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

by Blount, Roy, Jr.

  Two years later the NRA itself was trampled, by an alleged “unfit chicken.” Joseph, Martin, Alex, and Aaron Schechter (“butcher” in Yiddish) operated kosher wholesale poultry slaughterhouses in Brooklyn, New York. They ran afoul—

  CHICO: Hey, ‘at’s-a good one!

  —so to speak, of the Live Poultry Code. When it came to enforcement, the NRA’s eye undertook to be on the individual chicken. Its inspectors came to the Schechters’ slaughterhouse and charged them with purveying a questionable chicken, an unhealthy-looking chicken, which is why the matter became known as the “sick chicken case.” The NRA inspector, testified Joseph Schechter, was “a very nice boy … He don’t know from a chicken.” The Schechters appealed their conviction all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rendered the chicken’s health moot by declaring the NRA unconstitutional, on broader grounds.

  Disillusioned, General Johnson authored a memoir of the NRA’s rise and fall, The Blue Eagle: From Egg to Earth. Might there have been a Marx Brothers movie in that book, the brothers as the Schechters and Louis Calhern as Iron Pants? No, too reality-bound. The Marxes had once been, as we shall see, chicken farmers, but in Duck Soup they fly higher than chickens or ducks, off into the empyrean. Transcendent individualists and chiselers they are. Charged with saving a nation from financial disaster.

  In Duck Soup the blue eagle is not blue. This movie, like all Marx Brothers movies, is in black and white. Flesh tones would not suit them. The only known color footage of the brothers in movie mode is fifteen silent seconds of them rehearsing a crowd scene for Animal Crackers. Everyone is in full fancy-dress costume except Harpo, who comes prancing through the throng wearing bedroom slippers and a faded blue-gray bathrobe. No wig. Very little hair. He looks like your cousin Freddy, assuming your cousin Freddy is a highly unexceptional-looking person—except when everybody but Freddy is dressed for a gala and one of Freddy’s brothers is wearing a painted-on mustache and eyebrows and another brother is wearing a mop under an elfin pointy hat and he, Freddy, by which I mean Harpo, is in a bathrobe.

  “Harpo, we’re trying out this new process, just as a test—come on, we’re all waiting for you to walk through the scene with us, see it in living color,” and Harpo shows up as uncolorfully as possible. I was about to say, that’s Harpo all over. But Harpo all over would have lost the bathrobe. In all sorts of settings, Harpo took a toddler’s delight in popping up in a state of nature. As far as that goes, so did his brothers. During the making of Room Service, the Marxes demanded that the set be closed to visitors, but a special party of outsiders was allowed in anyway. In the scene about to be shot, a then-unknown beauty named Lucille Ball was to burst into a room, slam the door, and keep running. She did so. Her pursuers, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico, were to burst in after her. They did so, in the nude. And the visitors were priests and nuns. Back when clergy were a lot more shockable probably.

  Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo, each at a different stage of unreadiness.

  Another time, as Somerset Maugham was giving a group of guests, including Harpo, whom he had just met, a guided tour of his villa, Harpo dropped back and then reappeared diving naked through the master bedroom window into the pool. Maugham, delighted, disrobed and joined him.

  And when the director of Horse Feathers couldn’t get the crowd he had assembled for a big football scene to show any enthusiasm for the third or fourth take, Harpo said he’d take care of it. He did a lap around the field naked and honking his horn, and the fans went wild.

  In the aforementioned silent color clip, Groucho is clearly not delighted by Harpo’s appearance. He looks at Harpo askance. Askance was Groucho’s attitude toward life. He was born with one eye (or the other one) very slightly awry, so he was never quite—even when directly addressing the camera—looking in only one direction. In a strange humor-analysis book entitled Enjoyment of Laughter, Max Eastman maintains that when Groucho “says something, his eyes drop off into the corners of their sockets like those of a doll that you have moved into a horizontal position by accident.” This is hyperbole. Groucho’s rolled eyes are sentient, cultivated, athletic. One eye, unable to believe what the other eye is seeing, is looking to the viewer, or to heaven (not likely), or to the spirit of Minnie, or, conceivably, to his own inner child (which has been left at his doorstep), as if to say, Why me? Why you? Why anybody?

