Monkey Business

Norman Z. McLeod’s Monkey Business (1931) occupies an intriguing and important place in the evolution of American screen comedy. Released by Paramount, this brisk 78-minute confection transports the Marx Brothers from the vaudeville and theatrical traditions that had nurtured their anarchic talents into a more resolutely cinematic realm of visual gags, verbal absurdity, physical mayhem and comic improvisation. The film is loose, episodic and, at times, gloriously chaotic; yet it is precisely this looseness that liberates the Marx Brothers to behave with something approaching complete comic impunity.

The premise is disarmingly simple. The four Marx Brothers are stowaways aboard an ocean liner bound for America. They possess neither tickets nor legitimate identities, and exhibit even less inclination to comply with the rules that govern respectable passengers. Their principal objective is therefore not to reach their destination so much as to avoid being apprehended by the ship’s officers. What follows provides the film with its first, and arguably most inspired, stretch of comedy: the brothers creeping furtively through the ship, concealing themselves in improbable places, assuming makeshift identities and generating mayhem wherever their itinerant presence is detected.

Their escapades eventually become entangled with the machinations of two rival gangsters, Big Joe Helton, played by Rockliffe Fellowes, and Alky Briggs, played by Harry Woods. Zeppo becomes romantically involved with Mary Helton (Ruth Hall), while Groucho develops his customary and altogether incorrigible fascination with Briggs’s wife, Lucille, played with considerable comic verve by Thelma Todd. The narrative subsequently migrates from the confines of the ship into the gangsters’ world, bringing with it the obligatory ingredients of kidnapping and rescue.

But the plot, in truth, is almost beside the point. The Marx Brothers were never particularly interested in the tyranny of conventional narrative logic. Their films employ stories rather as one might employ a clothesline: something on which to hang the jokes. Monkey Business understands this principle instinctively. The narrative exists not to govern the comedy but to provide it with something to overthrow.

Groucho Marx is, inevitably, the dominant presence. His comedy is not merely a matter of delivering jokes; it is an entire philosophy of social insolence. Groucho enters respectable environments and proceeds almost immediately to dismantle their assumptions. Authority, wealth, romance, morality, etiquette and social hierarchy are not institutions to be respected but targets waiting to be punctured. His essential persona is that of the outsider who refuses to acknowledge that the rules governing everyone else have any jurisdiction over him.

His encounters with Thelma Todd are among the film’s most enjoyable episodes. Todd was one of the relatively few performers capable of matching Groucho’s manic verbal energy without being consumed by it. Their scenes possess an irresistible amalgam of flirtation, aggression and absurdity. Groucho does not court women in the conventional Hollywood fashion; he treats romance itself as another arena for verbal combat. Todd, fortunately, is more than capable of returning fire. Their chemistry gives these exchanges a vitality that remains striking.

If Groucho embodies verbal anarchy, Harpo represents its physical counterpart. He requires no dialogue because his entire body functions as a comic instrument. His genius lies partly in his ability to transform the most mundane object into an agent of disruption. A musical instrument, an item of clothing, a door, a piece of furniture—or, indeed, another person’s possessions—can abruptly be absorbed into Harpo’s private universe of mischief. Yet what makes his behaviour especially endearing is the curious innocence beneath the destruction. Harpo is mischievous rather than malicious, a child let loose in a world constructed for adults who take themselves far too seriously.

Chico contributes yet another species of anarchy. Where Groucho weaponises language, Chico appears determined to destabilise it. His malapropisms, deliberate misunderstandings and mock-Italian accent create a comic universe in which communication itself becomes an unreliable enterprise. He is especially effective when paired with Groucho. Their exchanges resemble a musical duet: Groucho introduces an idea, Chico misunderstands it, Groucho responds, Chico misunderstands the response, and the conversation spirals inexorably into nonsense. Yet it is nonsense governed by rhythm and timing. One of the enduring secrets of Marx Brothers comedy is that what appears spontaneous is, in fact, executed with astonishing precision.

