Growing up in a small New Hampshire town, a trip into Boston, 66 miles or so, was always an adventure. Whether it was going to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, heading into Harvard Square to hit the record and bookstores or something really wild - heading to Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theater, an old vaudeville house for an evening with the Marx Brothers, a triple-header.
The Coolidge Corner Theater, which opened back in 1933, was an old rundown sort of theater at that time. Worn red upholstered seats that creaked when you sat in them, ratty carpet, old wallpaper, the kind of theater you could imagine being packed in the 1930s when going to the movies might have cost you a nickel, long before TV took over our evenings and our world.
Going to the movies in those days, right after the great Depression was a great escape, a chance to literally shut out the world, the troubles of your life for a few hours. There was no comedy team better suited to do just that than the chaotic world of the Marx Brothers, Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo.
When you arrived at the theater, it was almost always nearly full, quite a tribute to the talents of these brothers from New York, who’d made these black and white films going all the way back to 1929, forty years earlier. The audience, mostly college students who may or may not have had some herbal influence before arriving at the theater, was always abuzz - maybe literally - before the first flickers of light appeared on the screen.
Their films were generally short, usually a little over an hour, so packaging three of them in a row, while it might seem like overload, all it did was raise the ante.
Then the screen would come alive with Groucho’s crackling smart-ass remarks, sizzling from underneath that fake greasepaint mustache, Harpo’s bright-eyed, silent, child-like quests for absolute joy and delight and Chico, playing the role of a dim-witted Italian immigrant fond of terrible puns running through the always half-assed plots of their films; Groucho as a college president, the president of a country, the four of them afloat on a cruise ship in the middle of organized crime, invading the captain’s quarters - “Would you like to see the Captain’s bridge? He keeps it in a glass of water” the jokes coming so fast and furious, the tumbling, endless laughter sometimes obscuring the next line. It didn’t matter if you missed one, there was another headed your way, or a Harpo - who didn’t speak - sight gag, brilliantly, inventively playing in a hilarious puppet show or Chico, testifying on the stand in “Duck Soup,” “I got an uncle lives in Texas’ “No, I’m talking about dollars and cents” “Hey, that’s where he lives, Dallas, Texas” (I’m doing this from memory - not checking the video tape - remembering a movie I saw maybe 50 years ago.)
When the first film would end, three young students, dressed like Groucho, Harpo and Chico would come racing from behind the stage and up the aisles, squirting water, throwing confetti, balloons, taking people’s hats, sitting on their laps, messing their hair, all in a wild, what-the-hell spirit that had everyone laughing just as we had at those black and white shadows from decades ago up on that flat silver screen.
“Animal Crackers” “Monkey Business” “Duck Soup” “The Coconuts” - they all ran together, films from 1929 through 1937, helping Americans through the Great Depression. Though they had screenwriters and an actual script, Groucho, in, particular, seemed as if he was making it up as it went along, every line he spoke had some spin on it, a muted snarl - “Ambassador Trentino has had a change of heart” “A lot of good that’ll do him, he still has the same face.” EVERY line had a barb in it, so much hostility that, looking back, no wonder Depression audiences responded so well to Groucho defying authority figures - organized crime bosses, ambassadors, ship’s captains - it was as if the audiences felt he was fighting, standing up for them.
And Chico, a Jewish guy, a brilliant card shark with a fake Italian accent, always trying to pull something somewhere, in a time when immigrants in most major cities opted to live next to one another, sometimes for protection, the audiences liked seeing him get over on those in positions of power.
By the end of the evening, as joyous a three-hour plus experience as a film goer could have, your sides were sore, your mouth dry, your spirits lifted by the magic of these black and white films from years and years ago.
They run their movies once in a while on TV, usually around the holidays when everyone’s silent hope is for a happier time, a better year ahead, good fortune for all and lots and lots of laughs. I’ll watch them again, bought a set of DVD’s to have them for myself, even annually showed them in my classrooms. The kids always loved Harpo, some loved Groucho. Only my friend Bobby Hall loved Chico. But there was a spirit there, even with the weak plots and the antiquated sets that comes through every time, in the classroom, in a quiet house, late in the evenings. They were defiant, they were going to have FUN, dammit and they wanted you, above anything else, to laugh your ass off.
Which I still do. But not like my friends and I would laugh on those nights at Coolidge Corner Theater, those Marx Brothers’ triple-headers, where we’d laugh for three hours plus, then laugh all the way back home to New Hampshire. What a gift. What a memory. The precious gift of laughter.
As much as I adore their films, I wish I could have seen them live on stage, especially when something unforeseen happened and the ad libs started!!!