Movie Quote of the Day (‘Duck Soup,’ on Forgetting Faces)

Rufus T. Firefly [played by Groucho Marx]: “I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”— Duck Soup (1933), story by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, directed by Leo McCarey

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Horse Feathers,’ With Groucho in a Unique College Football Moment)

Referee [sees Wagstaff lying in the middle of the field with a cigar]: “What are you doing with that cigar in your mouth?”

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff [played by Groucho Marx)]: “Why? Do you know another way to smoke it?”—Horse Feathers (1932), written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Skeekman (uncredited)

Wouldn’t you find the football game in Horse Feathers a lot more unexpected and entertaining than any of the bowl games you’ll watch on TV today?

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Horse Feathers,’ As Groucho Mixes Geology and Theology)

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff [played by Groucho Marx)]: “Beyond the Alps lies more Alps. And The Lord Alps those that Alps themselves.”— Horse Feathers (1932), written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Skeekman (uncredited)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Night at the Opera,’ As Groucho Explains Why a Tenor Was Treated Roughly)

Rodolfo Lassparri [played by Walter Woolf King]: “Never in my life have I received such treatment. They threw an apple at me.”

Otis B. Driftwood [played by Groucho Marx]: “Well, watermelons are out of season.”— A Night at the Opera (1935), screenplay by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, directed by Sam Wood

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Duck Soup,’ As Groucho Demonstrates a Unique Diplomatic Style)

Ambassador Trentino [played by Louis Calhern]: “I didn't come here to be insulted!”

Rufus T. Firefly [played by Groucho Marx]: “That's what you think!”— Duck Soup (1933), story by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, directed by Leo McCarey 

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Cocoanuts,’ in Which Groucho Romances a Rich Woman Who’s Unexpectedly Unattainable)

Hammer [played by Groucho Marx]: [to Mrs. Emily Potter, after trying to put his arms around her, only to find she’s too tall for him.] “Can you come down a little bit? Just think, tonight, tonight when the moon is sneaking around the clouds, I'll be sneaking around you. I'll meet you tonight under the moon. Oh, I can see you now -- you and the moon. You wear a necktie so I'll know ya.”— The Cocoanuts (1929), based on the Broadway play by George S. Kaufman, adapted by Morrie Ryskind, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley

Movie Quote of the Day (‘A Day at the Races,’ As Dr. Groucho Deftly Defends His Credentials)

Mrs. Upjohn [played by Margaret Dumont]: “Surely, you don't question the doctor's ability?”

Whitmore [played by Leonard Ceeley]: “No, not exactly. But running a sanitarium calls for a man with peculiar talents.”

Dr. Hackenbush [played by Groucho Marx]: “You don't have to look any further! I've got the most peculiar talents of any doctor you've ever met.”—A Day at the Races (1937), screenplay by Robert Pirosh, George Seaton and George Oppenheimer, directed by Sam Wood

Premiering 80 years ago this week, A Day at the Races clocked in at one hour and 50 minutes, making it the Marx Brothers’ longest feature. That was not its only distinction, however: the other related to Groucho’s character, a veterinarian passing himself off as a medical doctor.

In the original screenplay, this medical masquerader was given the Dickensian name of Dr. Quackenbush. MGM’s legal department, however, discovered that there were at least a dozen real doctors in the U.S. with this name. Nervous studio executives decided that a slight change of spelling would get them out of any legal hassles. Groucho liked the new name so much that he sometimes used it in signing off in letters to friends.

I have to admit to another reason for liking this name: It sounds like a cousin to a town near where I live: Hackensack, N.J. Five years after A Day at the Races, writer-director Preston Sturges used that place name for even more uproarious effect in The Palm Beach Story, when he gave Rudy Vallee’s stand-in for filthy-rich industrial John D. Rockefeller the sobriquet “John D. Hackensacker III.”

Movie Quote of the Day (The Marx Brothers, With a Foolproof Means of Solving a Crime)

Captain Jeffrey Spaulding (played by Groucho Marx): “It is my belief that the missing picture is hidden in the house next door.”

Signor Emanuel Ravelli (played by Chico Marx): “There isn’t any house next door.”

