Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made

by Blount, Roy, Jr.

  HAIL, HAIL, EUPHORIA!

  Roy Blount Jr.

  PRESENTING

  THE MARX BROTHERS

  IN

  DUCK SOUP,

  THE

  GREATEST

  WAR MOVIE EVER MADE

  For Pauline Kael

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  PHOTO CREDITS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ROY BLOUNT JR.

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  It will come to this.

  Chapter 1

  Imagine you belong to a savage yet sophisticated cult, which goes way back before your time even, and you haven’t attended an observance for a while. And you hear that an introductory service is to be held, and when you walk in, there are all these children there, and their young, earnest, probably over-parenting parents or over-nannying nannies are there, and you think, Oh my gods (this cult is polytheistic), these newbies are going to be humming along off-key and clapping on the beat, they’re going to be going Wha? at all the philosophical moments and hissing the sacrifices—or worse, they’ll be getting off on it all in some trashy, prurient, mocking way. They’re going to walk all over my heaven, trampling the lush undergrowth, and then they’re going to walk out and leave me sitting here cursing and sobbing into my hands.

  Such was my anxiety recently as I sat in Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater in Manhattan before a daytime screening of Duck Soup. The Thalia is where I saw that movie for the first time, fifty years ago. Back then, the Thalia was cramped, ratty, mildewy, and darkly over-intellectual inside, and I can’t begin to tell you how much I, a lank youth up from Georgia, loved it. Now the Thalia is cheerfully refurbished. (A revival house? Quaint notion.) Duck Soup isn’t refurbished. Parents were shushing the offspring whom they had dragged to this old black-and-white …

  I was sitting next to this one six-or seven-year-old, Theo, who was trying to hustle another kid’s mother into getting out of there with him (and, presumably, her kid) and going back to her place for a playdate. “We’re doing this, the movie, instead,” she said. “No, this isn’t playing,” he said.

  But then the movie started. The audience blinked at Duck Soup a few times, and then they laughed, readily, steadily, sliding along with Duck Soup like Harpo in white socks on a polished floor. Some of the kids looked frankly amazed. Okay, these were New York City kids. But when was the last time you saw kids—especially New York City kids—looking amazed? At something done by men in their forties, seventy-seven years ago? Even Theo, after a little while (the entrance of Vera Marcal perked him up, but I think it was Groucho singing with his pants rolled up that got him), was into it.

  You know that scene in Sullivan’s Travels where Joel McCrea watches a Mickey Mouse cartoon with fellow members of the chain gang and their raucous laughter convinces him that comedy-making is worthwhile? The laughter at this screening of Duck Soup was of a better quality than that. It was also better than what I hear in theaters today in response to either of the extremes of contemporary not-for-kiddies comedy. It was better, that is, than the rank, startled barking you hear at a Borat or Brüno gross-out.* And better than the shallow upchuckly sound of an audience somehow vaguely gratified by the schlubby spectacle of guys getting in touch with each other’s feelings, the genre that has come to be called bromance.

  Duck Soup was getting family laughs, but edgy. Vintage laughs, but fresh. Even the parents seemed to have come unprepared for this movie. They looked too young to have been aware of Duck Soup when it was widely revived and became a big hit, for the first time, in the sixties. “Groucho’s mustache wasn’t real?” I heard one mother ask another after the screening. “It looked like just a piece of felt.” It’s greasepaint, for Godsake, it’s unreal, like everything in this anarchic, farcical—

  CHICO: What’s a matter you? ‘At’s-a no farcical. No wheels.

  Wheels?

  CHICO: Two wheels, you got a bicycle. Three wheels, you got a tricycle. Four wheels, then you got a farcycle.

  I see, I see—

  CHICO: Nahhh—i-c-i-c, ‘at’s-a spelling icicle. Hey, I got a riddle for you. What is it has got two Eskimo brothers, they look just-a like him? Give up? An icicle—he’s a frozen driblet.

  You take a special interest in native Alaskans?

  CHICO: Nahh. I’m not all that Inuit.