  CHICO: Hey, boss, what’s-amatter you no make-a the eye contact?

  GROUCHO: None of your strabismus.

  Der Eifersüchtige (the jealous one) or der Dunkle (the dark one) is what their mother called Groucho growing up. In color, he may be wondering how come his older brother gets to be the only one in a bathrobe.

  In life, as on the screen, Harpo had already evolved way beyond askance.* Harpo was sillier, simpler, and sweeter than Groucho or than Chico, the oldest.

  Chico was their mother’s favorite. His birth followed by a few months the death in early infancy of the first child, Manfred. Chico may have felt doted upon for two, beyond his due, so he undercut himself. Or maybe a double load of unconditional love made affection so predictable, he had to keep screwing up in order to make things interesting. He spent most of his time losing money on anything but favorites—what’s the fun of backing a horse that has any considerable chance to win?—and winning the favors of many, many women (aka chicks), hence his nickname, pronounced Chick-o, not Cheek-o. In this little clip of color footage, Chico is just standing there, apparently lost in thought. He has more on his mind than moviemaking. He is waiting for a chance to slip away and phone his bookie.

  Chico’s wife, Betty, did call him Cheek-o. Once she urged him to complain to his brothers that they upstaged him and didn’t allow him enough screen time. He decided she had a point and went off to argue his case. He returned looking shaken. “You almost broke up the Marx Brothers,” he told Betty. The act had room for only two prima donnas, he said. He didn’t need to be a star. “I just want the act to work”—so he’d have the wherewithal for his true calling: making merry with money, cards, and the broads, as he had been doing since early-onset adolescence.

  The next thing you’re going to see is a snow-topped mountain peak surmounted by an arc of stars and the legend “A Paramount Presents Picture.” That would seem to be a typo. In all the other Marx Brothers movies for Paramount, the mountain is saying “A Paramount Picture.” Maybe this time the boys had the logo rattled.

  Not counting an early silent film, Humor Risk, which, by all accounts, stank and which has at any rate been lost, Paramount produced the Marxes’ first five movies. The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers were versions of their hit stage shows, filmed in Astoria, Queens, New York. The Marxes grew up in Manhattan, whence Minnie stage-mothered them into show business.

  The brothers were quick to say that none of them would have amounted to anything if it hadn’t been for Minnie. “Her doelike looks were deceiving,” Harpo says in Harpo Speaks!

  She had the stamina of a brewery horse, the drive of a salmon fighting his way up a waterfall, the cunning of a fox, and a devotion to her brood as fierce as any she-lion’s. Minnie loved to whoop it up. She liked to be in the thick of things, whenever there was singing, storytelling, or laughter. But this was in a way deceiving too. Her whole adult life, every minute of it, was dedicated to her Master Plan.

  That was to make stage stars of her sons. Her brother, Al Shean (born Schoenberg), had achieved a career in song and patter, most notably as half of the comedy team Gallagher and Shean. (“Positively, Mr. Gallagher?” “Absolutely, Mr. Shean.”) Uncle Al impressed the boys when he came to visit, wearing matching fedora and spats and handing out dimes. But only Groucho, after leaving school to help support the family, thereby giving up on following in the footsteps of his father’s chiropodist, was eager to go into show business. The others, except for Chico, who joined late, were prodded into it by Minnie.

  Zeppo, for instance. Zeppo was Buster Marx, a Ford Motor Company mechanic and car thief who carried a gun, when Minnie c
alled and said Gummo had been drafted (“We can do without you,” she had told Gummo), so Zeppo had to catch a train right away to Rockford, Illinois, to join his brothers because the act was billed after all as the four Marx brothers. Zeppo said, “Ma, I have a date.” He didn’t mention that it was a double date: he and his tough older friend Louis Bass, who had led him into serious crime (his brothers having been too much older and too far away to be role models), were meeting two girls whom they planned to entertain by taking them into some bushes.

  And Minnie said, It doesn’t matter, you have to go.

  So Zeppo went. And that night Louis Bass met the girls but also their brothers, who were going to beat him up so he shot one of them to death and as a result went to prison for twenty years and when he got out he went into drug dealing and the police came and Bass decided to shoot his way out and he was killed. That’s the story Zeppo told, some sixty years later.

