Monkey Business was the Marx Brothers’ first film written directly for the screen, and it let Groucho run wild on an ocean liner.
Monkey Business was released in 1931, directed by Norman Z. McLeod. It was the first Marx Brothers film not based on a stage show. The brothers played stowaways on an ocean liner, hiding in barrels and in the gangster Alky Briggs’s cabin, and Groucho’s character spent much of the film pretending to be other people, including Briggs himself.
The film’s humour was freer than in the stage adaptations, because it was not tied to musical numbers or to a theatre plot. Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and Harpo’s silent mischief worked together in a series of scenes that had little to do with the story, and that was the point: the Marx Brothers were the story.
Monkey Business was a success, and it established the pattern for their Paramount films: a thin plot, a setting that could be disrupted, and Groucho at the centre, talking his way out of trouble and into it again.