  I have worked and worked on that, and, I know, it’s labored. For Chico, puns are duck soup: “A nice, cold glass eliminate.” It’s partly in the writing, but it’s mostly in how he puts them across. What moved those parents and children most, I think, was how the people in that old movie move. Like when Harpo dances in the tank of nice cold eliminate. And especially when two or three or four Marx brothers are moving together.

  Duck Soup doesn’t have everything. “If you asked me to name the best comedies ever made,” Woody Allen said in an interview, “Duck Soup is the only one that really doesn’t have a dead spot.”*

  It doesn’t have a romantic subplot either. For Groucho or Harpo or Chico—or even Zeppo, in this movie—to “get the girl” onscreen would be like a dybbuk getting a job. The brothers make eyes at girls, and Harpo chases them, but they get only Margaret Dumont, who is tolerable because she doesn’t get them. When Duck Soup came out, audiences across America failed to get it. It didn’t make much money—partly because there wasn’t much money in 1933, but also because Duck Soup didn’t mirror the national mood. It may not mirror the national mood now. It doesn’t care. It mirrors something more primal. Something heedless and ruthless as kids playing war.

  I don’t want to oversell it. In London in l931, Thomas Wolfe wrote to a friend in the States that he dreaded going with his swellegant English publishers to see the Marxes onstage. “I suppose I shall have to listen to the usual horrible guff … ‘You know there’s Something Very Grand about them—there really is, you know, I mean there’s Something Sort of Epic about it … I mean that man who never says anything is really like Michael Angelo’s Adam … you know they are really Very Great Clowns, they really are, you know,’ etc. etc. etc. ad vomitatum.”

  There is no vomiting in Duck Soup. There are no poop jokes. (An outhouse joke in the script was replaced by a doghouse joke.) The Marxes violate personal boundaries without resorting to naked wrestling or talking penises.

  There is only one thing Duck Soup lacks and might be said to need: a commentary track. On the DVD there are no special features except subtitles in Spanish and French. Only once that I know of* has this movie been accompanied by a running interpretation. Groucho, in his eighties, watched Duck Soup at home one evening with Marvin Hamlisch’s attractive young sister, Terry, whose relationship with Groucho extended to big, sloppy, sort-of-tongue-in-cheek, so to speak, kisses. The two of them were “kinda necking in the dark,” as Ms. Hamlisch told Charlotte Chandler, a chronicler of Groucho’s dotage. “The lyrics, the songs, the numbers and everything, he remembered how each thing was shot. He got so excited, he almost broke my knee in the dark, which was a big thrill.”

  I can’t match that, and Terry Hamlisch is no longer living to recall it. But I’ve got Duck Soup up on the upper left corner of my computer monitor here, and I can fill you in on some background as we watch it together. I may even toss in some dead spots.

  And if you must have romance:

  “My parents met,” says Jane Stine of New York City, “while backing away from Duck Soup.” Not recoiling. Retreating, slowly, reluctantly, up the theater aisle
after having already, separately, sat through Duck Soup twice. Tearing themselves individually away from Duck Soup, that’s what brought them together. Their eyes, full of Marxes, met. And they knew.

  Maybe the Marxes were funnier in their younger days, when various combinations of them were a vaudeville act, presided over by their mother, Minnie Marx. When they made Duck Soup, they just had to compete with the Great Depression, King Kong, and the rise of Fascism. In vaudeville they had to stand out among Collins and Hart, who had a cat that blew a whistle; “The Musical Cow Milkers,” a husband-wife team who sang while she, in a pinafore and sunbonnet, milked a live cow; and Mons Herbert, whose act, according to Harpo, was “playing ‘The Anvil Chorus’ by blowing knives and forks against each other. For a finish he would blow up a prop roast turkey and deflate it in such a way that it played ‘Oh, Dry Those Tears’ out of its rump.” Not to mention Swain’s Rats and Cats. (The rats rode the cats.)

