American Surrealism

by Richard Armstrong

One Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1984 I had a friend's flat to myself and sat down on his moth-eaten carpet in front of his portable black-and-white TV and watched the Marx brothers in The Cocoanuts. I had been a fan of the Marx brothers for years, and the prospect of catching their first, albeit primitive, film was one I relished.

That afternoon I had spent an hour or so with Vanessa, whom my friend and I at the time thought terribly sophisticated and worldly. She was having a nice time talking about herself in the little tea room where we sat. Eager not to miss The Cocoanuts, I invited Vanessa back to share some weed and savour the Marxes' wacky debut. She pursed her lips and declined. To hell with her, I thought, as I strode through the rain past families shopping and couples on sprees. When I got to the flat I put the little electric fire on, made coffee, took a cushion for my back and a blanket to cover my legs. Switching the TV on, I watched as the green glass turned pale grey and the picture emerged.

When I was a teenager in the early '70s, the Radio Times critic Philip Jenkinson had used the term "confection" to describe the kind of Hollywood comedies which appeared in the high '30s but which I would not learn to appreciate until the late '70s. "Confectionery" was a term I had found only on more archaic shop facades. Now it served to describe that spicy blend of risqué chatter and piquant gesture that had delivered Depression audiences from less subtle forms of evil. Appearing in 1929, The Cocoanuts is a much less subtle confection than romantic comedies such as Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise or Mitchell Leisen's Hands across the Table. In fact, it's utterly bonkers. As America faced economic and industrial ruin, this contrivance of jewel thieves, tender young love, madcap chatter, and inept musical interludes must have looked like St. Vitus's dance to anyone on a soup line. That the sound was raucous and sometimes indistinct added to my sense of retrieving something from deep within an archive vault. This Florida hotel with its art deco elevators and lobby fittings transported me to a place that never really existed, an aesthetic moment into which I gladly immersed myself to escape from the Saturday rain.

I had already learned to distinguish between the Paramount Marxes and the overly polished MGM extravaganzas to which the brothers would gravitate in the late '30s. Growing stoned, the anarchy of The Cocoanuts struck me as an American surrealism peaking before giving way to the bald escapism of the plush casino romps of Lubitsch and Leisen. A final plea for avant-garde abandon before the dialogue comedy got its marching orders. I was in a world of Bakhtinian excess in which not one word or gesture was passed without the world being turned on its head. Even at that moment when the heroine weeps because she must marry a man she doesn't love and the mute satyr Harpo proffers her a lollipop, she reacts not by taking it but by putting her head on his shoulder. Even the director's attempt to introduce coherence by re-reading Marxist madness as rational plot seemed forlorn. I was helpless with mirth. Every time the Busby Berkeley-style numbers began, you could tell the players were itching to chuck the plot and go berserk for the camera. At the end the Marxes looked straight at me and waved goodbye. It is a remarkable moment during which the fourth wall of the screen is shattered, players thank me for being there, and a hallowed moviegoing convention goes out of the window.

When I turned the TV off, the room was so still. It was as if a procession of the revelling dead had passed through the flat. The film's raucous themes triggered memories for days. Each time I recalled that afternoon, a Jazz Age troupe burst out of a box in my brain. I wondered what Vanessa would have done if I had offered her a lollipop.

Copyright © Richard Armstrong 2004