Groucho at Cannes

In 1972, at the age of 82, Groucho Marx was invited to the Cannes Film Festival to receive the French Legion of Honor Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. I don't speak French, but it sounds pretty impressive. At this stage in Groucho's life, known among Marxists as the Living Legend period, Groucho was being honored and celebrated everywhere he went. The same year as the French thing, he performed his bittersweet concerts at A&M University and Carnegie Hall. The following year, the long-unavailable Animal Crackers was re-released, an occasion which put Groucho in the middle of a literal mob scene in New York City. The year after that, he received an honorary Academy Award.

In the following newsreel footage, we see Groucho deplaning in Cannes. He's helped down the stairs by Erin Fleming, his volatile companion and manager during the Living Legend period. Erin Fleming is a controversial figure, to whom we can attribute some of the glories as well as the agonies of Groucho's last years. (Her manner in this footage conveys the Erin Fleming condition pretty well: Indispensable caretaker, tireless promoter, crazy person.) In the ensuing clip, from a French press conference, Groucho speaks. The voice, though tired, is unmistakable. It's really the voice, more than any other aspect of this genius, that changed the world. "Virtually everything Groucho said was funny," Dick Cavett once pointed out, "because he said it in his voice." In the press conference clip, he musters both a wisecrack and a political statement. (The Groucho footage is followed by some of Alfred Hitchcock.)

And while we're on the subject, here's a track from An Evening with Groucho, the 1972 LP of Groucho's Carnegie Hall concert. Here, he delivers a poem which he wrote in the late twenties, during the stage run of Animal Crackers.