  In those days the brothers had to suppress their animal spirits. Mother Minnie kept an eye on them from the wings. She made sure they behaved—put on a good safe musical act with traditional comic turns—by shouting “Greenbaum.” That was the name of the man who held the mortgage on the family home. But when Minnie wasn’t looking, they would improvise. Groucho singing “La donna e mobile” accompanied by Chico on piano could become, in Harpo’s recollection, “a six-hand, three-key version of ‘Waltz Me Around Again, Willie’—Chico on the stool, me sitting on Chico’s shoulders, and Groucho crouching behind us, reaching his arms around Chico like tentacles, and all of us singing.” Follow that, Mons Herbert.*

  We do know that in l933, the depths of the Great Depression, Duck Soup was regarded in the industry as too funny for its own good. Since then, Samuel Beckett has stolen hat gags from it for Waiting for Godot. Gene Kelly, Bugs Bunny, and many others have been inspired by it. In 2009 an international panel of critics voted Duck Soup the thirty-seventh greatest film of all time, and yes, it is the movie that makes the Woody Allen character in Hannah and Her Sisters decide not to shoot himself.

  It’s not just a Marx Brothers movie; it is also a Leo McCarey movie. That dashing, conflicted Irish-American Catholic was the only inspired director they ever worked with. In other Marx movies, a dumb romantic story was wedged in, for the ladies. Mc-Carey ruled that out for Duck Soup. It could be that he didn’t want the Marxes bursting in and out of his own subtle way of conveying romance. On the whole, he hated working with them.

  Jean Renoir, whose own touch was light, said of McCarey, “He understands people—better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood.” Faint praise perhaps. But here is a quite sensible but somehow magical exchange from another movie directed by McCarey, Ruggles of Red Gap.

  ROLAND YOUNG (playing an English earl who is so cool his lips barely move): Do you believe in love at first sight?

  LEILA HYAMS (playing the beautiful

  proprietor of a sort of G-rated bawdy house in Red Gap, Washington): No.

  YOUNG: No, neither do I. That’s why I’d like to stay around for a while.

  In a scene set up by McCarey and improvised by the actors, Leila tries to teach Roland to play the drum. The most nearly passionate word in it is “ditta-boom.” Gets me every time. Check it out on YouTube. There’s another moment in Ruggles between Charles Laughton, the gentleman’s gentleman whom the earl loses (Ruggles, that is, was the stake) in a poker game, and Zasu Pitts—I’ll tell you about it later.

  Ruggles is also the only unabashedly patriotic movie—except for Yankee Doodle Dandy—that I would ever recommend. Charles Laughton reciting the Gettysburg Address in a cowboy bar … it gets you. If in Duck Soup the Gettysburg Address had ever come up, it would have been pelted with fruit. The closest thing to romantic in Duck Soup, Jane Stine’s parents’ reaction to it aside, is Groucho’s eagerness to marry, for her money, the woman he relentlessly insults.

  McCarey was a bit of a rounder, but also devout and sentimental. The last two qualities must have had some impact on Duck Soup, but it’s hard to see where. Duck Soup doesn’t have a reverent or softhearted bone in its body. It tells how a band of brothers—that is to say, three maniacs (and Zeppo, a maniac’s secretary)—take over (relevance alert) a bankrupt nation and, while constantly mocking and sabotaging everyone, including each other and themselves, lead that nation giddily into war.

  Didactic is another kind of bone Duck Soup’s body doesn’t have. “It kidded dictators,” McCarey once said. As we shall see, there is more to it than that. W. H. Auden once wrote that Iago, in Othello, was driven by “motiveless malignity.” Duck Soup perpetrates motiveless indignities. It is sheer …

  Let’s watch it.

  The first bird you see is not a duck. It’s an eagle. Why an eagle? Try rallying a nation around a duck. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was freshly elected and had a big majority’s hearty, not to say desperate, mandate. “The whole country is with him,” said Will Rogers. “If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.’” But FDR couldn’t make this eagle fly. This eagle was killed by a sick chicken.

