A Film Canon

 

 

It's questionable whether Monkey Business improves upon Animal Crackers. Although the narrative is much tighter, it's also less systematically subverted, mainly because of a reconfiguration of Groucho's comic position. In the earlier film, he is almost always paired with the same foil (Margaret Dumont), creating a comic intimacy that finds clearest expression in her bemused, ambiguous detachment from his sadistic jibes, thereby opened up as a kind of perverse flirtation or, at the very least, a camp miscommunication. Here, however, Groucho's foils are various - and, in many cases, detached from any romantic potential - meaning that this camp dimension is deflected away from the sadistic exchange and back into his persona, while his sadism is transferred to Harpo, who, taking it to ever more violent, psychopathic ends, undoubtedly steals the show. That said, this personality exchange is part of a more concerted attempt to construe the brothers as a trio - from their intial stowaway in identical barrels, to their attempts to leave the same ship by each posing as facets of Maurice Chevalier's personality - in which Harpo and Chico function as symmetrical adjuncts to Groucho. This shared identity allows the brothers to develop a series of sketches based around a conflation of stillness and movement - or, alternatively, a lack of net movement - whose narrative corollary is an enhanced sense that their anarchy is capable of granting a more satisfactory order to the world, albeit unintentionally.