Where were we? Trentino’s office. Kinskey’s agitator says he has failed to foment because Firefly is so popular with the people. Trentino, rather than expressing consternation, says (one of my favorite lines, somehow, in the whole movie), “Oh yes, I’ve known of that too.”
So he has employed spies. Chicolini and Pinky. Chico and Harpo.
In childhood, Chico and Harpo were close, but not equal. Harpo: “I was flattered when people said I was the image of Chico. I guess I was. We were both of us shrimps compared to the average galoots in the neighborhood. We were skinny, with peaked faces, big eyes, and mops of wavy, unruly hair.” But although “I practiced walking like Chico for hours,” Harpo “never could master his look of total concentration.”
Anything Harpo acquired that was spendable or hockable, Chico would steal. He even stole Harpo’s bar mitzvah watch and, when Harpo complained, handed him the pawn ticket. Minnie bailed the watch out. Harpo prevented Chico from pawning it again by taking the hands off it—it still ticked just fine. But Chico also taught Harpo things: for instance, never shoot dice on a blanket.
As Harpo comes in backward with whirling eyes on the back of his head, Chico as Chicolini makes his first appearance. He’s smiling. We can see confirmation here, without dwelling on it, of what so many people said who knew Chico in person: that he had a powerfully seductive smile. Not gigolo seductive, not salesman seductive, but deep-tissue seductive. It’s not warm, it’s not confiding, it’s a got-something-working smile. It’s a smile you’d like to respond to in such a way as to make it warmer. The thing that my wife likes most about the Marx Brothers is watching Chico play the piano. Which he doesn’t do in this movie. A pity.
Why is it that Trentino welcomes his spies with what seems to be genuine enthusiasm? “Gentlemen!”
They run right past him and start messing with stuff on his desk. “Gentlemen! What is this?”
“Shhh. This is spy stuff.” Richard Nixon once recorded himself saying, “The Jews are born spies.” Anyone taking that contention seriously enough to refute it might point to this movie. One thing to say for Harpo as a spy, he is resourceful: if you can’t light your cigar with a telephone, the blowtorch you’re carrying in your pants (same pocket you carry your alarm clock in) will do. After you light the cigar of the man you are reporting to, it’s textbook spy-craft to cut it in half with the scissors you are carrying in that same pocket. Where is your James Bond when Harpo and Chico take up spying? Bond needed enemies to bring out his heroics; these spies foil whoever is handy.
Chicolini, Trentino, and Pinky: this is spy stuff.
Speaking of handy, why doesn’t Harpo chase the secretary? He is about to, but when Chico says, “Anh-anh,” he backs off. As a rule, Harpo does exactly what he wants to—when he takes scissors to his employer’s coattails or applies glue to the seat of his employer’s pants, he achieves that rare thing, an intended consequence. But Harpo does not pursue the secretary. No time for lust. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree treason is a far far finer thing that they do.*
“Gentlemen, we are not getting anywhere!”
To that appeal, the spies’ lightning response is unexpected: an improvised spot of baseball, with ruler for bat and cigar butt for ball. The Marxes were sports guys. In golf, Groucho once got a hole in one; Harpo says he missed a hole in one by inches, on another occasion, while not wearing any clothes. They were serious fans of baseball—Harpo a heavy-betting one. Harpo’s boyhood dream was to play left field for the New York Giants because the left fielder was the only player he could see when he watched the games at the Polo Grounds for free from a promontory overlooking the park. In a celebrity baseball game, Will Rogers, playing second base, took a throw standing several feet from the bag and declared that Groucho, steaming into second, was out. “You’ve got to touch the base!” insisted Groucho. “When you’re my age,” said Rogers, “the base is wherever I’m standing.” For Harpo and Chico, wherever they are is off-base, and home.