  It’s the NRA blue eagle, symbol of the National Recovery Administration, which was created the year Duck Soup came out. Banks, farms, factories, mills, and mines had failed. Twenty-five percent of workers were unemployed, and in 1933 “workers” mostly meant “men,” so if the man of the house was laid off, the household was hungry. And in 1933 there were no food stamps, no aid for dependent children. No deep-pockets China either. People were riding the rails, living in packing crates, standing in line for hours to get free bread.

  People well established in entertainment did better than others. Groucho had been wiped out by the stock market crash in l929 and claimed he didn’t get a good night’s sleep thereafter for the rest of his life, but Hollywood and radio had replenished his coffers. When Harpo’s margins were starkly exposed by the market collapse, “[I] liquidated every asset I owned except my harp and my croquet set,” and he still had to come up with $10,000 to avoid utter ruin. Zeppo saved him. Stop moping, Zeppo said, and come with me to a gambling boat, and be sure to bring some burnt cork. I urge you to read that story—nothing to do with blackface—in Harpo’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks!

  In real life, of course, Harpo did speak. At first he spoke onstage, presumably in an Irish accent since he played a dumb Irish type generically called Patsy Brannigan. He went mute after Uncle Al Shean forgot to write him any lines in a new sketch for the family act, and Harpo said, Okay, I’ll ad-lib, and he did, and next day in the papers his ad-libs were panned. So he stopped speaking professionally, even when interviewed on radio (he would honk his horn) or TV. In Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House, Steve Stoliar writes that while working for Groucho as an archivist, he did find a note that in l940, when the brothers were trying out their Go West routines onstage, Harpo, after being applauded for his harp solo, stepped forward and delivered a long speech concluding as follows: “May I not have the rather unusual privilege of tending to you, my audience, the warm congratulations which are rightfully yours for the keenness and perspicacity which you have shown in recognizing true genius, accomplished artistry, and monumento-monumania. Thank you.”

  Somewhere along in there Groucho shouted, “Now you know why he never talked!” In January l963, at a fund-raising concert for symphony orchestras at the Pasadena Civic Center, Harpo took the stage to announce his retirement and then, as Simon Louvish puts it, “he astounded and delighted his audience by talking at great length, unleashing a stream of tales and anecdotes that seemed to be never ending. Then he walked off the stage forever.” He died the following year.

  One audio clip of Harpo speaking has survived. It may have been recorded while he was working with his collaborator on Harpo Speaks! You can hear it at www.marx-brothers.org/biography/bbc2.wav. In a surprisingly adult-sounding soft baritone, he tells about the time he fainted off the piano stool twice while playing in a whorehouse, because he had t
he measles, and the madam had him thrown out, saying, “I don’t want any sick Jews around me.” He was just a kid when that happened.

  “We Do Our Part” it says there under the NRA eagle. For the Marx Brothers, that meant making this insane movie. “If you think this country’s bad off now,” as Groucho sings, “just wait till I get through with it.” What FDR did, in his first year as president, was to push through Congress a flurry of programs called WPA, CCC, TVA, SEC, AAA. People called them his “alphabet”—

  CHICO: ‘At’s-a no good.

  GROUCHO: What? The alphabet? Is no good?

  CHICO: ‘At’s-a right. You got somebody over here, wanna make a bet, that’s halfabet. Somebody over here, wanna take a bet, that’s another halfabet. ‘At’s-a no good. You gotta get in a whole bet.

  GROUCHO: The next time you get in a hole, remind me to leave you there.

  FDR’s “alphabet soup,” those programs were called. Some of them helped a lot and are still with us today, but not the National Recovery Administration. The NRA enjoined the nation’s industries to develop self-regulatory codes of “fair practice,” designed to create better working conditions, new jobs, and mercantile enthusiasm. The NRA’s director, and Time’s Man of the Year 1933, was the former army general Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson. Johnson delivered this message to “chiselers” and “rugged individualists” who refused to rally behind the NRA:

  Away, slight men! You may have been leaders once. You are corporals of disaster now and a safe place for you may be yapping at the flanks but it is not safe to stand obstructing the front of this great army. You might be trampled underfoot—not knowingly but inadvertently—because of your small stature and of the uplifted glance of a people whose “eyes have seen the glory.”