Cinema: Horse Feathers
TIME
(See front cover) If the trustees of Princeton or any other U. S. university which lacks a  president had met last month to choose one, they would surely not have  chosen Groucho Marx. He lacks the...
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TIME
(See front cover)

If the trustees of Princeton or any other U. S. university which lacks a president had met last month to choose one, they would surely not have chosen Groucho Marx. He lacks the manner, the appearance, the erudition proper to the post. Nonetheless, at the beginning of Horse Feathers (Paramount) it becomes clear that the trustees of Huxley College have been so haphazard as to select Groucho. thinly disguised under the pseudonym of Professor Wagstaff, for this honor. He is discovered on a rostrum, where the retiring president of Huxley is addressing the faculty and student body. Attired in a mortar board, with a tailcoat over his arm, Groucho is shaving his false mustache in a portable mirror while puffing a stogie. The retiring president asks him to throw away the cigar. Groucho Marx casts a look at the faculty of Huxley and says: “There’ll be no diving for this cigar.” He goes on puffing. Carried away by his own address to the students, he breaks into a song called “I’m Against It,” leads the faculty in a soft-shoe dance.

Harpo Marx’s profession in Horse Feathers is somewhat more appropriate than his brother’s. Harpo is a dogcatcher. He has a large lamp post to attract large dogs, a small lamp post for lapdogs, nets of various sizes. Running wildly about the town, he presently arrives at a speakeasy where Groucho Marx is trying to find a pair of professional football players to improve the Huxley team. Chico Marx is associated with the speak-easy as bootlegger and iceman. In the speakeasy. Harpo plays the slot machine with buttons, tries to enlarge his winnings by dropping coins in a pay telephone. He bowls grapefruit at bottles on the bar and when he hears someone say “Cut the cards.” does it with an axe which he carries in his pocket.

Incompetent Groucho Marx hires Chico and Harpo to play football for Huxley, gives them each a contract. When Groucho wants a seal to make the contracts official. Harpo produces a live one. Presently, all three go to a classroom where Groucho gives a lecture on geography and anatomy. Says he: “The Lord Alps those that Alps themselves.” Harpo and Chico stop clawing at pretty female classmates long enough to blow spitballs at Groucho. Groucho dismisses the class, blows spitballs back.

Like other Marx Brothers pictures (The Cocoanuts, Monkey Business) this one is distinguished by an irrationality which is only vaguely challenged by romantic episodes concerning Zeppo Marx. This time Zeppo is attached to a blonde Miss Bailey (Thelma Todd), the college widow. Groucho, Chico and Harpo also attempt to become familiar with Miss Bailey. She tries to steal the signals of the Huxley football team from President Groucho by taking him for a ride in a canoe. Groucho lets her paddle, throws her a candy life-saver when she falls out. Presently, Chico and Harpo go to kidnap the two best players of the rival football team. The football players kidnap Chico and Harpo. Harpo and Chico saw their way out. Half naked, they drive to the game in a perambulating garbage can that resembles a chariot (see front cover). After Harpo has made one touchdown by scattering banana peels in the way of the opposing team, all four Marx brothers ride up the field in their refuse wagon and put down several balls for several more touchdowns.

As everyone knows, there are really five Marx brothers. They are descended from a Hanoverian magician and ventriloquist named Lafe Schoenberg, who toured Germany for 50 years, carrying his scenery, tricks, wife & three children in a roofed wagon. Mrs. Schoenberg played the harp between Lafe Schoenberg’s tricks. In 1860, the Schoenbergs emigrated to the U. S. Lafe Schoenberg died in Chicago in 1919. He was 101. One of his sons, Al Schoenberg, a tailor’s assistant who was frequently discharged for his habit of organizing noisy quartets, took to singing on the stage. He chose the name of Al Shean, became famed with the late Ed (“Oh, Mister”) Gallagher. Al Schoenberg’s sister Minna was a Manhattan fur and lace worker. She married an Alsatian immigrant named Samuel Marx who frequently sat up all night playing pinochle in his tailor-shop. Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Marx had five sons: Leonard (Chico), Arthur (Harpo), Milton (Gummo). Julius (Groucho) and, ten years later, Herbert (Zeppo).*

It is preposterous that in Horse Feathers Groucho should be cast as a college president and Zeppo as an abnormally stupid undergraduate who has spent twelve years in one class. Zeppo is the only Marx who has enjoyed the advantages of a high school education. Mrs. Marx, eager to train her children for the stage, saved money for Chico’s piano lessons. Soon he was able enough to play in cheap cinema theatres. Harpo, two years younger than Chico, looked exactly like him. He could play two tunes on the piano. They enabled him to defraud theatre managers who had hired Chico. He went to work in jobs that Chico had secured, four times received a week’s wages before he was discharged. The fifth theatre manager, forewarned, recognized Harpo by a wart on his nose. Harpo was thrashed.

While Chico and Harpo were playing pianos, Groucho was developing his soprano voice. Confirmed in the Jewish faith at 13, he became a choir boy in a Manhattan Episcopal Church, quit when punished for puncturing the organ bellows with an alto’s hatpin. He learned to tap dance. His mother persuaded her friend Ned Wayburn to get him a job in a Gus Edwards act (where famed Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Georgie. Price. Walter Winchell received their histrionic training). When Groucho was 14, he went to Denver to be boy soprano in a trio. Soon after he arrived his voice changed. He got a job driving a grocery wagon in Cripple Creek, Colo., saved enough for a ticket home and $10 to pay for his food. He lost the $10. An old lady who had a basket of fruit fed him on oranges and peanuts.

