Mikael Uhlin's Marxology @ marx-brothers.org

The Cocoanuts

This was the Marxes' second show on Broadway. It was almost filmed by United Artists in 1928, but luckily it wasn't, because how would a silent movie of this musical have been? Instead, Paramount filmed it the year after as one of the first talkies. It reportedly ran as much as 140 minutes at a preview but was cut back to 96 minutes for release. Zeppo has less to do here than in later films and his part may have been reduced in cutting. One moment may be traced thanks to the stage script. When the bellboys are protesting against being unpaid, Zeppo tells them that Groucho has yet to arise at four in the afternoon. His comforting postscript, that Groucho always gets up on Wednesday, precedes the manager's arrival. Glenn Mitchell suggest that this scene was shot but deleted, as Groucho makes his entrance descending the stairs, still putting on his coat, allowing time to fend off his staff before meeting a train at 4.15. The print that MCA-TV sent out for television was obviously cut together from a number of battered negatives or old prints and runs about 92 minutes. Given the poor condition of the material that has survived, it's very doubtful that any of the missing footage has survived.

In the preview-length print of the film, Groucho supposedly sang the number A Little Bungalow (composed by Irving Berlin and according to Alexander Woollcott "clever, insidious, engaging") while courting Margaret Dumont. In the play, A Little Bungalow was "the inevitable duet" (Woollcott), sang by characters Polly Potter and Robert Adams. The song is set up through Groucho's dialogue ("Ah, if we could find a little bungalow, huh....oh, of course I know we could find one, but maybe the people wouldn't get out") but the film fails to deliver. Although replaced by another Irving Berlin-original (When My Dreams Come True), The Cocoanuts has gone to history as the only Irving Berlin-play that didn't produce a hit tune.
In his encyclopedia, Glenn Mitchell says that the song Monkey Doodle Do was written in 1913 but in an email I received on 2 February 2002, Kay Lhota points out that the 1913 Irving Berlin song Monkey Doodle Do is not anything like his 1925 song Monkey Doodle Do. Kay says that these songs have a completely different set of lyrics and are written in different keys.

When The Cocoanuts had closed on Broadway, the Marx Brothers made a vaudeville tour with an adaption of the concluding party scene named Spanish Knights. It opened at the Metropolitan Theater in Los Angeles on 9 February 1928 and toured until April the same year.