Chico Marx - Acting Career

Acting Career

Marx used an Italian persona for his on-stage character; stereotyped ethnic characters were common with vaudevillians. The obvious fact that he was not really Italian was referenced three times on film. In their second feature, Animal Crackers, he recognizes someone he knows to be a shady character impersonating a respected art collector:

Ravelli (Chico): "How is it you got to be Roscoe W. Chandler?"
Chandler: "Say, how did you get to be Italian?"
Ravelli: "Never mind—whose confession is this?"

In Duck Soup, when Chico impersonates Groucho but retains his accent, Margaret Dumont asks what happened to his voice. Chico replies, "Well, maybe sometime I go to Italy and I'm practicing the language." To which Dumont replies, "Your dialect is perfect." However, this statement could have been a ruse on Chico's part to explain his accent and trick Dumont, as he was portraying Groucho rather than himself.

In A Night at the Opera, which begins in Italy, his character, Fiorello, claims not to be Italian, eliciting a surprised look from Groucho:

Driftwood (Groucho): "Well, things certainly seem to be getting better around the country."
Fiorello (Chico): "Well, I wouldn't know about that; I'm a stranger here myself."

A scene in the film Go West, in which Chico attempts to placate an Indian chief of whom Groucho has run afoul, has a line that plays a bit on Chico's lack of Italian nationality, but is more or less proper Marxian wordplay:

S. Quentin Quayle (Groucho): "You can talk Indian?"
Joe Panello (Chico): "I was born in Indianapolis!"

However, there are moments where Chico's characters appear to be genuinely Italian; examples include the film The Big Store, in which his character Ravelli runs into an old friend he worked with in Naples (after a brief misunderstanding due to his accent), the film Monkey Business, in which Chico claims his grandfather sailed with Christopher Columbus, and their very first outing The Cocoanuts, where Mr. Hammer (Groucho) asks him if he knew what an auction was, in which he responds "I come from Italy on the Atlantic Auction!"

Chico was a talented pianist. He originally started playing with only his right hand and fake playing with his left, as his teacher did so herself. Chico eventually acquired a better teacher and learned to play the piano correctly. As a young boy, he gained jobs playing piano to earn money for the Marx family. Sometimes Chico even worked playing in two places at the same time. He would acquire the first job with his piano-playing skills, work for a few nights, and then substitute Harpo on one of the jobs. (During their boyhood, Chico and Harpo looked so much alike that they were often mistaken for each other.)

In the brothers' last film, Love Happy, Chico plays a piano and violin duet with 'Mr. Lyons' (Leon Belasco). Lyons plays some ornate riffs on the violin; Chico comments, "Look-a, Mister Lyons, I know you wanna make a good impression, but please don't-a play better than me!"

In a record album about the Marx Brothers, narrator Gary Owens stated that "although Chico's technique was limited, his repertoire was not." The opposite was true of Harpo, who reportedly could only play two tunes on the piano, which typically thwarted Chico's scam and resulted in both brothers' being fired.

Groucho Marx once said that Chico never practiced the pieces he played. Instead, before performances he soaked his fingers in hot water. He was known for 'shooting' the keys of the piano. He played passages with his thumb up and index finger straight, like a gun, as part of the act. Other examples of his keyboard flamboyance are found in A Night at the Opera (1935), wherein he plays the piano for a group of delighted children, and A Night in Casablanca (1946), where he plays a rendition of "Roll Out the Barrel".

Chico became manager of the Marx Brothers after their mother, Minnie, died. As manager, he cut a deal to get the Marx Brothers a percentage of a film's gross receipts— the first of its kind in Hollywood. Furthermore, it was Chico's connection with Irving Thalberg of MGM that led to Thalberg's signing the Brothers when they were in a career slump after Duck Soup (1933), the last of their films for Paramount Pictures.

For a while in the 1930s and 1940s, Chico led a big band. Singer Mel Tormé began his professional career singing with the Chico Marx Orchestra.