Chico Marx plays piano

[Tarantella]

These old films of the Marx Brothers are such fun. I couldn't resist posting this because Chico's face shows such joy and love when he's playing music. These men were all so talented, and to think they lived on the same street as the Gershwin family!! The only non-musical member of the family was Groucho, but he mostly wrote the scripts himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kDHD4Bs_EI

[Balthazar]

I always liked Groucho taking the piss during Chico's musical interlude in Animal Crackers:



"If you get near a song, play it!"

[Mambo]

maybe we can find some videos of Harpo too.

i may look up Groucho's You Bet Your Life to see if there are any
reruns around - have heard they are kneeslappers

[IsaacDavid]

When I was a young lad, my parents would put me and my brother to bed on a Friday evening and go out for a few hours. That's when we stole into the living room, put the TV on and discovered the joy of the Marx Brothers. Ah, happy memories!

[Tarantella]

ID, the Marx Brothers are quite wonderful - even the somewhat dated pratfalls are amusing. Who are your favourite 'characters' - Captain Spalding, Rufus T. Firefly, the Good Professor from "Horse Feathers"?

Take a look at this: classic!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMV44yoXZ0

I worked with an obscurantist, antagonistic Head Teacher of English and one day at a staff meeting over English Trial Matriculation marks I started singing this Groucho Marx song to him!! Everyone laughed but he was horrified, being the mysognistic individual that he was. He left the school with his backside afire shortly thereafter!! (The man was intensely disliked because his tone was always aggressive.)

The Marx Brothers - the ultimate iconoclasts.

[IsaacDavid]

Alas, Tarantella, I have to tell you that I have never seen the Marx Brother before bedtime! Maybe that's something else I should rectify. Watch this space...

[Liberty]

I notice a comment on another thread which you made about Woody Allen's "Annie Hall". Actually there's a strong link between the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen. Remember at the beginning of "Annie Hall" Allen quotes the famous line by Groucho Marx, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have somebody like me as a member!".

In a sense, too, Allen is carrying on the tradition of Commedia which the Marx Brothers epitomised - Allen is always the SAME, neurotic character and only the plots are interchangeable.

[IsaacDavid]

Well, indeed, and then there's the scene in Hannah and Her Sisters, where Allen's character walks into a movie house in search of solace...

[Liberty]

Wonderful isn't it? "Putting the world back into rational perspective!"

My favourite film of his is, indeed, "Hannah and Her Sisters" - not least because of the choice of music. Gershwin, Cole Porter (Bobby Short) and Bach. I think of Allen, in these particular films, as a 'soul mate'. Then there are the hilarious scenes with the 'religious conversion' and when he tells his parents he's converting to Catholicism. Those pestering questions of his about death and dying to which his father replies, "How do I know - I'm having enough trouble getting the can-opener to work!"

He's made the comment on several occasions that the Europeans 'get' his films but that Americans on the whole 'don't get irony'. But that was qualified once when he said, "well, 2% of them do and that's still a lot of people".

Have you seen "Midnight in Paris"? What did you think of it. My 'jury' is still out.

[IsaacDavid]

Hannah and Her Sisters is my favourite Allen film too, but when I saw it in the 1980's, I was living in London, and somehow Central London and Allen's Manhattan were like parallel worlds for me, so the films resonated for me, and each new film was an 'event.'

But in the 1990's I was living in Amsterdam and though I continued to see his films , they no longer seemed to resonate. I can remember seeing Mighty Aphrodite (who can forget that clock?) and Celebrity, though I had forgotten what it was called until I checked IMDB! So I haven't seen Midnight in Paris, I'm afraid.

The last film I can remember wanting to see was Deconstructing Harry, but somehow I never got round to it. Something else to rectify. I didn't expect to be spending money when I joined this site, at least, not on non-musical items!