Ian Thomson

What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers

On the eve of a BFI season of Marx Bros films, Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers

‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ Groucho Marx wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1961 on receiving from him a signed studio portrait. The Missouri-born Eliot was the Marx Brothers’ devoted fan; three years later, in June 1964, Groucho called on the 75-year-old poet at his home in London. Eliot was interested in the Marx Brothers’ first undisputed film masterpiece, Animal Crackers (1930), while Groucho wanted only to quote from ‘The Waste Land’; however, the men agreed that they shared a love of cats and fine cigars.

Winston Churchill was another who admired the Marxes and their deliciously mad repartee. During an air attack on London in May 1941 he found himself watching Monkey Business (1931), and was ‘glad of the diversion’. The Marx Brothers season this month at the British Film Institute includes Monkey Business as well as the other, glorious Paramount productions Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). The ever-popular MGM extravaganzas of the mid-1930s, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, are also billed, along with a handful of lesser-known Broadway transfers.

Corny as a whoopee cushion, Marxian wit (‘Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?’) borrowed from Broadway vaudeville but was inseparable from Jewish émigré culture. The five brothers, Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo, were born in turn-of-the-century New York City to Jewish immigrant parents. Harpo Marx had travelled through Hitler’s newly anti-Semitic Germany in 1933 on his way to perform in Soviet Russia, and was disturbed by the sight of shop windows daubed with ‘Jude’. Duck Soup, though not overtly political, features a dangerously unhinged dictator in the guise of Groucho’s Rufus T. Firefly. ‘We stand ’em up against the wall and pop goes the weasel!’ he sings while brandishing a machinegun-like parasol. The fate of European Jewry had yet to be decided in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor.

The brothers had all been pushed into Broadway by their German-born mother, Minnie Marx, who worked as a seamstress on New York’s Upper East Side before becoming her sons’ manager and booking agent.

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