THE COCOANUTS (1929) B/W 90m dirs: Robert Florey, Joseph Santley

w/Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Mary Eaton, Oscar Shaw, Kay Francis, Margaret Dumont, Cyril Ring, Basil Ruysdael

From The Movie Guide: "The greatest of zanies, the Marx Brothers, perform with dizzying speed in this farcical and nearly plotless romp through a Florida hotel, ostensibly dealing with the arrival and departure of would-be millionaires getting richer or poorer during the Florida land boom of the late 1920s. The mayhem is often side-splitting in this 'pure' Marx vehicle, where the love story is strictly incidental. While they basically kept to the routines audiences had enjoyed in the original play by George S. Kaufman and Irving Berlin, the boys were given their usual freedom to ad lib; these bits were constantly changing, even during the shooting of the film. Berlin himself cut many tunes that were never sung since the brothers cavalierly changed the material.

"This is a crude, shapeless talkie, a technically unsophisticated film in which the sound is static and the camera immobile, with the comedians leaping into the set scenes. Yet the boys are there in all their frenetic glory. Harpo honks his horn for the first time, chasing but never catching a scantily clad cutie; he would pursue her in vain for decades to come, while his brothers chewed up the sets and spat out laughter. THE COCOANUTS was officially the debut of the madcap brothers, although they had appeared in an obscure silent production, HUMOR RISK, which is now an apparently lost film."