Monkey Business (1931) on Netflix
Four stowaways hide in barrels in the cargo hold of an ocean liner bound for America. Their singing gives them away, and the ship's officers chase Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Four stowaways conceal themselves in wooden barrels aboard an ocean liner sailing to America. Their singing of "Sweet Adeline" reveals where they are, and the crew spends the crossing trying to catch them as they run wild through the ship. Chico and Harpo pass themselves off as barbers and shave the mustache off an officer while he sleeps. Groucho and Chico shut the captain inside a closet and eat his meal. Groucho hides in the stateroom of gangster Alky Briggs and courts Briggs's wife, Lucille.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Monkey Business (1931)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz warned writers S. J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone that working with the Marx Brothers would be "an ordeal by fire", calling them "mercurial, devious, and ungrateful" and telling them they would rue taking the assignment.
- Monkey Business was banned in Ireland because censors feared it would encourage anarchic tendencies; it was passed on January 8, 1932, with 16 unspecified cuts to the script, including characters falling over each other in a dance scene.
- Groucho dismissed the original script by S. J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone with the words "It stinks," thinking Perelman too intellectual for the brothers' manic style; the final script took five months, and director Norman Z. MacLeod said up to 12 writers worked on it, with Eddie Cantor contributing when he visited the set.
- Monkey Business was the first Marx Brothers film written specifically for film and the first shot in Hollywood; their first two films were made at Paramount Pictures' Astoria Studios in Queens, New York City.
- In the passport sequence, each of the four brothers impersonates singer Maurice Chevalier and sings "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me"; the mute Harpo did his by miming to a hidden phonograph tied to his back.
- Monkey Business was the first Marx Brothers film not to feature Margaret Dumont; their female foil this time was comedian Thelma Todd, who also starred in the brothers' next film, Horse Feathers.