  But Minnie wasn’t trying to save Zeppo from all that; she was just keeping the act together and her word was law, so Zeppo went and when he got to Rockford he didn’t know any of the act but he went on anyway and ad-libbed and faked some dance steps and he was an entertainer (four or five shows a day at the beginning there) for the next fifteen years.

  As the boys were entering middle age Minnie died—in Harpo’s arms, after eating two hearty dinners and whooping it up with the boys at table tennis (picture Marx family Ping-Pong!) and having a stroke—four years before Duck Soup. In Harpo and Me, Harpo described her last moments:

  Then she saw me. She did the hardest thing she had ever done in sixty-five years of doing the impossible: she smiled. Her lips trembled. Her eyes were glazed with fear. But two tiny stars twinkled through the glaze, and she smiled.

  The smile went quickly out. Her fingertips fluttered against the bedcover. She was trying to say something. I knew what she was trying to say. I reached over and straightened her wig, the new blond wig she had bought especially for tonight. The smile came back for a second. Then it faded, and all the life in Minnie faded with it.

  In a documentary on the Marxes, Chico’s daughter, Maxine, is a cheerful and confident interviewee, but when she remembers what it was like after Minnie passed, her face falls: “All the boys were there. They were seated around the table. I had never seen the Marx brothers as a group that down. There was a pall over the room. I was eleven years old, and all I felt was the atmosphere. I looked at them all, and I got out. It was a terrible moment.”

  Early on, Minnie appeared with the boys, in the role of a learning-impaired schoolgirl. It’s frustrating not to have any moving, much less speaking, image of her. In still photos she looks a little like Harpo, wig and all, but considerably plumper. (She would arrive at parties laced into a corset, but then, having made her entrance, she would take the corset off.) She insisted on a class act—comedy leavened with unfarcical music. They felt their strengths lay in horseplay, however, and Chico, who was good at making connections, took over the managerial reins when the boys were thirtyish.

  Horseplay, musical and non-, made them stars on Broadway. By 1929, wrote Groucho, “we were the toast of the town, which is a lot better than being in a breadline.” New York’s most stylish literary clique, the celebratedly witty Algonquin Round Table, took Harpo to its acidulous bosom. Not Groucho. Whereas Harpo, at this time, was not even much of a reader, Groucho regarded himself, with reason, as a writer, and he admired in particular the most genial of the Round Tablers, the humorist Robert Benchley. Benchley was a fan of Groucho’s work, but Groucho himself, Benchley told someone, “makes me nervous. He’s always on the edge of his seat.”

  (Harpo, too, was always poised vis-à-vis Benchley but in a different way. According to Ben Hecht, “Harpo would wait for Benchley to fall in love, like a huntsman waiting for a bird dog to flush” a bird, and bingo, the lady in question would end up not in Benchley’s arms but in Harpo’s—in Benchley’s apartment, though, since Harpo had the use of it.)

  The Marxes’ conquest of Gotham and the commercial and critical success of their first two movies gave them clout. The most lucrative place to throw that clout around was Hollywood. They moved there, permanently as it turned out. They made Monkey Business (which, except for its flat ending, is one of their best films) and Horse Feathers, both of which were highly profitable. Paramount itself, though, was no healthier than the rest of the nation, and the Marxes decided to go indie. The Four Marx Brothers Inc., with Harpo as titular president, would mount their own project, a movie version of the musical Of Thee I Sing, starring themselves.

  Of Thee I Sing—a sprightly takeoff on American politics (but with nothing in it as subversive as three choruses of “Hail, Hail, Freedonia, laaaand …”)—was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. George and Ira Gershwin wrote the music and lyrics, and George S. Kaufman wrote the book and directed. This was the project about which Kaufman made an often-quoted cautionary comment: “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Of Thee I Sing concerns a man who runs for president on a platform of, simply, love. He plans to marry the winner of a special beauty contest and ride that factitious romance into the White House. But real love intervenes. He jilts the beauteous blond contest winner (who vows revenge) for a practical woman who bakes great corn muffins. He is elected, and the first lady will be a cornucopia of muffins to the unemployed.

