Monkey Business-Marx Brothers [VHS]

Stowaways on board a liner, simple but hysterical antics right from the start, Groucho is Groucho but Harpo and Chico are the absolute greatest, I cry etc everytime I watch the manic antics. Simple but effective and undoubtably the film I'll rescue should the house burn down. Just the thoughts of Harpo hiding under a mat and Groucho in a wardrobe and the 'just a little snoop...' and I'm incredibly happy, my five year old son also enjoys this comical caper

From the opening credits to the escape from the boat this comedy is among the most frenetic and stunningly funny film ever made.
After the boat journey the pace slows down but still retains some classic dialogue.A true classic

That's the new and most recent, 1931, manual for how to immigrate illegally into the US via New York, Ellis Island, and then how to succeed in the gangster dominated society of New York City. Of you are a stowaway, better be four because they will never be able to find you all and one will always be able to make them run in one direction while the three others are either eating, or resting, or playing, or flirting, or whatever. Then of course you have to rotate the one or the two who are running and chasing the officials on the ship. Funny business indeed, monkey business for sure, but who is the monkey, who are the apes? Then the best strategy is to select two competing gangsters, who are here only to enjoy gambling and drinking, on the ship and manage to become their bodyguards. Two for one and the other two for the other one. You add to that a slight love affair of one of the four with the daughter of one of the two gangsters and you have it. It will only take some hullabaloo with the customs officers and the police to go through in a lot of noise, antics and floating or flying papers and stamps. Then use the rivalry of the two gangsters to get the daughter of one kidnapped by the other, then retrieve her from detention and manage to capture the kidnapping one and deliver him to the other and you are the kings of the night, full of money, good food, good champagne, in one word good cheer. We cannot exactly say this is a super-duper plot that deserves a medal, an Oscar or even a paragraph in a cinema encyclopedia. But you have to take into account the rest, that is to say the performance and antics of those four clowning siblings. They will manage to play some piano, some harp and also to play Punch and Judy with the captain and his acolytes. It is nothing but apish foolish clownish play but it is funny in the extreme rhythm and supreme variety hence absolute amazement it breeds, raises and inflates in your brains, plural absolutely needed because after a while you do not know any more on what brain of yours it is playing, left, right, middle, under, top, upper, heart-core or whatever. You are losing your ground and you start diving or sinking in their broth. And your sanity is getting loose. I hope you will not meet Chico or Harpo in a dark street tonight because you may feel a sudden need to run away. They are not really dangerous, they are just frighteningly de-structuring. And don't try to understand their language. From pun to pun, from innuendo to fuzzy innuendo, from play on words to more play on more words, you will be completely corrugated within fifteen minutes by their witty gibberish. Even if this film is definitely not politically correct, it sure is not in anyway hitting under the normal belt of morality. Yet it is a defense and illustration of illegal immigration from Europe, if possible rather what could we call it? Jewish, ethnic, Yiddish, who knows, but white nevertheless. In 1931, in the trough of the depression, still a couple of years before the New Deal, with no alcohol, except of course on transatlantic ships, and in the private celebrations of gangsters, life could only be funny if some apish monkeys cultivated some funny disturbance in the midst of the social capitalistic and teetotallistic mist, if not fog, if not plain good old London pea soup smog, of America.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines