The Cocoanuts (1929) - film review

Mr Hammer is the owner of a Florida beach hotel who, thanks to the housing slump, is having difficulty attracting customers.  Staying at the hotel is the wealthy widow Mrs Potter and her daughter Polly.  The latter is in love with Bob Adams, an aspiring young architect who works as a clerk at the hotel, much to the disapproval of Mrs Potter, who wants her offspring to marry the far more respectable Harvey Yates.  What Mrs Potter doesn’t know is that Yates is a high class crook who, with his accomplice Penelope, plans to steal her priceless diamond necklace.  When two down-and-outs named Chico and Harpo arrive at the hotel, hoping to deprive the clientele of their wallets and wristwatches, Penelope realises that they will be the obvious suspects when Mrs Potter’s jewels go missing...

The film that launched the Marx Brothers on their gloriously anarchic film career was this adaptation of a popular stage play which they performed in the mid-1920s, written by George S. Kaufman and with songs provided by Irving Berlin.  The Marxes had made one film prior to this, a silent two-reeler entitled Humor Risk, but this is now lost, believed to have been destroyed by Groucho Marx after an unsuccessful preview.  The Cocoanuts is where the brothers’ career took off, making them an international comedy sensation.  Although they were unhappy with the film, it proved to be an enormous success and audiences clamoured for more of the same.

Not surprisingly, given the primitive recording technology of the time, The Cocoanuts is the most dated and visually uninteresting of the Marx Brothers’ films.  Yet despite the static cameras, clumsy staging and poor sound quality, the film is a delight, replete with the kind of hilarious Marx Brothers routines which would have a generation of cinema audiences rolling in the aisles.  Admittedly the song and dance numbers sometimes feel like an unwarranted distraction, but they add to the gaiety of the piece and capture something of the exuberance of the twenties just before the world economy went into a tailspin.

The production of The Cocoanuts proved to be something of a logistical and technical nightmare.  Chico’s gambling habit was the thing that caused most of the headaches.  He would frequently go missing, leaving his brothers to run around in a frantic attempt to find him at whichever racetrack he had chosen to lose his shirt on.  Another problem was the inadequacy of the sound recording equipment, which would pick up and amplify the tiniest unintended sound and make the dialogue unintelligible.  In particular, director Robert Florey could not contain his laughter when he saw the Marx Brothers perform, with the result that little could be heard above his enthusiastic guffaws and the noise of the cameras.  The solution was to enclose the cameras and operators in soundproof glass cubicles, within which Florey would direct using hand signals.  Any paper used on the set (such as Groucho’s map) had to be soaked in water so that the sound of its crinkling didn’t drown out the dialogue.         

The Cocoanuts may not be the slickest Marx Brothers film but it contains some of their funniest material.  Harpo literally gets to chew (and drink) the scenery, in between honking his horn, strumming his harp and chasing after pretty young things (with no hope whatever of catching them).  Meanwhile, Chico and Groucho get well and truly trussed up in the first of their many miscommunication sketches.  "Here is a viaduct..." explains Groucho, to which Chico enquires "Why a duck?", ad nauseum, leading to the memorable auction scene in which Chico, misunderstanding what Groucho has asked of him, outbids everyone else, and himself.  

Harpo may be the most sympathetic character and Groucho may get the best lines (and at least half of those look suspiciously as if they were improvised), but it is Chico who ultimately steals the show with his amusing but absolutely flawless piano routine.  Margaret Dumont, often dubbed the fifth Marx Brother in their films, appears for the first time as Groucho’s love-interest and comedy punch-bag whilst Zeppo, condemned to play the straight man, hardly gets a look in.  If side-splitting slapstick, zany wordplay and madcap comedy hi-jinks are your thing, you will treasure every moment of this bumper offering of first rate lunacy.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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