  The complications that ensue amount to a lively tug on America’s leg at a time when theatergoers were in need of a lift. But Groucho marrying for corn-muffin love? Or for that matter, love? Chico might have worked as the play’s chief justice of the Supreme Court, a muffin-susceptible court that engages in absurdist arguments. But where’s the role for Harpo? Is it Alexander Throttlebottom, who keeps trying to get people to notice that he is vice president? Nobody doesn’t notice Harpo. So what? Harpo plays the blonde? And Kaufman was not eager to see his play Marxized. He was a friend of the brothers and had written, in collaboration with them and others, the stage versions of The Cocoanuts and Horse Feathers. Eventually he would be lured to Hollywood to write A Night at the Opera for them. But he was an honored and meticulous dramatic craftsman. The story goes that he once interrupted a full rehearsal of Horse Feathers to say, “Hey! I think I just heard one of my lines.”

  To posterity’s great relief, the Marxes’ Of Thee I Sing project fizzled. Then, with only Zeppo at his side, the Marxes’ father, Sam, known as Frenchie because he came from Alsace-Lorraine, died. He had been a terrible tailor professionally, a wonderful cook at home. Cheerfully dominated by Minnie when she was alive, he pursued the housemaid later. “Frenchie never stopped smiling, and his smile was like a secret radiation,” Harpo would recall. The brothers now were middle-aged orphans. For one more movie, they reconciled with Paramount. A highly unstable combination of people would gather at that pinnacle to help them make their masterpiece.

  Fade out mountain, fade in ducks. Four of them swimming and quacking in a big black pot with a fire beneath. Right away, this movie is not cuddly.

  So many movies have mice. Mickey, Minnie, Mighty, Stuart Little. Ignatz, whom Krazy Kat dotes on hopelessly, Jerry and Tuffy, whom Tom can never get over on. A Muppet mouse, a Russian immigrant mouse, a French chef mouse (okay, a rat, but a cute rat), an Italian mouse on Ed Sullivan (remember Topo Gigio?), city mouse and country mouse, a widowed field mouse named Mrs. Brisby, mice in Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella, Amos the mouse who tells how he and Ben Franklin discovered electricity. Serpico (like Lenny, unfortunately, in Of Mice and Men) has a pet mouse, Dr. Doolittle talks to a mouse, and Stockard Channing refers to “mouse-beds” in The Fortune. In l933, when he was nine years old, Billy Barty, the great dwarf actor, played a mouse in a Busby Berkeley number in Footlight Parade. Cast the mouse and you got a movie.

  Mice you can live with in the house. Ducks, no. According to Helen Lawrenson, a journalist-hottie-about-town in the mid-l930s, one of the fashionable joints in New York was the Chapeau Rouge, whose owner, Pepy d’Albrew, wore a live white m
ouse in his buttonhole. Not a duck. A duck wouldn’t stand for it.

  In movies, also, ducks aren’t easy. There’s Donald, whose chops led the critic Dave Hickey to call him the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters, but who is not cool. Donald throws duckfits—jumps up and down and squawks abusively at his nephews (who, being ducks themselves, can handle it). In “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (1942), Donald dreams that he has become a Nazi flunky, and it drives him phantasmagorically insane. (A great performance. If only for its bracing lack of subtlety, I put it ahead of Chaplin’s in The Great Dictator.) Then there’s Daffy, who has an exthplothive lithp and when excited goes bouncing around in all directions off all parts of his body and making a variety of hoo-hoo h’h’hoo oo-h’hoohoo wuh-hoo hw-w’hoo woo noises. And briefly there was Howard, an extraterrestrial “sarcastic humanoid duck” (to quote imdb.com) who, as a griping, cigar-smoking comic-book hero drew comparison to Groucho. But sweetened up by George Lucas for the blockbuster flop Howard the Duck, he became a synonym for turkey.

  In Horse Feathers there is a duck. It is swimming behind the canoe in which Groucho is serenading the college widow, played by Thelma Todd. As she paddles, Groucho is lying back, singing “Everybody Says I Love You,” and accompanying himself on the guitar. Will Rogers once wrote that Groucho could play the guitar as well as Harpo the harp and Chico the piano, “but he never does. So he is really what I call an ideal musician; he can play, but don’t.” Thelma tries to wheedle something out of Groucho by using baby talk. Not the tack to take with der Dunkle. “Is that coming from you, or the duck?” he asks Thelma. She winds up in the water, and the duck with Groucho in the canoe.