It was my pick for film club. We hadn’t watched a comedy in a while, so I picked the Marx Brothers’ The Cocoanuts.
The Cocoanuts came out in 1929, just over a year after the first all-talking movie, Lights of New York, and less than two years after the first part-talkie, The Jazz Singer. The film reworked (for better or worse) their hit Broadway show for the silver screen.
It’s groundbreaking by being the brothers’ first feature film and for pushing the boundaries of sound. But apart from Groucho, Chico, and Harpo, I can easily do without the rest of the film. (Oh, and Zeppo, whose role is almost non-existent.)
The Cocoanuts‘ plot — a robbery scheme set at a resort during the Florida real-estate bubble of the 1920s — is a thin filament upon which the Marx Brothers’ routines and several show-stopping songs and dances are hung. And by show-stopping, I mean the show comes to a grinding halt for most of the songs and the overly long dance numbers.
The musical numbers in the brothers’ later movies — particularly when they sang them — added laughs and kept the movies moving.
Maybe with talkies being so new, it was exciting to hear an orchestra and watch a troupe of dancers perform. Today, the dances go on and on and on, and the dancers aren’t as coordinated or sophisticated as in later Busby Berkeley’s and others’ films (though The Cocoanuts does introduce shots that Berkeley would become famous for).
One musical gem here is “The Tale of the Shirt,” a parody of two songs from the opera Carmen, sung by the hotel detective (familiar-faced Basil Ruysdael, who was a classically trained bass-baritone) and a chorus of the guests. It’s perfectly random, just the sort of Marx Brothers movie wackiness that works. But, the Irving Berlin song “The Little Bungalow” was the one that unfortunately stuck in my head after the movie.
The plot isn’t the reason you watch The Cocoanuts; you’re there for the Groucho’s and Chico’s twisting-and-turning dialog, and Harpo’s zany antics. You’ll need to listen carefully for their rapid repartee since the early audio recording methods aren’t high fidelity, and their wordplay is almost drowned out by the on-set orchestra at times.
I was disappointed by the film print, but it must be the best available since it was on Criterion. The movie looked fine on an old black-and-white TV back in the 1970s, but on today’s 4K TV, there are some very noticeably rough portions.
If you want to see the brothers at their film peak, check out Duck Soup, Animal Crackers, or A Night at the Opera. Unfortunately, only The Cocoanuts was available streaming on the Criterion Channel; otherwise, I would have picked one of these. (Animal Crackers has a certain place in my heart. I saw it the first time in a theatrical revival back in the 1970s, and that cemented my love of the Marx Brothers.)