Freeze the frame right after they depart Trentino’s office. Look closely at the copy of the Freedonia Gazette that, thanks to Harpo, is glued to Trentino’s pants. It’s the same copy that Trentino was holding up when he was finding fault with the agitator. Its banner headline is “Reception Tomorrow for Rufus T. Firefly.” The last Gazette we saw said: “Mammoth Reception Arranged to Welcome Nation’s Leader Tonight,” and then we saw the reception. So Trentino is the type of national leader who reads old out-of-town newspapers. That still does not account for his parting words to Pinky and Chicolini: “Gentlemen, I’m going to give you one more chance.” As Joe Adamson puts it in Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Sometimes Zeppo:
One more chance? What does he want? What are his prerequisites for despondency? Leprosy? The Black Plague? Fire, Famine and Slaughter? Apparently games and disguises are all that’s expected of a spy anymore …
In Kalmar and Ruby’s original treatment, the spy stuff is different. Groucho and Chico are interviewing young women, ostensibly to hire one as a spy, but mostly so they can ogle them and get their phone numbers. Then Harpo enters the waiting room, in drag, and squeezes in between two girls. He’s carrying a “very large pocket book,” from which he extracts an outsize powder puff, with which he suffuses the room in powder. When one of the girls tells a dumb joke, Harpo slaps her on the leg, she slaps him, he slaps her again on the leg, and she looks at her leg and it’s bruised from the slap.
We don’t want to see that, do we? No. Kalmar and Ruby’s treatment and the draft of their subsequent script that survives contain many of the movie’s best bits, but they also include stuff that was too crass and prurient to get past McCarey. For instance, Kalmar and Ruby have Harpo in female garb entering the interview room, where he is well received. Chico advises him that if he gets the job of woman spy, he “might have to make love.” Harpo expresses his delight at that prospect by hugging Chico, who hugs back. There’s a pop—Harpo’s right breast has gone flat. Harpo finds a pump somewhere on his person and manages to explode his other breast. When he tries to pump that up, instead his butt expands, to the point that his dress comes off and he’s in his “trunks.”
“Well, you fooled me,” says Chico, in the script, so Harpo is hired. They give him a spyglass, which he trains out a window to find “a beautiful girl across the way getting undressed for bed.” He hands the spyglass to Groucho and Chico, who are impressed by this bit of spycraft, but then who should pop up in the view but Harpo chasing the girl around the room and then outside.
Enough of the script—back to the movie. We find Groucho in Freedonia playing jacks, and showing pride in his jacks-playing skill, as his distinguished-looking cabinet ministers wait to be called to order. Then there’s his still-oft-quoted “run out and find me a four-year-old child” joke. And he dispenses with new business and old. Imdb.com says that Edward Arnold plays one of the politicians in Duck Soup, but I’ve never been able to find him. Might he have been confused with Edwin Maxwell, who looks quite a bit like Arnold? Maxwell, uncredited, is the Secretary of War, who resigns in this scene. In 1933 Maxwell appeared in twenty-one movies, including his fairly substantial and quite creepy role in Mystery of the Wax Museum, which you might want to check out sometime.
But never mind that. By the equivalent point in Kalmar and Ruby’s script, it has been established that Firefly is an arms dealer. That’s why he’s trying to stir up war with Sylvania—so he can sell arms. So explicable, so mundane. In the movie, he’s just naturally interested in havoc. And so are his brothers.
In Kalmar and Ruby’s script, Firefly is in his House of Representatives, with Trentino visiting. We hear Chico chanting “PEANUTS” outside. Firefly tells Trentino to scram, then tells Zeppo to chase the vendor away. Zeppo says he won’t go, so Groucho goes to the window and sees Chico at his peanut stand conniving with Trentino, who, we learn, has hired Chico and Harpo to drive Firefly crazy. What? It’s so much more fun to drive Trentino crazy.
But here’s who would be even more fun to d
rive crazy: a beefy Irishman. Irish kids weren’t the only bullies Harpo recalled in Harpo Speaks! As Harpo broke it down, a German kid whose father had licked him for street fighting would take it out on an Italian kid who would pass it on to an Irish kid who would avenge himself on a Jewish kid, and at every stage the message was “I’ll teach you!”—something Harpo always thought of, he said, when anyone mentioned “progressive education.”
Chico finessed the diversity problem by mastering Irish, Italian, and German accents so that he could pass himself off as ethnically appropriate on any block. But Harpo’s talents were not vocal, and at any rate there was no fooling the Irish who knew him. He dropped out of school in the second grade, Harpo recalled, for two reasons:
One was a big Irish kid in my class and the other was a bigger Irish kid. I was a perfect patsy for them, a marked victim. I was small for my age. I had a high, squeaky voice. And I was the only Jewish boy in the room.
Whenever the teacher left the room, the Irish boys, according to Harpo, would throw him out the window. One day he just stayed out, for good.