Spaulding: “Then we’ll build one!”— Animal Crackers (1930), screenplay by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Bert Kalmar, and Harry Ruby, directed by Victor Heerman

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Duck Soup,’ on Groucho’s ‘Gala Day’)

Mrs. Teasdale (played by Margaret Dumont): “Notables from every country are gathered here in your honor. This is a gala day for you.”

 
Rufus T. Firefly (played by Groucho Marx): “Well, a gal a day is enough for me. I don't think I could handle any more.” —Duck Soup (1933), story by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, directed by Leo McCarey

This Day in Theater History (George S. Kaufman, Master Collaborator, Born)

November 16, 1889—George S. Kaufman, synonymous with urban wit as a member of the Algonquin “Roundtable” and as a playwright and director who preferred to work with others, was born in what many in his circle would have regarded as the sticks—Pittsburgh.

Nowadays, it is not unusual for theater professionals to hone their craft in this area of western Pennsylvania—brother and sister Rob and Kathleen Marshall (director-choreographers of, respectively, Chicago and The Pajama Game), for instance, cut their teeth in the theater program at Carnegie-Mellon, in Pittsburgh. But Kaufman’s path was more circuitous, and less happy.

With his long face, tortoiseshell spectacles and bushy hair brushed upward into a preposterous pompadour (a look appropriated for John Turturro’s Clifford Odets-like playwright in Barton Fink), Kaufman in adulthood appeared—not to put a fine point on it—like a grown version of a nerd. Indeed, his childhood was given over far more to books than to play.

But the cosseted circumstances that limited his physical activities early on derived from an understandable reason on his parents’ part: the loss of an older brother. The library became George’s favorite place, and something involving writing—in the end, journalism—his intended profession.

In his 20s, Kaufman wrote for a number of Washington and New York newspapers, including a stint as drama editor for The New York Times. 

That work was distinguished by a penchant for one-liners that made him a regular at the fabled Algonquin Round Table of Twenties wits, and became a hallmark of his later comedies. (For instance, in one review, he noted caustically, "There was laughter in the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.") 

He made his debut as a Broadway playwright with Some One in the House in 1918.

The presence of two co-authors, Larry Evans and W. C. Percival, might indicate that the rookie playwright required the assistance of more seasoned professionals, but in fact this became Kaufman’s preferred mode of working for the rest of his four-decade career. 

“With few exceptions, all of  [Kaufman’s] forty-five librettos and nonmusicals were written with somebody else,” noted Thomas S. Hischak in Boy Loses Girl: Broadway's Librettists (2002). 

His collaborators included neophyte playwrights (Ring Lardner, John Marquand, even “stripper-intellectual” Gypsy Rose Lee) and other, more established figures who, with him, formed, in the interwar period, the closest thing that America has had to Restoration Comedy (Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Morrie Ryskind, and, most significantly, Moss Hart).

Hart’s Act One, perhaps the best-loved of all show business memoirs, exhibits extraordinary respect for his senior (by 15 years) partner while also spelling out Kaufman’s individual, unusual, sometimes downright eccentric working methods: sessions that began at noon and continued, without food, for another 4½ hours; lying on his back as he tried out ideas; devoting as much as two hours to a single line of dialogue, or a whole afternoon to an entrance or exit.

In that attempt to create comic machinery as smoothly running as a Swiss watch, along with an aversion to sentimentality so intense that he would run to the bathroom to wash his hands to avoid one of Hart’s effusive expressions of gratitude, Kaufman resembles nobody so much as Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. In fact, a Myra Chanin article in The Huffington Post last month referred to Kaufman as “the Larry David of that day…a major maven of human imperfections.”

Kaufman would share the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for his work with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin, on the musical satire Of Thee I Sing (1932), and with Hart for You Can’t Take It With You (1936). (I will eventually review the latter, now being revived on Broadway with James Earl Jones.)

The influence of Kaufman, as playwright and director, extended not only from every year from 1921 (when his second play, Dulcy, opened) to 1958 (when a comedy he directed, Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet, closed) but even down to the present day. 

Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon are just a few of the comic writers who have cited Kaufman and Hart as major influences on their own style growing up. 

In addition, two shows he wrote in the 1920s for the Marx Brothers, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, were adapted to film, becoming crucial in creating their cinematic persona. 

"My dad gave Groucho his walk and his talk," Kaufman’s daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider said in a 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times.