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Chico pushed for the Marx Brothers to get a Broadway show when they were the highest paid act in vaudeville. Throughout the Marx Brothers’ career he was always the brother who pushed them to the next opportunity – often convincing his less confident brothers. For Chico Marx, television was the next place where money could be made. It was a time of unlimited opportunity for both aging and up-and-coming stars. The new twist with television was that a performer could reach a larger audience in one night than he had in years on the road in vaudeville. A slightly younger generation of vaudevillians, like Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, found their greatest success on television, and used the medium to establish long careers. Buster Keaton also enjoyed a comeback in early television. In 1949, television provided opportunities to people like sixty-three year old Ed Wynn, who debuted as the host of one of television’s first variety shows.
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Early television variety shows were structured in much the same way as a traditional eight-act vaudeville show, so the fledgling medium turned to older – and in some cases forgotten – stars from the vaudeville era.
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Television posed a threat to the movie and radio businesses, and there was a brief time when established stars were reluctant to appear in the new medium. The resulting film, A Night In Casablanca is the best of their later films, but they immediately retired again. The opportunity for the brothers to reunite in 1946 appealed to all of them – Chico in particular because being a Marx Brother paid a lot more than being a bandleader. Harpo mostly performed for servicemen during World War II – as had Groucho and Chico. Radio success eluded Groucho, who had become a frequent guest star on other people’s shows when his brief run as the host of Pabst Blue Ribbon Town ended. Chico’s band was successful – but not successful enough to finance the compulsive gambling habit he’d cultivated since childhood. By 1942 the brothers had all made other plans – Chico would front an orchestra, Groucho would try his hand at radio while doing some writing, and Harpo would raise a family and work when the spirit moved him. Their last M-G-M film, The Big Store was hardly a fitting farewell and did not invoke many memories of their best work at Paramount a decade earlier. When the Marx Brothers first announced their retirement from the screen in 1941, they meant it.
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But the end of their film career was perfectly timed for a collision with the birth of television. Television had arrived, but the middle-aged Marx Brothers – Groucho 59, Harpo 61 and Chico 62 – were not poised to take on the new medium – at least not collectively. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book.” – Groucho Marx, August 1950īy the time the Marx Brothers’ last movie, Love Happy, premiered in 1949, the brothers had been working on stage, screen and radio for nearly fifty years. “ I must say I find television very educational.
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This essay was first published in the 2014 Shout! Factory DVD release, The Marx Brothers TV Collection.