Rating: 
Summary: Unclean, unclean
Review: ...a typical fin de siecle biography--he purses his lips disapprovingly while dishing every last sordid detail with prurient glee. Do people, even famous ones, need some privacy? Yes, they do, for our own sakes as well as theirs. Elderly people falling under the sway of caretakers is a pretty common phenomenon, even in Hollywood (and it happened to even as tough a man as James Cagney), but what has this to do with the reason Groucho was famous? Nothing, and we don't need every last sad scummy detail. This book is an unclean object, in my view. If you want to know the important things regarding the Marx Brothers, which is their work, try the Acre biography and/or Harpo's charming autobiography, "Harpo Speaks!"
Rating: 
Summary: Groucho is sucko
Review: A bunch of stories you've heard before told in the driest prose imaginable make this bio of Groucho a chore, not a pleasure. I give it two stars only because at least I didn't find grammatical errors. ANY other book on the brothers is recommended over this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Read it
Review: An amazing account of an amazing man and his career. The first sections, in which Groucho steps from boy soprano singer to hilarious vaudeville acts that carry him and his brothers to Broadway and cinema stardom, are particularly well written. Kanfer elegantly descibes the marxistic method of success, based on tradition, originality, audience feed-back and perfection.Like most GM biographers, Kanfer uses many of the well-known gags from shows and films. One important gag is missing, though. In the Carnegie Hall performance in 1971 - which Kanfer uses as the starting point for his story - Groucho at age 79 appears in a solo act, going on for hours with escalating intensity, funnier than ever. I remember I neclected school for listening to the recording of 'An Evening with Groucho' until my sister stole the double LPs. At the end of the three-hour show, during storms of applauses, you can barely hear a tiny female voice asking Groucho: 'Wanna do some more?' 'What?' 'Wanna do more stuff?' 'Some more what? I haven't started yet.'
Rating:
Summary: the secret word is "lousy"
Review: As a Marx Brothers fan for over 30 years, I harbor no illusions as to what an ornery and mean-spirited man Groucho could be. He was never comfortable with himself, and, unfortuntely, he passed along a lot of that insecurity and misery to those who were closest to him. He was also a caring, literate, and liberal man with a worldview and wit like noone else. Yet, according to Kanfer, Groucho's entire life was a failure. ALL the movies are terribly flawed, no generous deed was performed without a sinister intent, and the fact that he was a greater comedian than writer negates all the success he had in the latter area. This is more a vendetta than a book. Kanfer is more mean-spirited than Groucho ever was. In addition, his idea of research is to read every other book on the subject and then weigh in with a third-rate behavioral analysis. I'm currently reading Simon Louvish's new bio of all the Marx Brothers, and, so far, it is a breath of fresh air (and well-researched to boot). If you want to read a bio of Groucho, seek the out-of-print Hector Arce book. All things considered, Groucho was a very great man, but you'd never know it from Stefan Kanfer's tedious character assassination.
Rating: 
Summary: Yes, I'm a Marxist!
Review: As a Marx Brothers fan, I've purchased and read many of the biographies/critiques of Groucho and Bros. (and there are a *lot* of them!), and I found this to be one of the most entertaining. We've reached the point in history where first-hand biographies can no longer be written--most of Groucho's friends, collaborators, and family are dead, so Kanfer's is likely the first of books that will study Groucho from a more historical perspective, using newspaper articles, movie reviews, and the books that have gone before (Kanfer points out, a little defensively for my tastes, that Groucho told so many tall tales you couldn't take first-person testimony at face value anyway). "Groucho" makes for an effective (if somewhat detached) bio: overall quite entertaining, not skimping on Marx's low points and somewhat pessimistic worldview as well as his more familiar triumphs. By all accounts, including this one, Groucho was not a guy you'd want to pal around with unless you had the sharpest wit (and even then he'd dislike any attempt to outshine him), and Kanfer does a credible job of portraying Groucho's sourness as well as handling a controversial subject: just how badly Groucho was treated by women in his later years (and to be perfectly fair, his less-than-stellar treatment *of* women throughout his whole life). I have to praise an aspect of this book not many other reviewers have mentioned: it is immensely funny, not because Kanfer is a humorous writer, but because he has the good sense to occasionally step aside and recount some of Groucho's funniest lines or dialogue. Still, the occasional sloppiness in writing and editing (as mentioned by other Amazon reviewers) did make me scowl once in a while as I read it. I wouldn't call this the definite Groucho bio-- but it's an entertaining read and a decent synthesis of the many books I've read before with a slightly fresh spin. Still, given Groucho's disarming, misleading wit about anything personal, can there *ever be* a definitive bio? I'm eagerly awaiting Simon Louvish's "Monkey Business"--given his excellent *and* entertaining W.C. Fields bio, perhaps it's Louvish who can best do justice to the Marxes--but with this enigmatic cult icon whose greasepaint mustache and quick words hid a much more complex man, I wouldn't be surprised if Groucho's up there having a good old laugh on all of us who are trying to analyze his wit rather than just enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: Kanfer must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.