We know that Harpo, as a performer, was McCarey’s favorite Marx brother. Maybe it didn’t occur to McCarey that giving Harpo a large Irishman to push around would be sweet. Maybe McCarey thought having a large Irishman to push around would keep the Marxes from trying to push him around. At any rate, McCarey brought in Edgar Kennedy, whom he’d worked with in the Laurel and Hardy days, to play a lemonade seller.
McCarey and Kennedy were old masters of the slow burn and the tit-for-tat. One of McCarey’s contributions to silent comedy had been to slow down the pace. For one thing, he shot at a speed of fifteen or sixteen frames per second, instead of the previously standard twelve, so that gags weren’t jerky and frenetic. For another thing, he got his actors to pause more, to engage in deliberative slapstick. This would give them time to fume, to steam, to plot and scheme, and for the audience to savor the last bit and to anticipate the next bit of tit-for-tat. In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, McCarey recalled a scene in one of his Laurel and Hardy shorts, From Soup to Nuts: Hardy, carrying a cake, steps through a doorway and
falls and finds himself on the floor, his head buried in the cake. I shouted to him, “Don’t move! Above all, don’t move! Stay like that, the cake should burn your face!” And for a minute and a half, the public couldn’t stop laughing. Hardy remained immobile, his head in the cake! He remained stretched out, furious, and you could only see his back.
McCarey’s devotion to the tit-for-tat derived, he maintained, from a party he attended in the twenties with Hal Roach, Charley Chase, Mabel Normand, and other giants of the silent screen. He had never been able to tie a bow tie. Normand had promised to tie his black tie for him at his hotel, but as a joke she ducked out, so he had to call all around to track down a friend’s wife whom he knew to be an excellent tier of ties. Then as soon as he got to the party, Normand pulled the tie loose. So McCarey pulled Roach’s. Roach pulled somebody else’s. Soon everyone at the affair was ripping off collars and tearing apart dinner jackets. That social occasion, McCarey recalled, inspired “at least a dozen Laurel and Hardy pictures.”
The next scene of Duck Soup is in the tradition of tit-for-tat, but it’s different, because it’s the Marxes. In Laurel and Hardy movies, tit-for-tat was a matter of carrying out mutual assured destruction. When Harpo and Chico get ahold of Edgar Kennedy, it’s more like tit-tit-tit-tit-tit for the Marxes, Kennedy getting in one resounding tat, and then more tits for the Marxes. Kennedy can’t keep up because he is operating at a slow-burn pace and they are operating at pretty close to their usual rat-a-tat.
So that you don’t have to, I have watched this scene some twenty or thirty times, and in slow motion, and frame by frame. A lot of things happen, and here they are, for the record:
Chico, at his peanut wagon, is chanting, “PEA-NUTS,” but his focus, and his big anticipatory smile, is on the wiener he is mustarding up. Harpo appears. Steals some peanuts. That makes sense. But it is not enough for Harpo. Harpo pulls out his scissors and snips Chico’s wiener in two.
Why? In a Laurel and Hardy movie, a tit-for-tat would be generated by some imagined affront, or by an accidental one perceived to be intentional, and the counteraffront would be commensurate but real and purposeful, as would be the next and the next and so on. But Harpo is an imp of the perverse, who does everything he wants to, for no other reason than that he is looking for trouble. He gives Chico a loony, almost conspiratorial smile, as if he has performed for Chico a necessary or at least a delightful service.
Chico is not delighted.
If this were classic tit-for-tat, he would cut something Harpo values in two. Instead, he pushes Harpo away while saying, “Hey, com’ere.” And says to Harpo, against all reason, “Just the guy I wanna see.” Bit of a double or triple bind there, but Harpo is unbound. For the sake of connecting this scene, however tangentially, to the movie as a whole, Chico begins grilling Harpo as to whether he has been spying on Firefly.
Harpo’s response is to give Chico his leg. This is a thing Harpo started doing in vaudeville and continued to do throughout his life, in any situation. (At a reception in London, however, the Duke of Windsor gave Harpo his leg.)
Chico flings Harpo’s leg away. Harpo sticks one of the in-the-shell peanuts he stole from Chico into Chico’s mouth. Chico spits the peanut out and demands to know why Harpo won’t talk. (He hasn’t noticed until now that his partner is mute?) Harpo offers Chico a handful of his peanuts. Chico slaps them away. Harpo looks pouty.
