Giraffes on Horseback Salad: Salvador Dalí, the Marx

Brothers, and the Strangest Movie Never Made by Josh Frank

and Tim Heidecker (review)

Jonathan L. Friedmann

Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal, Volume 9, Number

2, Fall 2021, pp. 244-247 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jfn.2021.0015

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/871523

[ Access provided at 12 Dec 2022 17:22 GMT from Arizona State University ]
 REVIEW

On Frank and Heidecker’s Giraffes on Horseback

Salad: Salvador Dalí, the Marx Brothers, and the
Strangest Movie Never Made
Jonathan L. Friedmann

Giraffes on Horseback Salad: Salvador Dalí, the Marx Brothers, and the Strangest
Movie Never Made. By Josh Frank and Tim Heidecker. Illustrated by Manuela
Pertega. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books, 2019. 224 pp., ISBN 9781594749230 (hc),
US $29.99.

Author Josh Frank, a self-described “archaeologist of forgotten pop culture” (8),

is a life-long Marx Brothers enthusiast. Despite being born in the mid-1970s,
Frank often watched the brothers’ movies on his childhood television set. At
a time when other boys dressed as Hulk Hogan, Freddy Krueger, or Star Wars
characters for Halloween, Frank’s go-to costume was Harpo Marx. At age ten,
Frank and some friends adorned trench coats to see Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, play
the piano at the local Jewish Community Center in Houston, Texas.
Frank attributes his anachronistic interest to his family history. As the
“great-grandson of Jewish ancestors,” some of whom lost their lives in the
Holocaust, he is haunted by the idea of people’s lives and deeds being erased
from memory (8). While future generations will surely remember Marx Broth-
ers’ classics, including Animal Crackers (1930), Duck Soup (1933), and A Night
at the Opera (1935), the subject matter of his 2019 graphic novel has persisted
only in rumors, footnotes, and scattered remarks. In the over eighty years since
Salvador Dalí hatched Giraffes on Horseback Salad, an outlandish attempt to

244 | Jewish Film & New Media, Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall 2021, pp. 244–247. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309.
 Jonathan L. Friedmann | 245

superimpose Harpo, Chico, and Groucho into his surrealistic vision, very little
has come to light about the project.
According to Dalí’s notebook, the film was to star Harpo, sans wig and
trench coat, as Jimmy, “a young Spanish aristocrat who lives in the US as a
consequence of the political circumstances in his country [the Spanish Civil
War] . . . But a war inside of him threatens to start an even greater world war
between nothing less than the continuous struggle between the imaginative life
as depicted in the old myths and the practical and rational life of contemporary
society” (34). In the film’s climax, Harpo, under the influence of the mysteri-
ous Surrealist Woman, would transform into his iconic costume, signifying his
escape from the mores and drudgery of “practical and rational life.”
Frank links the story to Dalí’s personal and financial struggles during that
time. In 1936, Dalí fled Spain for France with his new wife, Gala, making him
“an expatriate from both the Surrealist movement and his own country” (27).
Dalí first encountered Harpo at a Paris party and the two apparently hit it off.
Seeing Harpo as a kindred spirit—and perhaps as a ticket to Hollywood—Dalí
sent Harpo a “surrealist harp” with strings of barbed wire and spoons for tuning
screws. Harpo reciprocated with a photograph of himself “playing” the harp
with bandages on his fingers. Dalí visited Southern California the following
year, where he met Walt Disney and Cecil B. DeMille, whom he considered
fellow surrealists. He also visited Harpo’s home. As he recalled for Harper’s
Bizarre (with some exaggeration): “Harpo [was] in his garden. He was naked,
crowned with roses, and in the center of a forest of [at least five hundred] harps
. . . He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a
statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese. Which he grated against the strings
of the nearest harp” (32).
Dalí pitched Giraffes on Horseback Salad to MGM Studios in 1937. It did
not go well. Irving Thalberg, whose portfolio included the Marx Brothers,
had recently died at age thirty-seven. Thalberg’s responsibilities went to Louis
B. Mayer, who was no fan of the brothers. Their MGM contracts were set to
expire, and Mayer was not keen on the project—especially with its thin plot,
expensive sets, dizzying abstractness, and questionable imagery: animals on fire,
a drowned ox, Harpo catching dwarves in a butterfly net, Groucho cracking
walnuts on a dwarf ’s bald head, etc. Groucho also hated the concept. There was
little chance of the movie being greenlit, even if the more amenable Thalberg
was still in charge.
246 | On Giraffes on Horseback Salad

