Groucho Marx: You Bet Your Life Episode – Secret Word: Voice

DVD: www.amazon.com More episodes: thefilmarchived.blogspot.com The Marx Brothers’ stage shows became popular just as Hollywood was changing to “talkies”. They signed a contract with Paramount and embarked on their film career. Their first two released films (they had previously made — but not released — one short silent film titled Humor Risk) were adaptations of Broadway shows: The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930). Both were written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Following these two feature-length films, they made a short film that was included in Paramount’s twentieth anniversary documentary, The House That Shadows Built (1931), in which they adapted a scene from I’ll Say She Is. Their third feature-length film, Monkey Business (1931), was their first that was not based on a stage production, and incidentally the only movie in which Harpo’s voice is heard – he’s singing tenor from inside a barrel in the opening scene. Horse Feathers (1932), in which the brothers satirized the American college system and Prohibition, was their most popular film yet, and won them the cover of Time. It included a running gag from their stage work, where Harpo revealed having nearly everything in his coat. At various points in Horse Feathers Harpo pulls out of his coat: a wooden mallet, a fish, a coiled rope, a tie, a poster of a woman in her underwear, a cup of hot coffee, a sword; and, just after Groucho warns him that he “can’t burn the candle at both ends,” a …
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