“Hey, why you make-a the face?” says Chico, and he pushes Harpo in the face. This provokes Harpo into balling up his fists in a childlike way and taking an aggressive stance. Chico is willing to fight. Harpo fakes with the fists and kicks Chico in the leg.
In what sounds like it might be vintage street-fighting punctilio, Chico says, “Hey, no downstairs. Upstairs this time.”
By this time we have begun to see Kennedy at his neighboring lemonade stand, but he’s busy selling lemonade and has no part in the action so far.
Then Chico pushes Harpo back into a lemonade customer, and the next thing you know, the lemonade dipper is clattering and lemonade is sloshing and the customer is struggling to extricate Harpo’s hand from his, the customer’s, pants pocket. When he does get Harpo’s hand out, Harpo proudly shows him that a piece of paper, maybe money, has come with it. And meanwhile, Harpo is getting his other hand into Kennedy’s pants pocket. When Kennedy turns to direct his exasperation toward Chico, he feels a tug and realizes that Harpo has his hand in his, Kennedy’s, pocket. Kennedy jerks and slaps and manages to get Harpo’s hand out of his pocket, but in the process Harpo pulls the pocket inside out, and he is eyeing it the way he eyed Chico’s wiener.
“Hey,” blusters Kennedy, “what’s the idea?” Indeed. What kind of insane person goes around jamming his hands into other men’s pockets? But Kennedy takes offense not at the business with the pockets but at “fighting outside my place and driving my customers away!” While Chico is explaining that he wasn’t fighting, and giving Kennedy a few kicks to show how Harpo was fighting with him, Harpo has his scissors back out and is cutting the pocket out of Kennedy’s pants, turning it into a nice little cloth bag, into which he puts some peanuts from his pocket. Perhaps because there is something both symbolic and actual about all this that would seem, to your basic large Irishman, not a good thing to acknowledge, Kennedy does not notice that someone is using his pocket for a nut bag. Kennedy is responding to Chico’s explanatory kicks by saying, “Hey, what’s the idea?” again.
But he can’t stand listening to Chico’s explanations, so he addresses some questions to Harpo: “Say, listen, what’re you doing around here?”
What he is doing is demonstrating his disregard for Kennedy’s personal space. Leaning into Kennedy’s paunch, thereby causing the horns he carries in the front of his pants to honk.
“Who are ya?”
Might not these have been quest
ions the boy Harpo had to field when caught on an Irish block?
Again honk.
Chico butts into Kennedy’s berating of Harpo by explaining that he and Harpo are spies and casting himself as victim: how is he going to get any spying done if his fellow spy won’t talk? Harpo stands by, looking innocent.
“Will you quit annoying me?” Kennedy demands.
All right, says Chico, as long as Kennedy will make Harpo stop kicking Chico in the way that Chico demonstrates by kicking Kennedy. And Harpo gives Kennedy his leg.
That really sets Kennedy off. For that, he is going to tear Harpo limb from limb.
Harpo responds by engaging Kennedy in a handshake and knocking both his own hat and Kennedy’s to the ground. Kennedy picks up Harpo’s hat, Harpo Kennedy’s. Chico points out to Kennedy what has happened, and now Kennedy is showing us a great slow burner’s slow burn. If this were a Laurel and Hardy movie, both parties to the dispute would be slow burning, but it’s a Marx-McCarey movie, so Harpo and Chico aren’t slow burning, they’re just stoking Kennedy’s burn. He’s a full head (magnificent big bald head) taller than they are. They’re baiting him the way two small dogs might badger an ox.
Harpo seems to offer Kennedy’s hat back to him, but instead he takes his own hat back and drops Kennedy’s to the ground.
Kennedy, his lips pooched out, bends over to pick up his hat, straightens to put it on, turns to Chico, who is persisting in explaining what his idea is, and Harpo reaches way up (Kennedy being a full head taller than either Marx) and gets his hat in under Kennedy’s so that Kennedy winds up wearing Harpo’s again and vice versa. For good measure, Harpo gives Kennedy his leg again.
Kennedy sees what Harpo is wearing, realizes what he himself is wearing, utters a gutteral exclamation, and slams Harpo’s hat to the ground. Harpo drops Kennedy’s hat to the ground. And deftly kicks it away as Kennedy reaches for it.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 7