Word: marx
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Joseph Stalin had much to celebrate; he also had much to remember. When he was born, the son of a drunken Georgian shoemaker and his peasant wife, Queen Victoria was on the throne, Karl Marx was a penniless scribbler, and the world seemed to find it a good deal easier to tell the difference between right & wrong than it does today. Stalin built an empire of a kind that Victoria could not have visualized even in her nightmares; he forged Marx's foggy philosophy into an iron knife with which to carve the earth; and he swamped mankind with...
...movie is, in effect, a series of gag situation. While this may be all right for the Marx Brothers, who work on the saturation principle, it is not all right here where the material is so thin...
...chats with them between questions. He encourages them to tell their life stories, and as they talk, he festoons the impromptu dialogue with strings of rapid-fire gags, or simply guides his victims into verbal traps and lets them writhe. "Women are the best ones on this program," says Marx, carefully flicking cigar ashes on his grey slacks. "They talk a lot. And the older women talk more than the younger ones. They make great contestants, but I'd hate to be married to one of them...
Incorrigible Punster Marx often uses the double play on words-no matter how obvious it is-to make his misanthropic points ("I used to think a dowry was where you got milk-until I got married. I got milked plenty then"). He can affect poor hearing if it will make a gag go: once he pretended to think a woman described herself as a "monster" instead of a "spinster" ("Oh well," he said, winding up the whole discussion, "there isn't a great deal of difference...
After the breakup of the stage & screen team of the Marx Brothers (The Coconuts, Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera), Groucho was on & off radio for ten years before anyone found him particularly funny on the air. Then Producer John Guedel saw him ad lib for ten minutes on a network show when Bob Hope accidentally dropped his script. Shortly thereafter Guedel put Groucho into You Bet Your Life. He still has some qualms: "Having Groucho as emcee of a quiz show is like using a Cadillac to haul coal...