Newly-Discovered Marx Bros. Footage!

"Marx Bros. & The Golden Age of Vaudeville," a one-week festival including brand new restorations of the team's first five feature comedies, along with special programs devoted to the halcyon days of vaudeville, will run at Film Forum from Friday, September 23 through Thursday, September 29.

Tickets and showtimes are available here: http://filmforum.org/series/the-marx-brothers-the-golden-age-of-vaudeville-series

Universal Studios, owner of the pre-1948 Paramount Pictures sound film library, has restored the Brothers' five Paramount classics: The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933). All five are included in the festival (paired in double features), along with the team's two best MGM comedies, A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937).

The new restoration of Animal Crackers includes footage unseen here for over 85 years. In its year-long restoration, Universal utilized a 35mm composite nitrate dupe negative from the British Film Institute. The negative not only contained the best resolution of any other known element, but also contained long-unseen footage excised from U.S. prints in the 1930s due to censorship cuts, including a ribald line in Groucho's signature "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" number and his song and dance upon returning from Africa, Harpo pulling perennial Marx foil Margaret Dumont's slip out from under her dress, Groucho telling a joke about a "shotgun wedding", and more.

The Marx Brothers - Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo (and Gummo, only briefly part of the live act) - were born in New York City to immigrant parents. Driven by their stage mother (later dramatized in the Broadway show Minnie's Boys), they began in show business at a young age. Their uncle, vaudeville headliner Al Shean (of the famous team of Gallagher & Shean), wrote some of their earliest sketches and helped them develop their distinct comic personae: wise-cracking Groucho; mute Harpo; dialectician Chico; and romantic interest Zeppo. The team performed for 20 years before making their first feature film, an all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing adaptation of their Broadway hit The Cocoanuts.

In addition to the Marx Brothers movies, Film Forum's repertory director Bruce Goldstein will present two illustrated talks on vaudeville entertainers:

In "Vaudeville 101," originally presented at this year's TCM Festival in Hollywood, Goldstein shows how vaudeville nurtured movie icons like the Marx Bros., Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire, Mae West, Judy Garland, and even Cary Grant - and left an indelible mark on golden age Hollywood.

In his "Tribute to the Nicholas Brothers," Goldstein, who wrote and co-produced a 1992 documentary on the team, celebrates African-American dancers Harold and Fayard Nicholas. Known for effortless balletic moves, elegant tap dancing, perfect rhythms, and jaw-dropping leaps, flips, and splits, the Olympian brothers are in the end impossible to categorize. The dancer's dancers, their fans have included Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine, Gregory and Maurice Hines, and Michael and Janet Jackson.

Ron Hutchinson, founder of The Vitaphone Project, a group primarily devoted to finding lost vaudeville shorts produced by Warner Bros.' Vitaphone division (mostly at their Avenue M Studios in Brooklyn), will present two special programs:

"A Night at the Palace: Vitaphone's Greatest Hits" includes some of the greatest vaudeville shorts of all time, including Shaw and Lee in "The Beau Brummels" and Burns and Allen in "Lamb Chops," along with shorts starring Baby Rose Marie, Trixie Friganza, Mayer and Evans, Al Jolson (in a sound film made a year before The Jazz Singer), and many others.

"Unseen Vitaphone Varieties, Part I," a program of all-new restorations from UCLA Film & Television Archive and Warner Bros., including long-forgotten acts like Edison and Gregory, The Croonaders, The Big Paraders, and Ulis and Clarke, along with Yiddish theater icon Molly Picon. Film Forum's presentation marks the shorts' first screenings since the 1930s. (Part II will be screened on Tuesday, October 25 - separate press release to follow.)

On the closing night of the festival, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will co-present "From Bowery to Hollywood: Vaudeville's Legacy," curated by Alejandra Espasande and Kelly Kreft of the Academy Film Archive and presented by Ms. Espasande. The show explores the evolution of vaudeville comedy - tracing its origins back to circus, honky-tonks and burlesque - and its influence on early talkies. The program compiles rare trailers, newsreels, and feature excerpts culled from the Packard Humanities Collection at the Academy.

"Marx Bros. & The Golden Age of Hollywood" has been programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum's Director of Repertory Programming.