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The Marx Brothers: Swordfish Collection (a TM2YC FanEdit series)

Patrik Stash

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first off,...thank you,this is long overdue

second...horse feathers is rather badly damaged during the scene in thelma todds lounge were all the boys enter and exit,so many censor cuts have left a badly scarred print(only full source was owned by the bbc,but that was in the 60's and is no doubt long gone by now)

third...i attempted a fanedit of a day at the races a while back,and while you may see love happy as being the slimest remaining marx movie,i got that down to 40 minutes of pure funny(the story was lost but that never hurt)
and for a while i toyed with the idea of cutting circus,go west and the big store into 3 half hours as they are generally the weakest of them all

fourth...thank you again....and good luck,im a huge marx fan and really looking forward to watching these...a night in casablanca will be a joy
 

TM2YC

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Patrik Stash said:
first off,...thank you,this is long overdue

second...horse feathers is rather badly damaged during the scene in thelma todds lounge were all the boys enter and exit,so many censor cuts have left a badly scarred print(only full source was owned by the bbc,but that was in the 60's and is no doubt long gone by now)

third...i attempted a fanedit of a day at the races a while back,and while you may see love happy as being the slimest remaining marx movie,i got that down to 40 minutes of pure funny(the story was lost but that never hurt)
and for a while i toyed with the idea of cutting circus,go west and the big store into 3 half hours as they are generally the weakest of them all

fourth...thank you again....and good luck,im a huge marx fan and really looking forward to watching these...a night in casablanca will be a joy

Thanks for the response,

I won't be restoring any footage since I don't think any footage is available to restore. Also 'Night At The Opera' was slashed to pieces to remove all mention of Italy when the US was at war with that country. Removal of all Italian refrences from a film half set in Italy with 5 of the main cast playing Italians must have been severe. Or perhaps it made it what it is, a pure comedy masterpiece with all the backstory stripped out??? With mangled films like that and 'Horsefeathers' I'll be attempting to smooth out the edits if that's possible. There's very little editing needed of the story of both those films.

Re 'Day At The Races': I will be cutting very little, maybe a heavy trim of 'Blue Venetian Waters' which isn't the strongest song. I will be trimmig the illjudged blackface gag at the stable. It's a little grain of sand in the mix that has always irked me. As the message of the film is anti-rascist, with the finale of the film being a huge parade of dirt poor Jewish and Black folks celebrating making the rich white establishment look like asses lol.

Re 'Love Happy': Harpo is on fire in that film, the routine where he's catching tins in his pockets is classic. But the story about the Broadway show is just awful and will need heavily trimmed. But I still want a coherant film at the end, not just a compilation of the best bits.

Re 'At The Circus' and 'Go West': Probably the films I've watched the least. The stories are very weak so will be heavily cut. I do remember some fine material though, like the train station farce from 'Go West' and of course 'Lydia' from 'At The Circus'.

Re 'The Big Store' and 'A Night In Casablanca': Of the post Opera films I think these are the two best. 'The Big Store' has many great routines including 'Sing While You Sell', rollerskating and best of all when Chico tries to sell a large family a bed. Of the later films 'A Night In Casablanca' probably has the strongest plot and a great villian. Also Groucho's lines are laugh out loud funny, for example...


I must have another crack at 'Animal Crackers'. Got a bit fed up because I've tried to rip, then recut it twice already and it keeps having visual and audio errors. There is something odd about the source DVD that I don't quite understand. I'll have to have a third try.

btw, found a clip of Harpo on TV in 1959, he's still got it!

 

Moshmothma

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Great idea! I am all for these edits! Please persist with Animal Crackers...easily one of the best of the Marx Brothers comedies (tied with Day at the Races in my head). Looking forward to the series..
 

