|
|
 |
| |
Groucho: subversive |
Hurrah for Captain Spaulding
IT wasn’t until the Vietnam War protests in the 1970s that audiences began to realise that subverting America’s war-mongering policies had been the Marx Brothers’ game in Duck Soup (1933), their fifth film.
Eventually it filtered through that without Groucho, Chico and Harpo, Joseph Heller’s surreally explosive 1961 novel Catch 22 would never have caught on in the way it did.
Stefan Kanfer in his introduction to The Essential Groucho also neglects to mention Groucho’s influence on two very contrasting protesting poets – Alan Ginsberg, with his Buddhist bells and chanting, and Robert Bly, with his bible of the mythopoetic men’s movement and unlikely bestseller, Iron John: A Book About Men.
Stefan does mention that in 1986 Woody Allen paid tribute to Groucho in Hannah and Her Sisters when his suicidal hero, watching Groucho slapstick his way through Duck Soup, realises that laughter is the most powerful therapy in the whole world, and more than sufficient reason to continue living through thin and thick.
Perhaps Groucho’s greatest claim to immortality is his confrontations with Margaret Dumont, the wealthy hypochondriac Mrs Emily Upjohn in A Day At The Races (1937). No matter that she plays the same character in every film under different names. She never stands a chance whenever Groucho is sending her up rotten, which is in most of the films.
Get hold of The Groucho Letters (1967) in which TS Eliot, the poet, says to Groucho: “Your coming to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street. Obviously I am now someone of importance.”
Groucho said to his brother Gummo before meeting his celebrated pen pal TS Eliot in 1964: “During the week I had read Murder in the Cathedral twice, The Waste Land three times, and just in case of a conversational bottleneck, I brushed up on King Lear...That, too, failed to bowl over the poet. He seemed more interested in discussing Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera.”
Forget all of Groucho’s literary aspirations, real and imaginary. Go straight to your nearest video shop and hire as many of the Marx Brother films on DVD as you can afford. Laughter and music are the most powerful therapies of all. There is no substitute for either.
John Horder
•
 |
| |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
