Restoration Comedy

THE MARX BROTHERS AT THE MOVIES by Paul D. Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt. 224 pages. Putnam. $7.95.

What has eight legs and laughs? ran the question in the '30s. Answer: the Marx Brothers. Later they lost a pair of legs, when Zeppo dropped out of the act. Groucho, Chico and Harpo went on to make eight more films together, becoming precursors of the new American humor. Groucho's flip irrelevancies foreshadowed the theater of the absurd: "I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse." Harpo was a troll bridge between the silents and the talkies. "How can you write for Harpo?" shrugged George S. Kaufman. "All you can say is, 'Harpo enters.' From that point on, he's on his own." Though Chico's accent was an Italian defamation league all to itself, his shrewd con-mannerisms and manic assaults on the piano were often brilliant pieces of destructive art.

The Brothers Marx found themselves the darlings of the Intelligentsia. Harpo became a visitor to the Algonquin Round Table; Groucho corresponded with T. S. Eliot in a number of letters that showed that he thought of himself as a cerebral clown. But the old vaudeville team had begun its film career comparatively late in life--in 1929, at the time of their first film, The Cocoanuts, Chico was 40--and by the late '40s their creative energy had faded. To a whole generation of television viewers, the Marxes are at once as familiar and as obscure as the Smith Brothers.

The Marx Brothers at the Movies, (text by Zimmerman, graphics by Goldblatt) restores the team to its proper prominence. Customarily, the most static objects in the world are books about movies; pictures float by on oceans of turgid or fawning prose, while the subject drowns. In The Marx Brothers at the Movies the text is as good as the pictures. The still ones, that is; nothing can quite match the films. Zimmerman shows just how much Groucho could inscribe on the head of a pun: "This is indeed a gala day. That's plenty. I don't think I could handle more than a gal a day." He retells the best of the anecdotes from the days when the boys were as funny off-screen as on. Best of all, the book resists the temptation to analyze, observing E. B. White's dictum: "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process."

Harpo and Chico are dead, and Zeppo has been retired for 36 years. Groucho is confined to occasional cameos in such humorless atrocities as Skidoo. In lieu of a reel of their films, this book is the best possible way to meet the Marx Brothers when they had all their energy, all their laughs and all their feet.

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