While the majority of film scholars will hail “Duck Soup” and “A Night at the Opera” as the best of the Marx Brothers movies, my go-to Marx mayhem is their 1931 “Monkey Business.” Part of my devotion is emotional – this was the first Marx film I saw, back when I was around 10 years old and WNEW-TV Channel 5 in New York City would broadcast the film. And part of my devotion is intellectual – I genuinely believe it is the crazy siblings’ best film.
“Monkey Business” finds the Marx Brothers as stowaways on a luxury liner – where the vessel sailed from and where it is going to is never stated. Indeed, there is no backstory to the main characters – they don’t have on-screen names and their presence on the ship is never explained. They just exist as surreal vagabonds who disrupt the humorless worlds of the wealthy passengers and the ship’s pompous officers.
Once they’re presence is discovered – the Marxes are hiding in empty barrels marked “Kippered Herring” – “Monkey Business” breaks loose as a wild chase with the brothers engaging in solo, duo and quartet antics. There is no plot for the first half-hour, but rather a series of interconnected skits with Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo getting into bizarre trouble. Some semblance of a plot finally occurs well into the running time involving a pair of rival gangsters who hire the Marxes as bodyguards – Groucho and Zeppo protect one of well-heeled mobsters while Chico and Harpo protect the other.
“Monkey Business” is the sole Marx Brothers film where is an equal partner in the mayhem. His story arc involves the pretty daughter of one gangster and he has two very funny brief scenes with her – his initial meet-cute moment involving a dropped handkerchief and later when his declaration that he’ll never leave her is interrupted when he needs to escape from the ship’s crew who is trying to apprehend him. And Zeppo is the one who hatches the brilliantly cockamamie scheme for all four brothers to sneak off the ship by each pretending to be Maurice Chevalier.
Margaret Dumont is absent from “Monkey Business,” but quite frankly she isn’t missed. Blonde bombshell Thelma Todd becomes Groucho’s foil as the frustrated wife of one of the gangsters, and her stateroom rendezvous with Groucho (complete with a wacky dance) is priceless. Todd was so effective that she was brought back in the Marxes’ next film, “Horse Feathers,” with all four brothers seducing her.
Admittedly, the film’s zany energy loses steam when the story switches from the ship to a party at the Long Island estate of one gangster, and that part of the film includes the inevitable musical interludes with Chico on piano and Harpo on harp that always slowed the flow of the comedy. But that part of the movie has my all-time favorite Groucho line, when he tries to sell a ring to a society matron: “Would you give me a buck and a half for it? It’s brass, you know. I got it from the nose of a savage, so it ought to fit you.”