Today is the anniversary of the day in 1977 when the world lost Groucho Marx. Shelly Goldstein and I were talking today about how his passing didn't get the attention it deserved, coming only three days after the death of Elvis Presley. I remember a hastily-assembled special on ABC hosted by Dick Cavett…and that was about it. Not nearly enough reverence was shown for a man who many of us felt was as important to American culture as Elvis…and maybe more so.
Here's a Groucho appearance you may not have seen. It came late in his career but before the strokes and other ailments that affected his performing and made his last few times in front of audiences rather sad. It's an episode of The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, a little-known TV series produced in the early seventies as some sort of co-production of American and British talent. Larry Gelbart, who was then living in the U.K., was one of its producers.
Aired briefly on ABC, it looked a little like Monty Python's Flying Circus because of animation inserts made by Terry Gilliam, but portions of it looked like The Dean Martin Show because that program's producer Greg Garrison, who I mentioned in the previous post here, took control of The Comedy Machine at some point. He did serious editing on the shows, including but not limited to cutting it from an hour to a half-hour and adding in segments with stand-up comedians that were taped for Dean's show on NBC.
Mr. Feldman was, as you might imagine, very unhappy at what was done and at the way ABC dumped the series so quickly. I believe what we have here is an episode as aired on British television — one on which Mr. Garrison never laid a finger. It's missing the music and dance numbers but those were trimmed out by the gent who posted it to YouTube.
I know more about this series but not a lot more. What I do know, I posted here some time ago. Now I'm just going to introduce this episode which has several segments in it with Groucho.
In case you don't stay around for the end credits, they say this episode was written by Chris Allen, Rudy DeLuca, Marty Feldman, Larry Gelbart, Barry Levinson and Spike Milligan, with additional material by John Cleese and Graham Chapman. I believe the Cleese and Chapman credits are because the series reused material from earlier shows they'd done with Feldman. Either way, that's a pretty impressive writing staff…and Milligan was in the show, as well.
For some time now, we've heard that the original uncut episodes were going to be released as a DVD set in the U.K. but I don't believe that's happened. So here is this episode which you can watch in full — or if you just want to see Groucho's spots, click here, here and here. I think I got them all…