This runs 47 minutes so you might not want to watch all of it…but you might want to watch a little.
In the 1940's, Groucho Marx and his friend Norman Krasna wrote a play called Time for Elizabeth. Apparently when they started on it, Groucho had in mind to star in it himself. That was when he was worried about having or not having future employment. By the time they finished it, Groucho was starring weekly on radio in You Bet Your Life, which paid a lot better to do one show a week than the play would have earned him to do eight. He also was tethered to Los Angeles where his game show was produced…so he had a good excuse not to star in the play he co-authored.
It was staged without him…with Otto Kruger in the lead. It opened at the Fulton Theater in New York on September 27, 1948, where it lasted for a whopping eight performances, probably due to its tepid reviews. Some suggested Mr. Kruger had committed the unpardonable sin of not being Groucho Marx; that the character's lines would have sounded right for Groucho but were wrong for Otto. Still, there was a movie sale — reported as $500,000, which sounds awfully high to me for a show that closed so rapidly. There was talk of Groucho starring in the movie but no such film was ever made.
He did tour in it a few times during vacations from You Bet Your Life. Reportedly, he took liberties with his own script, broke character often to chat with the audience, and at the end of each performance delivered a long curtain speech that most audiences preferred to the preceding play. But he only did it once on camera — in an abridged version that ran on April 24, 1964 with his then-wife, Eden Hartford, in a small role. It was an episode of the anthology series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, and that's the video we have for you today. It's not wonderful but it is Groucho and he's pretty funny at times…
