Behold this nifty hour-long mini-doc called ‘Home Again; The Marx Brothers and New York City’. It’s a very well done and charming look at how the comedian-brothers grew up, what their heritage was and how New York City formed and shaped their personas. I realize that it’s not exactly breaking news that the Marx’s were Jews from New York City but the creator of this doc, Noah Diamond, spins a nice tale of their ancestry, their Yorkville childhoods, the specific ways Jewish culture infused their comedy and their startling emergence on Broadway in the 1920s. (Diamond is the co-host of one of the best film podcasts on the internet, ‘The Marx Brothers Council Podcast‘). He makes a good point about how ‘Broadway’ in the 1920s became more than just the name of a street, turning into a nationally known adjective. To be ‘Broadway’ was to be a certain type of personality/hustler/show-biz/gangster type, a sort popularized by Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell. And ‘Broadway’ was also a sort of state of mind; Broadway as a conceptual unearthly being could break your heart, make a career, define a romance and philosophically inform a world view with its hard-bitten, cynical but always good-hearted super-natural aura. I’ve been reading 1920s and 1930s editions of the New York Daily News on newspapers.com (highly recommend this site despite its hefty monthly charge of twenty-bucks) and the entertainment section is filled with columns by the likes of Mark Hellinger and Sidney Skolsky extolling Broadway as an existential phenomenon, one that the denizens of Manhattan interact with, grapple with and are willingly joined to. Reading old newspapers may seem like a wildly geeky pursuit but I assure it: it’s much more interesting and relaxing than reading today’s papers. Anyway, enjoy the doc–it’ll make you want to visit the city if nothing else…