In the previous item here, I made the simple, non-arguable statement that some people think Duck Soup is the best of the Marx Brothers movies and I stand by that: Some people do think that. You may think they are brain-dead morons who should be put up against a wall and executed for heresy but some people do think that.
Nevertheless, two separate e-mailers messaged me to express their outrage that I said "some" and not "all." The rhetoric of their missives would suggest to me that for these people, there are three incontrovertible, indisputable truths in the world and they are, not necessarily in the order of importance…
1. 2 + 2 = 4
2. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west
3. Duck Soup is the best Marx Brothers movie
One of them wrote me in an outrage a few months ago when I posted the following graphic even though I said "that any film on this list could easily swap positions with the one over it or the one under it."
This correspondent, ignoring the very real difference between "best" and "favorite" was upset on two fronts: (1) That I ranked one of the Marx Boys' M.G.M. films above any of the films they made for Paramount and (2) that I made the egregious factual error of not placing Duck Soup in its rightful unanimously-agreed-upon-except-for-stupid-me position of Number Uno. If we've learned nothing else from the Internet, it's that some people can be real dicks if you dare like something that they don't and vice-versa.
I also received a couple of messages insisting that Love Happy should not be consider a Marx Brothers Movie. Look: It's got Groucho in it, it's got Harpo in it, it's got Chico in it and the opening titles say "Starring the Marx Brothers." That oughta hold up in any court in this great land of ours.
But some people really love the five films the Brothers made for Paramount and abhor all the others. I love those first five but cannot discount the first two from M.G.M. and selected scenes from others that followed. While I loved the Marx Brothers from the time I was first aware of them, I didn't really love them until an evening in July of 1972.
My friend Rob and I attended and shared a room at Westercon 25, a science-fiction convention that was held June 30–July 4, 1972, at the Edgewater Hyatt House in Long Beach, CA. Like most of the s-f cons I attended, the proceedings had very little to do with science-fiction. I assume others do but the ones I went to were just multiple-day parties with sorta-like-minded people getting together at some unfortunate-to-have-us-there hotel. One evening, Rob and I played hooky from the con and drove just a few miles to the State Theater, located not far from Nu-Pike, a famous-then/gone-now amusement park in Long Beach.
They were showing a double-feature of those first two films that Groucho, Harpo and Chico made, sans Zeppo, for M.G.M.
In '72, long before the advent of home video and Turner Classic Movies, it was not easy to see those movies at all, let alone the right way. The right way was not watching them alone or with a couple of folks in your den. It was watching them with a big, raucous crowd on a big movie screen. This was the first time I saw those movies that way…and Rob, I and a maybe a thousand strangers laughed ourselves silly.
From start to finish. Every minute Allan Jones wasn't singing and even now and then when he was.
We laughed through the intermission too and there was a strong feeling in the place that went roughly like this: Where have these films been all our lives? Or maybe with some it was: Why doesn't some theater show them every week like this?
I cannot tell you how much love and laughter there was in the State that night. And even admitting the things that were right about the Paramount Marx Bros. movies and wrong about the M.G.M.s, I can't not love A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. The love for the former is greater than the love for the latter but I always think of them as one movie in two parts. Because of that evening.
Like Nu-Pike, the State Theater ain't there no more. It opened in 1920 as Loew's State Theatre and closed in the eighties. You can read the entire history of the place at this webpage and there are plenty of photos but I'll also offer you this one…
It's part of a frame grab from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Portions of the big chase scene near the end were shot in the streets of Long Beach and at one point, they go past the State and also past Nu-Pike. And you may not be able to make it out in this photo but one of the movies on the State's marquee is the version of Cape Fear which came out in 1962, the same year Mad World was shot. One of the stars of Cape Fear was Barrie Chase who, of course, was also one of the stars of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In fact, she's the last surviving cast member of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
And here's one last little trivia point which intrigues me…
The first Marx film for M.G.M., A Night at the Opera, was shepherded by Irving Thalberg, an uncredited but powerful producer for M.G.M. Thalberg was the man Groucho called "The only authentic genius I ever met in Hollywood." A Night at the Opera deviated from the template of the Paramount Marx films in several ways, most of them dictated by Thalberg.
There are many stories about a sneak preview that was held of the finished or nearly-finished film at a movie theater. If you read every book about the Marx Brothers and read all the relevant interviews, as I think I have, you'll find that accounts of that preview vary but most go something like this: The audience sat, not laughing much, throughout a screening at a theater in Long Beach. Their tepid reaction panicked some or all of those who worked on the film but Thalberg kept a cool head.
Then, depending on which account you read, he either (a) arranged for the film to be shown that same night at another nearby theater where it got a much better reaction or (b) arranged for another preview a few nights later, perhaps after some edits had been made…and got a much better reaction. Either way, the movie went on to be a huge hit.
That night Rob and I saw it and the follow-up film at the State, a person of indeterminate expertise gave it a brief intro in which he said that A Night at the Opera had first played at that theater. Did he mean that was where the supposedly-disastrous preview took place? Or the more successful preview either that night or later? Or maybe it was where the film debuted locally when it went into general release? Or did that person even know what he was talking about?
Beats the heck outta me. All I know is that the State was probably the largest, most important theater in Long Beach in 1935 so it might seem like a good place to hold a preview. And I know that I love the idea that we had that wonderful evening in a theater that was important to the history of that movie.
And if it was the theater in which the audience failed to laugh, that would be fine. Because that night in July of '72, we sure made up for them.