The House That Shadows Built

A long while back I saw the documentary The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell which includes some rare footage of the Marxes doing a promo for Monkey Business. The promo is a sequence set in a theatrical agent's office, where each of the brothers comes in one by one and tries to get a job. The dialog is in rhyme, at first anyway. The guys take turns impersonating Maurice Chevalier singing "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me," just as they do in the feature, but nonetheless it's unique footage. Apparently the scene was first concocted for their stage show "On the Mezzanine" in the early 1920s, then reworked into their Broadway revue "I'll Say She Is!" in 1924. So although the scene was filmed in 1931 this is a pretty early slice of Marx Brothers history, a hint of what they were like in their early stage shows.

Recently I found a VHS copy of the feaurette this scene was made for, a promo film for Paramount Pictures called The House That Shadows Built. It's a pretty strange little infomercial for the studio, and the Marx Brothers sequence is definitely the highlight of the show. I've written a fairly lengthy essay on the IMDb page for this film if anyone's interested in knowing more about it.

Getting back to the scene, it seems to me that this routine stands as Zeppo's best performance in any of their films (and I'm not joking!). Instead of playing the sappy love interest he's an equal member of the team, and even when he imitates Chevalier he sounds better than he does in Monkey Business. It looks like they were trying to make Zeppo more a full-blooded Marx Brother this time around, but in the later Paramount films he was forced to play the sap again. The other brothers are pretty much their usual selves, although in his first few lines Groucho seems to be using a Yiddish or German accent (it's hard to tell what he's doing) that he quickly drops. My favorite bit: Groucho introduces Harpo as a frankfurter salesman, "the Merchant of Wieners." Only Groucho could make that funny!