The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts [sic]
August 3, 1929
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
C+

The first Marx Brothers movie is slow, awkward, and of course stagy, but hey, it's the first Marx Brothers movie.   So it's at least of historical interest.  Based on their smash hit stage play of a few years earlier, it shows the Marxes and everyone trying to adapt to the very early days of sound.  The dance numbers are pretty bad and seem to go on forever.  The many, many reprises of Irving Berlin's "When My Dreams Come True" feel less necessary each time.  And some of the dialogue, even Groucho's, feels parceled out.  Not till the wedding speeches section, with Harpo hilariously getting annoyed and then drunk, as Groucho undercuts everyone including himself, does it feel like the timing works.  It is fun to see Groucho first (on film) insulting the imposing Margaret Dumont (so stodgy in this one, she carries a monocle and seldom smiles), but the only line that has real spin on it is when she says she likes the color scheme of his outfit, and he says, "It's not a scheme, it's a conspiracy!"

Meanwhile the romantic couple (with a man who looks like he could be a young Richard Nixon) and the villainous couple dream and scheme.  Harpo and Chico don't show up till almost twenty minutes in, but Groucho perks up then, and eggs on Harpo eating anything he likes in the lobby, including a telephone.  Groucho also of course verbally battles Chico, at one point calling him "Einstein."  The movie is VERY 1920s, definitely a product of another time, a time that reveled in its modernness, with the heroine dancing and showing her underwear to the crowd, and the villainess smoking cigarettes.  Chico not only, of course, plays an Italian, but he makes ethnic jokes about Jews and "Polacks."  As for Zeppo, well, he smiles a lot.

Is the movie funny?  Yes, sometimes even deliberately.

With the Paramount Marx Brothers movies, you always want to know not only why a duck, but why this title?  Well, I guess it's the Florida setting, palm trees and all (even if represented by New York indoor sets), but apparently no one knew how to spell "coconuts."  Donny & Marie would know better fifty years later.