To piece together the never made film, Frank acquired a shortened Por-
tuguese translation of Dalí’s handwritten French notebook from the Gala-
Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres, Spain, the original French notebook
housed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and a typed film treatment owned
by the Marx family. To help with scenes and dialogue, Frank enlisted modern
surrealist comic Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! He
also recruited Marx Brothers’ revivalist Noah Diamond to flesh out song lyrics
(Dalí envisioned Cole Porter scoring the film). Spanish artist Manuea Pertega
was brought on to illustrate the “screenplay.”
The result is a visually striking, occasionally amusing, but narratively lacklus-
ter graphic reimagining of a lost movie that never was. While the creative team
manages to capture the zaniness of the Marx Brothers and the bizarre inventive-
ness of Dalí—thanks particularly to Pertega’s stylized illustrations—much of
the book involves Groucho and Chico nonsensically prancing around in a Dalí
painting. This seems to be true to the source material: Dalí was captivated by
the brothers’ reality-bending antics and lampooning of genteel society, but was
evidently less interested in the narrative aspects of their films. Here, we have
gags and over-the-top imagery in search of a story.
The book has enough to satisfy fans of Dalí and/or the Marx Brothers,
but readers of this journal might be disappointed with its introductory essays.
While Frank does an admirable job of recounting the history of the failed film,
he does not tackle deeper themes. For instance, Giraffes is not viewed in the
context of Dalí’s broader fascination with film. In 1929, Dalí had some success
with Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a silent short film made with
experimental filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The movie bug stayed with Dalí through
the decades, but it did not amount to much. In 1941, he was slated to create a
“nightmare montage” for Fritz Lang’s Moontide—a project that Lang abruptly
abandoned. (Archie Mayo took over production after Lang left; the film was
released in 1942.) A Dalí dream sequence appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spell-
bound (1944), but it was trimmed down from twenty minutes to just three. In
1945, Dalí began an ill-fated collaboration with Walt Disney on a seven-minute
cartoon, Destino, which Disney quietly scrapped due to budgetary concerns and
Dalí’s incessant insertion of stranger and stranger ideas. (The short was finally
finished and released in 2003.) Later in life, Dalí was approached by Alejan-
dro Jodorowsky to portray Emperor Shaddam IV in the director’s never made
adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. According to Jodorowsky, Dalí’s asking
 Jonathan L. Friedmann | 247

fee would have made him Hollywood’s highest-paid actor. This last anecdote
is instructive. One wonders the extent to which Dalí, who boasted of having a
“pure, vertical, mystical, Gothic love of cash,”1 merely sought to access Holly-
wood cash via the Marx Brothers.
Another unexplored theme is Dalí’s complicated relationship with the Jews.
The artist was initially sympathetic to Hitler, supported Spain’s dictator Fran-
cisco Franco, and even painted a portrait of Franco’s daughter on a horse. Fellow
surrealists shunned Dalí for his perceived fascism and antisemitism. Yet, Dalí
would later cite Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein as inspirations, collabo-
rate with Jewish Latvian-American photographer Philippe Halsman, befriend
Harpo Marx, and produce twenty-five commissioned pieces for the State of
Israel’s twentieth anniversary (1968).2 These contradictory views and involve-
ments speak to Dalí’s opportunistic nature. He likely did not have a strong
political ideology but rather adapted his artwork to the changing zeitgeist.
Perhaps the book’s biggest missed opportunity comes in the opening pages.
Although Frank connects his Jewish heritage to his interest in forgotten pop
culture, he does not address the Jewishness of the Marx Brothers. In both vaude-
ville and film, the brothers satirized bigotry and fascism, portrayed outsiders
looking in, took jabs at WASP snobbery, and excelled at “ethnic signaling”
(making coded and semi-coded Jewish references)—all of which reflected their
identities as sons of poor Jewish immigrants. These aspects presumably drew
Frank to the Marx Brothers at an early age, but he makes no mention of this.
Still, the reader can appreciate the book for what it is: an entertaining resur-
rection of a screenplay that would not have worked as a film, but delights as
sequential art. The avant-garde images and comic escapades are clever, captivat-
ing, and linger in the mind, but ultimately leave us asking “Why?”—much like
a Dalí painting.

Jonathan L. Friedmann. Academy for Jewish Religion California.

Notes
1. Pamela Young, “A Surreal Life: The Eccentric Visions of Salvador Dali,” Maclean’s,
February 6, 1989, 58.
2. See Jillian Steinhauer, “Dali and the Jews,” Forward, April 4, 2011, https://forward
.com/culture/136676/dali-and-the-jews/