Modern audiences can sometimes overlook Zeppo Marx, largely because his brothers possess personalities so flamboyant that his relative normality seems almost colourless by comparison. Yet Monkey Business demonstrates why he was an essential component of the quartet. Zeppo is the comparatively conventional young man—the romantic lead and the bridge between the anarchic Marxian universe and the requirements of a recognisably Hollywood narrative. His romance with Ruth Hall supplies the film with its conventional emotional thread. Zeppo was never the comic force that Groucho, Harpo and Chico were, but that was precisely his function. He could inhabit the story while his brothers gleefully proceeded to demolish it around him.

One of the film’s greatest assets is Thelma Todd, who plays Lucille Briggs with an appealing combination of glamour, intelligence and comic toughness. She is emphatically not merely a romantic ornament. Todd possesses sufficient presence to withstand Groucho’s verbal onslaught and sufficient wit to return it with interest. Their encounters consequently acquire a comic equality that makes them considerably more entertaining than the conventional male-dominant romantic exchanges of the period.

For me, however, the strongest portion of Monkey Business is its first half. The ocean liner proves an almost ideal laboratory for Marx Brothers anarchy. There are corridors through which to flee, cabins in which to hide, officers from whom to evade capture, passengers to deceive and formal occasions to disrupt. More importantly, the brothers find themselves as outsiders within a highly organised and rigidly hierarchical world. That contrast is fundamental to their comedy. The greater the social order, the greater the pleasure of watching the Marx Brothers dismantle it.

Norman Z. McLeod deserves considerable credit for understanding the peculiar mechanics of this form of comedy. His direction is particularly effective during the physical sequences. The ship’s corridors become a kind of comic labyrinth through which the brothers move with extraordinary velocity. McLeod generally allows the visual gag sufficient time to unfold rather than chopping it into a succession of nervous cuts. This matters because Marx Brothers comedy depends upon timing as much as upon invention. Cut too rapidly and the gag loses its rhythm; hold the shot too long and its energy evaporates. McLeod usually locates the elusive middle ground between the two.

Beneath all the apparent frivolity, moreover, lies something rather more interesting. Marx Brothers comedy repeatedly poses a deceptively simple question: what happens when an individual refuses to behave according to society’s expectations? The answer, in their universe, is chaos—but chaos of an exuberantly liberating variety. Groucho refuses to respect authority. Harpo refuses to respect language. Chico refuses to respect logic. Zeppo, by contrast, remains tethered to conventional romance. Together they constitute a peculiar comic democracy in which every established rule is negotiable and every solemn convention is liable to ridicule.

Ninety-five years after its release, much of Monkey Business remains remarkably accessible. The hairstyles and costumes are unmistakably of their period; the ocean liner and its social conventions belong to a vanished world; and some of the references inevitably require a degree of historical familiarity. Yet the fundamental comic impulses remain wonderfully universal: evading authority, pretending to be someone one is not, becoming ensnared in an absurd lie, misunderstanding language, embarrassing respectable people and transforming an ordinary situation into utter pandemonium.

Monkey Business is therefore not a film one watches primarily for its story. It is, rather, a film one watches for the gleeful destruction of story. McLeod provides the framework, but the Marx Brothers cheerfully proceed to dismantle it. Groucho supplies the razor-edged verbal anarchy; Harpo, the anarchic physical poetry; Chico, the deliciously destabilising linguistic confusion; and Zeppo, the necessary tether to conventional Hollywood narrative.

The film is at its most exhilarating when the plot ceases to matter and the brothers are simply permitted to be the Marx Brothers. There is something profoundly liberating in watching them refuse to behave, refuse to defer to convention and, above all, refuse to take the world with the solemnity with which the world takes itself. In 1931, amid the economic desolation and social uncertainty of the Great Depression, such irreverence must have possessed an especially intoxicating appeal. Nearly a century later, its potency has scarcely diminished.

For all its episodic construction and occasional narrative incoherence, Monkey Business remains a delightful testament to the emancipatory possibilities of comedy: a film in which order exists principally to be violated, authority chiefly to be mocked, and respectability to be regarded as an invitation to mischief. The Marx Brothers do not merely inhabit this world; they gleefully turn it upside down—and invite us to laugh at the spectacle.