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Highly entertaining, surreal full colour. A must for Dali, Marx Brother's fans. History of the research for this lost film included in the book. Mentions of David Lynch's Ronny Rocket, Piranesi, Gustave Moreau's Prometheus, Harry Langdon, Matt Sennett, Buster Keaton, Garcia Lorca, and the Mae West Lips sofa.
 
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AChild | 8 andere besprekingen | Jun 29, 2023 |
The only good thing about this book is its title.

The first obstacle to overcome is the longwinded introduction penned by Josh Frank. It provides an explanation of just how big an interesting genius he thinks he is. Frank seems convinced he is one of only a handful of people on planet Earth who remember who the Marx Brothers are (if that were true, there would be almost zero market for this book, so…yeah, there’s that). He also seems to be under the impression that since he has been a fan of Harpo Marx since childhood he is somehow entitled to some sort of medal and a designation as an extraordinarily fascinating individual. The reader is also subjected to a lot of heavy handed plugs for all of Frank’s other books. Ugh.

Frank’s research is also highly suspect. He claims that Harpo went on a tour of Europe pining away for his future wife Susan. I read Harpo Speaks a couple of years ago, and Frank’s comments are simply not accurate.

Harpo himself writes clearly in his autobiography that—after the tragic death of the woman he hoped to make his wife—he had no intention of ever getting married. His so-called ‘friends’ had other ideas and kept throwing him in the path of single females.

Susan was a failed starlet who was very pushy, manipulative and refused to take no for an answer. She hounded Harpo mercilessly until he got so fed up he fled to Europe in an effort to escape her. When he returned, he found that she had hijacked the renovation of his home and aggressively made it clear she had every intention of moving in. Harpo, who comes across as a very passive and easygoing personality, seemed to just sort of wear down and get dragged unenthusiastically to the altar. Harpo proceeds to subtly—yet vividly—depict her as an aggressive shrew who dominated his life and made him miserable.

From the moment Susan is first introduced in Harpo Speaks, it’s evident that—in spite of his attempts to put up a good front—Harpo really didn’t seem to like his wife all that much. The fact that Josh Frank seems determined to infer that they were a glorious love match is just odd, and doesn’t reflect well on his understanding of Harpo Marx’s life. It makes me seriously question the validity of anything else Frank has to say when he is able to so matter-of-factly get things wrong.

Anyway, after wading through all of that putrid hot air, and noticing how sub-par the artwork is, I almost gave up on the book entirely. In retrospect, I wish I had.

Not surprisingly, the plot makes very little sense. A young Spanish refugee, Jimmy (as portrayed by a Harpo Marx who is nothing like Harpo Marx), is a tremendously successful—yet sensitive—businessman. Jimmy is engaged to a vulgar trollop called Linda who constantly cheats on him. While they are at a nightclub, Jimmy is introduced to the obscenely wealthy and beautiful—yet enigmatic—Surrealist Woman, and he instantly falls for her and dumps the infuriated Linda.

As Jimmy and the Surrealist Woman fall in love, the world is absorbed by chaos and absurdity. A war then ensues between Linda and the Surrealist Woman, and the world is swallowed up by ridiculous warfare—warrior kittens, flaming giraffes, roads blocked by rotting food, etc.

All the while, the Surrealist Woman is accompanied by Groucho and Chico Marx acting as her assistants/sidekicks, planning all of her surrealist-imagining parties and spouting off inane witticisms and nonsensical bon mots at lightning speed.

The book is supposedly an attempt to submerge the reader into a 1937 film-going experience by re-creating as authentically as possible a representation of a 1930s screenplay written by Salvador Dali for the Marx Brothers which was never produced. Dali purportedly wrote this film specifically as a starring vehicle for Harpo Marx because he was such a fan and personal friend of the comedian. However, all of these claims were terribly misleading.

