GROUCHO MARX

October 2, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Born this day -October 2, 1890- Julius Henry Marx was shoved into the sawdust as a boy tenor, then worked his way up with his brothers through Vaudeville to Broadway and finally the klieg lights of Hollywood as the most invincible personification of the innate anarchy of the human spirit. No one has ever torn apart plotlines, set-piece acts or the English language as completely as the Marx Brothers did. Although it earned less than expected on its release, their final film for Paramount -”Duck Soup” (1933)- destroyed the very notion of any justification for war 7 years before Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940), and today still stands as the most definitive anti-war film ever made.