Giraffes on Horseback Salad

 
Giraffes on Horseback Salad

The Strangest Movie Never Made
by Josh Frank and Time Heidecker

art by Manuela Pertega

adapted from the screenplay by Salvador Dali

Quirk Books

1937, adapted 2019

 

 

Giraffes on Horseback Salad is a graphic novel that adapts a proposal for a movie that was never produced - a film written by Salvador Dali, starring the Marx Brothers. Well, I say 'written,' but what Dali actually produced was 84 pages of handwritten notes and sketches and a 14 page proposal to MGM. There was no completed script. So this was not a simple or straightforward adaptation, and includes a lot of creative input from everyone involved.

 
Josh Frank has apparently made a career of adapting famous unfinished projects, with this just his most recent. Frank read up on Dali during the years he lived abroad because of the Spanish Civil War. He met with Harpo Marx's son -  Harpo and Dali were friends, apparently. And he got copies of the notes and proposal from a Dali archive. Frank brought in comedian Tim Heidecker to help write the Marx Brothers' banter, since Dali's notes just indicated places they should be allowed to improvise. Manuela Pertega is a Spanish cartoonist, included for her interest in surrealist art.

 
So, the first 40 pages of the book are front matter, explaining all that. A bit like the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, really. And then the last 200 pages are the graphic novel itself, which is styled and structured to look like an adaptation of a finished movie, even though the only place the 'movie' exists is as this comic.

 
Jimmy, played by Harpo Marx, is a hardworking and cleancut young businessman. He has an ambitious but loveless fiancee, and he's really going places on Wall Street. Then one night while they're out to dinner, Jimmy catches a glimpse of the mysterious Surrealist Woman, who is announced and attended by Groucho and Chico. (The fiancee has a sidepiece boyfriend, who might be Zeppo, but I'm not certain?) Jimmy is instantly smitten, and suddenly discovers he can play the harp...

 
The Surrealist Woman has the supernatural power to manifest imagery from her dreams into the real world. In controlled spaces like a restaurant, she can pass it off as an elaborate and expensive publicity stunt. Jimmy dumps his fiancee, meets up with the Surrealist Woman at her next party, and the two of them declare their love for each other. Her happiness unleashes unrestrained chaos on the world.

 
The fiancee helps lead an effort to arrest the Surrealist Woman, which succeeds, and she's put on trial, with Groucho acting as her defense and Chico the prosecution. Jimmy sneaks in 'in disguise' looking properly like Harpo, and they escape into the streets of New York, where they fight a war between the forces of bourgeois order and surreal chaos, including flaming green giraffes running through the city.
Jimmy and the Surreal Woman briefly retire to a house in the suburbs where she manifests his dream of comfort and safety, but then they both agree this is too boring, and the commit to living dangerously and artistically. 

 
Frank's commentary in the front matter suggests that Jimmy was intended to be a semi-autobiographical character. Dali came from a respectable family, and perhaps especially while he was abroad during the Civil War, may have questioned whether his flamboyant lifestyle and persona were really the right choice.
 

Pertega's art really captures the prevailing balance of power at any given moment between conventional order (shown in linear panels in grayscale,) and surrealism (shown in color in irregular, cross-cutting panels are lack an obvious chronological order.) The manifestations of the Surrealist Woman's emotions into reality reminds me of a similar effect used in the Shade, the Changing Girl comics.