Interviewed in the early 1970s, Groucho Marx explained why he had stopped working with his brothers two decades earlier, bringing down the curtain on the greatest comedy team in movie history. “By the time we got around to making those last films I was close to 60,” he said. “I found myself hanging upside down and doing all sorts of crazy things a man that age shouldn’t be doing. I had saved my money and I was bored. I knew the films we were making weren’t any good, so why bother? So I told the boys that I was going to quit and I did.”
Chico fares much better when he pairs up with one of his siblings. On The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1952, he and Harpo revive their piano duet from The Big Store and the surefire routine—dating back to their 1914 vaudeville show Home Again—in which a cop, suspecting them of theft, pumps Harpo’s hand and he stares stupidly into space as an endless stream of cutlery drops out of his other sleeve. “Inside Beverly Hills,” an episode of the series The Sunday Spectacular, features a brief encounter between Chico and Groucho, who remarks, “I’m sure I used to know him. If I’m not mistaken, we used to have the same mother.” And the set includes the entire broadcast of “The Incredible Jewel Robbery,” a 1959 episode of General Electric Theater (introduced by Ronald Reagan) with Chico and Harpo acting out the title caper in pantomime; Groucho shows up at the very end to deliver the only line of dialogue: “We won’t talk until we see our lawyer!” The three brothers would never appear onscreen together again.
