybe about ten or 20 lines there’s not a moment in this film, or an aspect of this film I wouldn’t change 100%. Go West seems like their handlers were watching what all the other comedians were doing and imitating it. because EVERY COMEDIAN ON EARTH has made a western comedy, which is probably the best of all reasons why the Marx Brothers shouldn’t do it, being as they are unlike every other comedy team. This is a film that could and should star any of those other teams. After all, these are not the Ritz Brothers, nor are they the Three Stooges, nor Abbott and Costello nor even Laurel and Hardy. ![]() This gesture demonstrates such a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Marx Brothers characters are all about that it amounts to cinematic malpractice. So much about it is so wrong, right from the film’s very first frames with their apologetic title about how “stupid” the boys are. Like “The Cinderella Girl,” the film is oft-forgotten and considered lost.A strong case can be made for Go West (1940) being the worst Marx Brothers film of all. Some time later, in 1921, the Marx Brothers made their first film - the silent and unreleased “Humor Risk,” with a script by Swerling. The flu epidemic wouldn’t end until December 1920. ![]() Planning their next move, the quartet retired to the family farm in La Grange, IL., Stefan Kanfer wrote in “Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx.” By November 1918 the war ended and the brothers were once more playing packed houses with a show called “N’ Everything” - a (very) lightly rewritten version of their old “Home Again.” It did, however, produce at least one notable song: “Sailin’ Away on the Henry Clay.” It does appear that the show, once it moved from Grand Rapids to Benton Harbor, Mich. We don’t know what role Zeppo was playing - details on the plot, which local notices from the time describe as “a love story of a couple of street singers,” are hard to come by. Gummo had just left for the army, and Zeppo was added to the roster as a replacement, a permutation that, with few exceptions, would become the norm for the group going forward. But they were in something of a different arrangement than usual. ![]() The brothers, working with writer Jo Swerling (who went on to co-write “Gone with the Wind” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”), lyricist Gus Kahn and composer Egbert van Alstyne, were by then hugely successful on the road, having toured their show “Home Again” for nearly three years. Groucho later wrote of the production that “Chico hired six dancers out of a five-and-dime store, and gave them each ten dollars. This meant that even a sold out house was sparse, which made it tough for the brothers to break even.Īdding to their problems was a subpar out-of-town ensemble. That audience, it bears mentioning, occupied every other seat in every other row due to health regulations. ![]()
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