Harpo speaks! New recordings reveal mute Marx brother chatting with audience

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The comedy legend, who adopted his silent persona because of stage nerves, did occasionally address his audience, as revealed by a new archive release Groucho was the cigar-chomping wit with the improbable moustache, Chico was the piano-playing rustic grifter and Zeppo played the straight man and the lover. But as any Marx Brothers fan knows, Harpo was the pantomime, who cracked up the audience without saying a word, dressed in his tattered raincoat and curly wig. His persona was childlike and mischievous but also musical – he let his harp and his taxi horn do the talking. But now we get to see, or rather hear, a new side to Harpo Marx. A very special recording has been unearthed of Harpo in 1964 speaking to an audience, in character. Arthur “Harpo” Marx was born Adolph Marx in New York in 1888. He started performing with his brothers in 1910, and his nickname probably came about because of his instrument of choice – he was an entirely self-taught musician. By 1915, due to his nerves a...
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Battleship Potemkin review – Eisenstein’s explosive movie still burns bright

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With a new score by Pet Shop Boys, the Russian director’s masterpiece remains a stunning paean to revolution

Here for its hundred-year anniversary is a restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneering silent classic from 1925, itself commissioned for the 20-year anniversary of the events it showed and reimagined. It is in black-and-white of course, apart from the vivid red flag flown from the battleship’s mast. This rerelease is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Pet Shop Boys in 2005; it is a fervent, continuous score but not, for me, one that engages fully with the drama’s light-and-shade. It also perhaps reopens the debate about when and how a silent-movie musical accompaniment should be content to fall silent in favour of discreet ambient background sound.

The subject is a 1905 anti-Tsarist mutiny on an Imperial Russian Navy battleship in the Black Sea near Ukraine. It is an uprising of sailors demoralised by losses in the Russo-Japanese war, resentful of the officers’ arrogance and incompetence, electrified by news of revolutionary enthusiasms on land, and finally triggered by the maggot-infested meat they were expected to eat.

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