In the first place, although we are asked to pretend we are attending a film viewing in 1937, there are references to the 1980s and pagers and Ronald Reagan as president. At one point, a couple of hick farmers are even shown to be watching a television. Although these are presented in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, it detracts from the period atmosphere & 1930s experience the authors were professing to try to create. It was a colossal fail.

Secondly, we are supposed to believe that ‘Jimmy’ is Harpo Marx which makes no sense—at all. Jimmy talks; Harpo never did. To believe that any movie would be produced with a loquacious Harpo Marx just defies rational thought. And Jimmy looks more like River Phoenix than Harpo Marx, which is just silly. Jimmy transforms into the signature Harpo Marx costume towards the end of the story, but that doesn’t work either.

I wondered throughout the story why Dali would try to push a square peg like Harpo Marx into the round hole of the Jimmy character. It turns out that Dali actually had no such idea. Frank includes a few pages from the original Dali manuscript at the end of Giraffes on Horseback Salad. In the authentic manuscript, Dali’s ‘Jimmy’ is his own character, while Groucho, Chico, AND Harpo act as the Surrealist Woman’s sidekicks. Why Frank and his partners decided to alter this major element of the story is a mystery, especially since it doesn’t work. If they had followed the original manuscript as much as possible (which they alleged to be doing) this book might have potentially turned out a little bit better.

At the end of the day, the vague concept behind the screenplay and this book is a lot more interesting than the final product. I have to agree wholeheartedly with Louis B. Mayer and Groucho Marx who said this movie would never “play”. It certainly would never play in Peoria; it’s too much of a godawful mess.

I totally expected this book to be strange; I did NOT expect it to be so utterly boring, tedious, and inaccurate. Very disappointing.
… (meer)
 
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BrierleaHall | 8 andere besprekingen | Jun 7, 2023 |
Surreal. But what else would you expect?
 
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fernandie | 8 andere besprekingen | Sep 15, 2022 |
As an admirer of both the Marx Brothers and Salvador Dalí (and who isn't?) I was surprised that I had never heard of their abortive Hollywood film project Giraffes on Horseback Salad until finding this book, which resurrects and fulfills it in the form of a graphic novel. In the "unmade movies" department of my cultural awareness, it now has a roost next to the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, which also involves Dalí, strangely enough.

Josh Frank is responsible for the research and reconstruction of the film from the preliminary script, studio pitch, and notes by Dalí, and he also supplies most of the front matter and end matter with notes on his process, history of the project, Dalí's relevant biography, and related speculation. There is also a note from comedian Tim Heidecker, who helped to flesh out the reconstructed feature, and a short essay on "Dalí and Harpo" by Bill Marx, Harpo's son.

The artist for the central graphic novel is Manuela Pertega. Her drawings are expressive and effective, and I was especially pleased by the large full-page panels and two-page spreads depicting irruptions of the surreal. Her ability to represent the Marx Brothers as comics characters unfortunately falls well short of the lofty standard set by Dave Sim in Cerebus, but is nevertheless a reasonable success. Happily, she is in no way constrained by cinematic feasibility of the 1930s. It would be a treat to see a short based on her visual imagination in one of the more extreme scenes, now that digital effects make nearly any concept realizable on the screen.

Dalí's "film" tells the story of Jimmy, an expatriate Spanish aristocrat in the US, who is torn between the forces of mundane power and transformative dream, represented in the persons of his fiancée Linda and the mysterious Woman Surreal, respectively. It includes several musical numbers, designed after the American stage and cinematic tradition to be easily abstracted from their narrative context. Although there is no musical scoring in the book, the verses are hypothetically realized with never-written tunes by Cole Porter.

I enjoyed this book for its historical perspectives and creative efforts.
… (meer)
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paradoxosalpha | 8 andere besprekingen | Jul 3, 2021 |

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Werken
4
Leden
256
Populariteit
#89,547
Waardering
½ 3.4
Besprekingen
13
ISBNs
12

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