Review: For a book of this daunting length, not very much here is new. It will serve however, especially if you haven't read much about Captain Spaulding and his brothers before. Still, you'll have to ignore some howling errors;like when Kanfer says that Humphrey Bogart's first wife was Virginia Mayo (she was Mayo Methot).The stuff on Erin Fleming and the Groucho trial is first rate and at least it's not written in the atrocious, cutesy-wootsy style of "Monkey Business," the other new book on the Marx Bros. Hopefully, this is the last word on Hackenbush.
Rating:
Summary: Groucho The Funny Man!
Review: For one thing no write could possibly explain what made Groucho Marx so Funny. The printed page cannot show what he could do with a quick leap if his eyebrows, much less with his preposterous body, its upper half canted illogically forward from those scurrying legs. But the other, More imposing force working against Kanfer is the familiar truism: he who is funnist while perfroming is rarely appealing when the camra stops. In Grouch's case, his wit didn't abandon him off the set, but the man Kanfer discovers behind the joker is no fun at all.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed feelings
Review: Having previously read "Harpo Speaks," "Growing up with Chico," "Groucho and Me," and Lillian Roth's "I'll cry tomorrow" and having seen all the Marx brothers films, I honestly felt like this book was merely a hodgepodge of all those previously mentioned sources. There are parts where he quotes word for word what Lillian Roth wrote about working on Animal Crackers, or what Maxine Marx said in her book, and tries to pass it off as his own. There are also long sections where he just reprints dialouge from the films and TV show. That said, the parts involving Grouchos personality and his relationships with women and his family were totally new to me, and very interesting (although I do agree with the earlier reviewer who said it seemed that the author did not like Groucho and tried to paint him negatively.) I don't regret reading this book, true fans will probably know enough to form their own opinions. But I reccomend a number of other Marx-related books before this one. ("Harpo Speaks" being my #1)
Rating:
Summary: Mixed feelings
Review: Having previously read "Harpo Speaks," "Growing up with Chico," "Groucho and Me," and Lillian Roth's "I'll cry tomorrow" and having seen all the Marx brothers films, I honestly felt like this book was merely a hodgepodge of all those previously mentioned sources. There are parts where he quotes word for word what Lillian Roth wrote about working on Animal Crackers, or what Maxine Marx said in her book, and tries to pass it off as his own. There are also long sections where he just reprints dialouge from the films and TV show. That said, the parts involving Grouchos personality and his relationships with women and his family were totally new to me, and very interesting (although I do agree with the earlier reviewer who said it seemed that the author did not like Groucho and tried to paint him negatively.) I don't regret reading this book, true fans will probably know enough to form their own opinions. But I reccomend a number of other Marx-related books before this one. ("Harpo Speaks" being my #1)
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read
Review: Having read a number of other books on the Marx Brothers, I thought I knew most everything worth knowing. But this one really opened my eyes. The true genuis behind the boys was not, as is generally thought, their hard-driving stage mother Minnie, but their uncle Al Shean, a major vaudeville star in his own right. Kanfer tells the story with deftness and ingenuity, with particular emphasis on brothers' highly complex and often far from warm relationships. For all his swagger on screen, the deeply insecure Groucho was subject to deep, debilitating depressions; and his personal demons were but one of the factors that often threatened to tear the act apart. But it is a measure of the author's achievement that he manages to make this complex emotional tale consistently entertaining. Gifted with a sharp and telling wit of his own, as well as a sharp eye for observation, Kanfer offers in addition some real treasures: verbatim transcriptions of some of the Marx Brothers' best material, including some that never appeared on film. All in all, a terrific and memorable read.
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