Vultural

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Something that might tie in with Monkey Business,
Episode from Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, the ocean trip -

 

TM2YC

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Vultural said:
Something that might tie in with Monkey Business,
Episode from Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, the ocean trip -

Only took me a month to reply :p

There were these brilliant MB impersonators in Britain who recorded lost/unused scripts from 'Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel' for the radio. I had the rare honour of seeing them do a live touring show recreating 'Animal Crackers' on the stage when I was younger. It was amazing as they had the costumes, the voices (Not Harpo anyway, but the honking was authentic!) and the mannerisms down brilliantly and they knew the material so well that they would improvise and play with the audience and work in gags from other films. One of the funiest nights of comedy I've ever seen.:)


Anyway, I've suddenly got the enthusiasm back for this project. I've started AC from scratch for a third time and so far (!!TOUCH WOOD!!) the glitches are not happening. It 'should' take no time at all to finish, since I've got a detailed time-stamped cutlist, meaning I know exactly what to cut and change. Plus it was only 20 or so cuts, a very light edit befitting a stone cold classic.

I might use this rare appearance at the end to trail 'Monkey Business'...

 

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Rendering AC DVD. Fingers crossed.

fa_110_harpomarx970.jpg
 

TM2YC

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Qapla'!!!:eek:

The DVD of 'Animal Crackers' is finally edited (Without strange glitches!), rendered, uploaded and finished on the third attempt!:) Here is the cover again...



(^ Click full size version)

And here is the cutlist:

- Minimal trims to the 'Stolen painting' subplot. Without removing any of the Brothers.
- Cut the two 'Stolen painting' scenes back together to highlight their farcical nature
- Sharpened the image throughout (The print is of a variable quality)
- Smoothed out some of the primitive cuts and shots where possible. While still preserving the look of a film from this period.

00.00.00 Added TM2YC and Swordfish idents
00.00.12 Adjusted framing of opening credits to match rest of film
00.16.01 Fade to black shortened and Groucho/Rittenhouse scene brought forward
00.21.20 Hives' dialogue shortened
00.24.58 POV shot of painting added
00.25.00 2nd half of painting discussion blended back in
00.26.05 POV shot of painting removed and two shot recropped
00.26.30 Strange camera pan removed
00.47.10 Partially smoothed out the rough cut from Chico/Harpo to Mrs Rittenhouse
00.57.21 Hives sneaking and intro to unveiling shortened
00.57.41 Partially smoothed out the rough sound cut from painting to couple
00.57.45 Exposition dialogue trimmed
00.59.10 Start of scheming scene trimmed
01.00.22 Hives' final line and start of painting search trimmed
01.00.57 Lovers' song removed
01.04.23 Fade to black shortened
01.26.43 Introduction to Rittenhouse/Chandler scene trimmed
01.33.09 Trailer for 'Monkey Business' added to the end

Original Length: 97 minutes
FanEdit Length: 93 minutes
Removed: 4 minutes

It's quite a light edit with the romantic song being one of the few major cuts. There have been a few trims to the exposition where possible without hacking the film up.


On a less happy note my R1DVD drive has broken so I can't edit any more MB films for the time being.:-(
 

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I've got a USB R1 DVD drive now so I can resume this project. :)

I've decided to drop the chronological tackling of the 13 films and skip right to the end with perhaps the least of the Marx Bros films 1949's 'Love Happy'. Then I'll do a quick fix on 1931's 'Monkey Business' followed by a heavy edit of 1946's 'A Night in Casablanca' and so on until I get to the mid career 'Room Service'. Alternating between light and harder edits will keep it interesting for me.

Anyway, here is a comparison of the original sloppily edited first 90 seconds of 'Love Happy' with my fixed version...


- Reworked the bad 'Necklace' transition from scratch
- Created spoof newpaper transition to hide obvious jumpcut
- Corrected pre-credits volume dropout

(FYI I'm going to 'Scuzz-up' and darken the newspaper shot a little more in the final version)
 

TM2YC

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'Love Happy' is better then I remembered, it still needs alot of work but Harpo's scenes are hilarious, like this one of the bad guys searching his superhuman pockets...


