Groucho In Vienna

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31115, 19 July 1966, Page 9

Groucho In Vienna

(By

HILDE SPIEL.

in the

"Guardian” Reprinted by arrangement)

Two old tramcars had been hired to take dignitaries and important visitors to the opening of Vienna’s festival of comic films, the “Viennale.” Knowing the sauve qui peut attitude here displayed on these occasions, one feels it must have been the focal worthies who pushed dear brittle old parchmentcoloured Groucho Marx off the first tram and left him waiting for the next to the bitter winds of March. Hl in bed thereafter, he missed most of the six uproarious days which gave Marxism a new meaning to Austria. Under its energetic director Peter Kubelka, the Vienna Film Museum had collected all but four of the 15 Marx brothers movies, to show them in chronological order during the festival. Night after night, an audience of old initiates and young neophytes ranging from the British Ambassador to all the bearded beats to town—joined that endless Mad Hatter’s tea party to growing addiction. Seen in consecutive order, how do these films strike us today? Their rise can be traced from early movies like “Animal Crackers,” “Monkey Business,” and “Duck Soup” to the alleged masterpiece, “A

Night at the Opera.” Yet many of us would stop short of this first film made for M.G.M. and stick to the old Paramount pictures. Irving Thailberg it was who “At the Opera” brought law and order to the Irrational goings-on, introduced the terrible tenor Allan Jones at whose sight and sound pre-sent-day audiences recoil and, incidentally, made three million dollars for the brothers, twice as much as “Duck Soup” (that prophetic skit on dictatorship) had been able to earn. Byzantine decline set to with the still rightly famous “Day at the Races.”

And so, in ever diminishing returns, to the "Night in Casablanca,” after which majestic, magnificent Margaret Dumont dropped out for good, until in “Love Happy” (1949) Marilyn Monroe made her entry. Did he foresee, so Groucho was asked by the press after he had emerged from his sickbed, Marilyn’s rise to stardom when she was engaged as a 50-dollar bitplayer in this latest of their films? Yes, said the wistful survivor, for “she was the greatest walker I ever saw.” At the age of 71, Groucho, son of Samuel Marx and Minnie Schoenberg, now is the lime witness of their family’s fame, too sad to own

or look at any of the pictures —“Harpo’s widow has six or seven of them, but for me they hold too many memories”—a tired man, fond of reading and writing books, who just gave 400 letters written by and to him to the Library of Congress.

MOZARD CYCLE Ingrid Haebler, who is ranked high among Mozart pianists, is currently recording all the piano concertos. One of the first recordings to the cycle will be broadcast by 3YC at 8.29 this evening, Piano Concerto No. 16 to D, with Colin Davis conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.