MONKEY BUSINESS directed by Norman Z.McLeod (USA, 1931)
After two movies based on vaudeville shows, Monkey Business was the first Marx Brothers film written specially for the big screen. It’s included on the syllabus of the The Language of Hollywood Coursera MOOC to show how, with the coming of sound, many films of the 1930s were not dependent on innovative auteurs but relied on the ability of the players to generate the entertainment.
Effectively, this means that the director’s job is reduced to simply pointing the camera and relying on the timing of the performers.
The Marx Brothers had honed their comic skills on Broadway and knew exactly what audiences wanted, as is proven by the huge success of this movie.
Theirs is the essence of situation comedy with the specific situations here being a ship, a high-class party and a barn. Most of the action takes place on board an ocean liner where the four brothers are stowaways. Continue reading
FILM : A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION by Michael Wood (Oxford University Press)
Through You Tube, Netflix, Mubi and countless other legal and illegal online resources we have the history of film at our disposal that has never been possible before. There are pros and cons to this that you could argue about until the cows come home but Wood prefers to end on a deliberately positive note : “Film, in its magical animating mode doesn’t define, fix or even represent anything, doesn’t capture, hold or freeze, it lets its objects run, lends them the life we thought they had lost; and shaped or ragged, it mixes what we remember with what we dream and offers us an image of movement that we often can’t quite believe and almost never can deny” .