...and the scene where he threatens them by holding a loaded gun to his own head is a scream too. Plus Hungarian born Ilona Massey is a great villain as the super sexy Madame Egelichi. But christ the two romantic leads are wet, especially in the scene where Maggie is hysterically crying while Harpo is trying his comic best to cheer her up. Pull yourself together for god's sake! ;-) I'm trying to remove as much as possible of them while still leaving the story in place (And without cutting the 3 brothers).

amor1.jpg
 

Dwight Fry

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TM2YC said:

Very nice job, but I spotted a goof: at the end of "I'm Sam Grunion, private eye, at your service" there's a bit of stray audio as if the line was starting over again.
 

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Dwight Fry said:
Very nice job, but I spotted a goof: at the end of "I'm Sam Grunion, private eye, at your service" there's a bit of stray audio as if the line was starting over again.

Well spotted, thanks. Fixed! :)
 

TM2YC

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1949's 'Love Happy' was made by United Artists (And co-produced by one of it's owners Mary Pickford) but there is no mention of the studio on my DVD in the opening credits or at the end. Instead the last thing we see is a modern colour Paramont logo (The current rights holders).

I'd like to put this right but I'm not sure what the opening and closing logos of a UA picture like this might have been like. Chronologicaly the closest UA film I own is the Noir 'Gun Crazy' (Released 2 months before) but that has no titlecards either (UA is credited within the film).

I just checked my DVD of Chaplin's (Another of UA owners) superb black comedy 'Monsieur Verdoux' from 1947 and I've now noticed that there is a small black smudge over where it originally would have said UA in the opening credits. If it was digitally erased from 'Love Happy' during the restoration... it was done seemlessly.

I know what the late Bond era UA logo looked like and I know what it looked like circa 1980 but the late 40s early 50s are a mystery to me. I believe it would have been something like this...

image002161.jpg


^ Apparently this was only abandoned in 1967 so any film from 40 years before that could have the logo. But I'd need a high quality version (With sound?)

Can any budding film historians shed any light on this?

Or Does anyone own any films from the late 40s/early 50s that have the logo? (Here is a list of UA films by year)
 

Dwight Fry

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I know I've seen that logo before, but can't recall in what movie of it's in any of the ones I own on DVD... In the video below the color one is from The Hound of the Baskervilles (I assume the Hammer one, which I own, but I'd swear it doesn't have the logo)

 

TM2YC

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Dwight Fry said:
I know I've seen that logo before, but can't recall in what movie of it's in any of the ones I own on DVD... In the video below the color one is from The Hound of the Baskervilles (I assume the Hammer one, which I own, but I'd swear it doesn't have the logo)

^ Nice! Thanks Dwight Fry I added the second UA B&W logo from that clip ^ to my timeline. It's a minor thing but now I think my edit ends in style. Maybe it's not exactly how the film originally ended in 1949 but it's certainly better than the colour Paramount logo. Here's a clip of the fix...


Thanks again!

btw How in gods name do I not own Hammer's Baskervilles, given my obsession with all things Holmes and my ownership of a large Hammer DVD boxset and several Blu-Rays... an error I feel Santa Claus is duty bound to correct :p
 

TM2YC

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Watched the workprint of 'Love Happy' (9 minutes shorter) and I've spotted another 30-ish trims to bring it down further (Hopefully they work).

btw Here is the spoof newspaper I made...

10632325234_700cd99d01.jpg
 

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Removed another 2 minutes by cutting supporting character lines all over the place, fixed a few more errors with the film and fixed a couple of my own errors too. Plus I've subtlely recut the Harp scene to be a little more emotional and a little less melodramatic.
 

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'Love Happy' the Swordfish cut is complete and rendering after much tinkering. The final running time is 79 mins, down 12mins from the original 91 mins. I'll do a cutlist soon but it's quite extensive compared to the last two Marx Brothers edits I've done. Probably a third of the cuts are technical improvements.

I think I've succeeded in turning the runt of the MB litter into something pretty solid and fun. I'm working on finishing the cover artwork now.

10-marx_brothers_theredlist.jpg
 

TM2YC

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Found a "slightly misleading" but really nice Spanish language 'Love Happy' poster...

1301555582.jpg


tumblr_mo559qQPjN1qb3axzo3_r1_250.gif
 

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DVD cover complete...



(^ Click to see fullsize version)
 
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