He shakes the hand of a cop looking for stolen silverware in Animal Crackers, and all the cups and plates and saucers, forks and knives and spoons come falling out of his sleeve. When heвЂ™s asked for a dime for some coffee, he takes out a steaming cup of coffee. вЂњYou canвЂ™t burn a candle at both ends,вЂќ Groucho tells him in Horse Feathers, and he reaches into a pocket and pulls out a candle burning at both ends. His coat, for example, rumpled and voluminous, seems to have infinite pockets, holding everything he might need, from an alarm clock to an acetylene torch. While everyone else in Marx Brothers movies lives in our world, the real world, he has access to a sort of magic. To me he seemed like some mythical figure, Puck maybe, or Pan. Then he recounts all the times in his life that he acted like the manic character in the films.) (In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he says that he is really that harpist, not the manic character he plays in the films. (If the dialog is boring, why not change it?) But you could spend all of A Night at the Opera just watching HarpoвЂ™s expressions: looking amazed when he gets in line for dinner and his plate is heaped with spaghetti, his amazement growing as the food is piled higher and higher his evil grin as he finds himself in a room with three sleeping men with beards and a pair of scissors his concentration as he plays the harp, the way he seems to understand the harp and what the two of them can do together. Groucho and Chico were very funny in these movies, the more so since, as I later learned, they had made up a lot of their dialog. If a manВ was being unbearably pompous, why not eat his tie - with mustard, of course? Now I saw that there were other ways of thinking, of being, that everything that seemed unchanging and permanent didnвЂ™t have to be, that you could rebel, shake things up. I wasВ a dutiful kid, getting good grades and doing what was expected of me, not thinking of very much outside of home and school. I saw my first Marx BrothersвЂ™ movies, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, on my twelfth birthday, and my life changed forever.

Marx brothers a day at the races