Zeppo Left, Too

Joseph Epstein reviews Mark A. Vieira's new bio of producer Irving Thalberg. Thalberg, the model for Monroe Stahr in Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, never put his name on a film but dominated Hollywood as perhaps no other figure. He was the boy genius all his career, from his days at Universal barely out of his teens to his premature death at 37 while he was running MGM with Mayer. He oversaw a shedule of almost a film a week, with nothing released until he was satisfied.

He worked in every genre--epics, weepies, costume drama, musicals--but the one style he never fully mastered was pure comedy. Sure, he released funny (and allegedly funny) films, but he never truly developed a great clown. Which may have been the impetus to sign the Marx Brothers when their contract at Paramount was up. He put them in A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races, two huge hits. Proving he could make them bigger than ever must have been a great pleasure to Thalberg.

Here's what Epstein says about the issue:

What Thalberg understood is that movies are not merely primarily but entirely about storytelling, and, though he could not himself write stories (or movie scripts), he had a fine understanding of why some stories worked—and quite as important, why others did not. Every good movie requires at least one unforgettable scene, he held. Character is key, he held. Thalberg it was who came up with the notion that the Marx Brothers would be a lot funnier if they played their exhuberant zaniness off rigid social institutions: the opera, the university, diplomacy, thoroughbred racing, high society. He never wrote any of the Marx Brothers scripts, but without this central idea, the genius of the Marx Brothers would never have come to the glorious fruition that it did.

I'm not sure if I should blame Epstein or Vieira, but this is nonsense. It was hardly Thalberg who thought to put the Marx Brothers in rigid social settings. They were big stars at Paramount, and their first two films--The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers--had them laying waste to high society (and these were just adaptation of their Broadway hits). Then Horse Feathers put them in an academic setting, with Groucho heading a college, and Duck Soup, their swan song at Paramount, starts with Groucho being made head of a nation and later sending it to war.

No, Thalberg's insight into the Marx Brothers was, as he put it, to make their films gross twice as much with half as many laughs. He had them time their comedy in live performances so they didn't come on too fast. More important, he made them take the love plot seriously. The Marxes worked to help the romantic leads, rather than mock the romantic convention itself. This, allegedly, broadened their appeal, especially among women.

To many fans (including this one), it also neutered them. Before, they were anarchists who played by their own rules. MGM reduced them to buffoons. The writing and routines are so brilliant in Opera, and parts of Races, that you don't entirely mind. But after Thalberg died, the Marxes were overseen by Mayer (who didn't like them) and this formula helped destroy them artistically.

In any case, to claim "the genius of the Marx Brothers would never have come to the glorious fruition" without Thalberg is absurd. It already had before he met them.