By the time Groucho returned to Manhattan, his brother Gummo had shown signs of talent. Mrs. Marx hired a girl soprano, got up an act called “The Three Nightingales.” They performed in Atlantic City in a beer garden on a pier. Underneath the pier were fishnets. The manager of the beer garden fed the Marxes only fish, because it was cheapest on his menu. Next season, Mrs. Marx thought that Harpo also was fitted for her act. She recalled him from the Seville Hotel, in Manhattan, where he was a bellhop. Unable to think of anything for Harpo to say, she had him try some of his grandfather’s tricks. When the Marxes were performing in Waukegan, Ill., they were surprised to hear, in the orchestra pit, the piano playing of their brother Chico. He had been touring the country as a piano player and wrestler. At Waukegan, Chico, Zeppo, Gummo and Groucho made their closest approach to an academic career in an act called “Fun in Hi-Skule.” On the Sullivan-Considine circuit they toured with Charlie Chaplin, gave him good advice about taking a $100 weekly contract with the Keystone Cinema Company.

In Chicago, Harpo Marx bought an old harp. He tuned and played it to suit himself. The harp became so dilapidated that, when his train was wrecked at Mobile, Harpo claimed and received $250 on it although it had been unhurt. With the money, he purchased a new harp. He was amazed when a music store offered him $250 for his old harp, amazed further when the music store sold it for $750, as an antique.

In 1917, the Brothers Marx discovered the proper way of performing. Outside a theatre in Nacogdoches, Tex. where they were playing, a mule ran away and smashed a store. The audience deserted the Marx Brothers to watch the mule. When the audience returned, the Marxes, indignant, burlesqued their act. The audience was delighted. At Abilene, Kan., a manager cancelled their bookings. Put off a train which they had boarded without money, they walked to the next town. Harpo borrowed his first red wig. The Marx Brothers again burlesqued their act. By the time they reached Oklahoma City they were rich enough to stay at a hotel.

In 1918, the Marxes toured U. S. training camps with their first show, Mr. Green’s Reception. When influenza caused the barracks to be quarantined, Gummo and Harpo enlisted. Groucho and Chico joined organizations for entertaining soldiers. Harpo reached France with the 7th Regiment. He worked as a reporter for the Stars & Stripes, like Editor Harold Ross of the New Yorker, Colyumist Franklin Pierce (“F. P. A.”) Adams and Alexander Woollcott. With them he helped form the famed Thanatopsis Club, for poker.

After the War, Gummo entered the raincoat business. He now has a prosperous ladies’ wear establishment in Manhattan. Zeppo, just out of high school, joined the act. Soon it was a great success. At Manhattan’s Palace Theatre, Harpo fell into the pit. In London the Marxes were first booed, then applauded. In 1923 they bought and disorganized a musical comedy called The Thrill Girl (renamed “I’ll Say She Is”), ran six months in Chicago, eight months in Manhattan. Their next plays were The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. Their first cinema was an adaptation of The Cocoanuts. A year later, they made Animal Crackers, then Monkey Business, their first “original” screen play. Mrs. Samuel Marx, who stopped touring with her sons just before the War, later changed her name to Minnie Palmer, opened a theatrical agency in Chicago. She died just after the first Marx Brothers cinema was released. Father Samuel Marx, sleek, young-looking, happy, still addicted to pinochle, lives with Zeppo Marx in Hollywood.

Zeppo Marx, married to Marion Benda (Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em), acts straight juvenile rôles. He does it poorly enough not to detract from the antics of his confrères. Chico, married to Cinemactress Betty Karp, is differentiated from other Italian dialect comedians by his ability to play the piano, by a certain irrelevant vehemence which makes it seem that he is chagrined by something but has forgotten what it is. Groucho Marx, married to Ruth Tyrell, dancer, is talkative, cool, depraved. The prototype of Hebrew wisecrackers, he rattles off disgraceful puns (invented for him in Horse Feathers by Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, S. J. Perelman) in tones of nasal nonchalance.

Far more depraved than Groucho, more irrelevant than Chico, more implausible than Zeppo is Harpo Marx. He never speaks, does not need to. His appalling brain expresses itself in a language more .disastrous than words. He pursues women with the abandon of a satyr and the stamina of Paavo Nurmi. Sofas and tables are his racetracks and it amuses him in Horse Feathers to coax dogs away from their masters into his flea-bitten equipage which has two canary cages in place of sidelights. His harp (which he still tunes and strums in utterly unorthodox fashions) is all that he apparently admires. On it he plays superbly with grace and sumptuous gestures. Having completed Horse Feathers, Harpo Marx took it into his head to visit Russia. Last week, leaving his animals (dog, cat, monkey) in his brothers’ care, taking with him harp, red wig and Max Reinhardt, he set out from Hollywood to act in pantomime for the Moscow Art Theatre.

* The four older Marx brothers received their nicknames at Galesburg, Ill., in 1915, from Art Fischer, vaudeville monologist, who was playing poker with them. Groucho was glum, Harpo played the harp, Chico liked chicken. Gummo wore rubbers. Zeppo’s nickname, selected by Groucho. means nothing.