Marx Brothers and Chico appeared less prominently. The two younger brothers, Gummo and Zeppo, never developed their stage characters to the same extent as the elder three. They each left the act to pursue business careers at which they were successful, and for a time ran a large theatrical agency through which they represented their brothers and others. Gummo was not in any of the movies; Zeppo appeared in the first five films in relatively straight (non-comedic) roles. The performing lives of the brothers owed much to their mother Minnie Marx, who acted as their manager until her death in 1929. The
Marx Brothers The first Marx Brothers/Thalberg film was "A Night at the Opera" (1935), a satire on the world of opera, where the brothers help two young singers in love by throwing a production of "Il Trovatore" into chaos. The film—including its famous scene where an absurd number of people crowd into a tiny stateroom on a ship—was a great success, and was followed two years later by an even bigger hit, "A Day at the Races" (1937), in which the brothers cause mayhem in a sanitarium and at a horse race. The film features Groucho and Chico's famous "Tootsie Frootsie Ice