- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (Feb 29 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0520269012
- ISBN-13: 978-0520269019
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 581 g
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"A zesty and deeply literate joy to read."--New Haven Review
"A charming and rigorous study."--Sight & Sound Magazine
"Koestenbaum provides an informed, original, and near-obsessive assessment of all things Harpo."--Publishers Weekly
"A charming and rigorous study."--Sight & Sound Magazine
"Koestenbaum provides an informed, original, and near-obsessive assessment of all things Harpo."--Publishers Weekly
Book Description
The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx's physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo's chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute--his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body--its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum's text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
7 of 15 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Author causes marx fan to scratch head, April 2 2012
By Marc Goodstein - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (Paperback)
In attempting to analyze every movement Harpo made on screen, Wayne Koestenbaum makes frequent literary and other cultural allusions that were so far over my head as to render much of it incomprehensible. Or he sees things that remind him of his childhood and family and goes off on tangents, or reads sexual or scatalogical connotations into Harpos actions (he keeps pointing out visions of Harpos buttcrack). Or he makes references to his sexual history which I consider TMI. Worst of all, in breaking everything down, he totally drains Harpos actions of their humor. In "Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo", Joe Adamson wrote "When he isn't exaggerating the familiar, his actions have no explanation at all. And they don't want one." That's all the analysis I need.
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