Trentino is coming back, one last peace effort. Great idea, says Firefly, he’ll be glad to reach out himself. But in a flash it hits him what a downer that would be. It is so much more rousing to imagine that when he reaches out to the peace seeker, the peace seeker will refuse to accept, which will be a humiliation that no Firefly can tolerate. So when the peace seeker arrives, Groucho has at him again with his trusty glove. A remark by the late Dan May, businessman and philosopher of Nashville, Tennessee, may be apropos here: “There is one thing and one thing only that will create a sudden war at any time, and that is a conviction that we are appeasers.”
This means war! All righty then!
But first let us pause to consider the structure of Duck Soup. According to standard screenwriting theory, a movie must consist of three acts. One: thirty minutes of setup, including an “inciting incident” that causes the hero to take on the problem. Two: an hour of complications leading to another key plot point that causes a reversal. Three: thirty more minutes of resolution.
You might say that act 1 of Duck Soup is its first thirty minutes, culminating in the first time Groucho insults Trentino, at the garden party. Act 2 would then be the skulduggery involving the plans and the mirror, ending in Groucho’s third insult of Trentino. And act 3 is the forthcoming fifteen minutes of war. Where’s the “reversal”? Nowhere. Duck Soup is ineluctably headed for war from the get-go. Duck Soup is subversive of standard screenwriting theory.
One more look at what’s in the Kalmar-Ruby script:
An exploding Zeppelin. Would have been a bit over the top. And not character-driven, even if the Zeppelin were taken to represent Zeppo.
Harpo driving his motorcycle through a trench, soldiers leaping out of his way all along. A good enough idea that it was filmed: seven years later, in The Bank Dick, W. C. Fields drove a car through a ditch, ditch diggers jumping out all along.
Get this, a reconciliatory postwar banquet. All wrong, all wrong.
No, Freedonia wants to go to war. “At last we’re going to war.” Because a movie needs a dramatic climax, and because so do people, alas. “This is a fact we can’t ignore.” This movie has momentum because it is about what people at their worst (well, not worst worst, no torture or genocide) take a hankering to do.
Freedonians are writhing in the ecstasy of anticipating war.
Harpo reappears as a drum major. And here comes the clip that gives the Woody Allen character Alvy Singer reason to live, back in l986, in Hannah and Her Sisters.
For some reason, Alvy has been hung up on the question, if there is no God or afterlife, why is this life worth living? To me that is like asking: why eat lunch if there’s nothing for dinner? But Alvy has gone so far in his spiritual quest as to consider and reject both Catholicism (thereby missing an opportunity for some great Jewish-Irish syzygy, with Cardinal O’Connor still alive—or Bill Murray could have had a cameo as either a Bing or a Barry Fitzgerald padre) and Hare Krishna. Alvy is so hung up on the purpose of life that he has just now tried ambivalently to shoot himself and missed. Shocked by his own “violent and unreal” behavior, he wanders into an Upper West Side movie theater, the Metro,* hoping to “put the world back into rational perspective.” And the next thing we see is the four Marxes turning soldiers’ heads into a xylophone and Harpo snipping off the soldiers’ plumes, to the beat.
McCarey saves an unidentified damsel from Harpo with shears meant for plume snipping.
That’s some droll montage. You’d think the next shot would be of Alvy dancing ecstatically in the balcony there, with other patrons yelling at him to sit down. But we have no sense that there is anyone else in the audience, certainly no hint of laughter. Instead of dancing, Alvy thinks. In voice-over, he reasons with himself, as the brothers swing into hidey-hidey-ho and so on. God help us, Alvy is looking to the Marx Brothers for rational perspective.
“Look at all those people on the screen,” says Alvy, who has seen this movie many times since childhood and loves it. “They’re real funny.” As we cut back and forth between a musing Alvy and a screen full of people standing on their hands kicking both feet in the air by way of acting out war fever, Alvy comes around finally to deciding that he’ll reserve judgment about God (could I get, from above, a sigh of relief?) and enjoy life. “How can you even think of killing yourself, I mean, isn’t it so stupid?”
I’d say so, yes, unless you’re in a good deal more agony than Alvy has the chops to convey. Can we imagine the reverse case, of any Marx brother finding a reason to live in Hannah and Her Sisters? Groucho was a big fan of Woody Allen, though, and the way his old crush Maureen O’Sullivan plays Hannah’s salty mother might have reminded him of Minnie. Lloyd Nolan as her father is maybe a little like Frenchie. And Hannah’s sisters, played engagingly by Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest, might suggest Harpo (free spirit) and Groucho (neurotic), respectively. But that would leave Chico as the over-responsible Hannah, played tightly by Mia Farrow, who was Allen’s life companion at the time. Let’s move on from Hannah and Her Sisters. I just watched the big reconciled-family Thanksgiving scene at the end and realized that the cute little girl who greets the Wiest character at the door must be Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-yi Previn (uncredited), here looking younger than her age (twelve), now the Woodman’s wife.
The Marx Brothers were not military types. When the United States entered World War I, Minnie found out that producers of food were draft-deferred, so she set the boys up in a chicken farm. They were not agricultural types either. They couldn’t stop rats from eating all the eggs, so when a customer or curious visitor was expected, they would run into town and buy eggs to put in the nests. Near the end of the war, Gummo did get drafted, which is why Zeppo had to give up a life of crime, but Gummo served his country by introducing officers to chorus girls in Chicago.
“And then the war came,” said Groucho on the radio many years later, “and I fought all the way. But I hadda go anyway.”
No, he didn’t, thanks to Minnie. So Duck Soup’s disrespect for war was not inspired by traumatic experience in the trenches, nor, it would appear, by Groucho’s devotion to the Irving Berlin song about brothers being turned into butchers. What we have here is war as a handy hook on which to hang as many violations of traditional music as can be worked into one propulsive number. The hidey-ho business, which I guess you could call jazz-inflected, flows into the lamentational “Woe-oh-woe,” which flows into the remarkably upbeat desecration of a Negro spiritual, “They got guns, we got guns, all God’s chillun got guns,” with Groucho going all bobblehead and Harpo all bobble-bodied, and then, slick as a whistle (the camera panning away, for a change, and then back), the boys have picked up banjos, and before you know it we’re all in a hoedown, with Harpo high-shit-kicking as only he can and Groucho doing something like the opposite of his trademark walk—he’s leading with his knees instead of his head, he’s stiff-backed and bent-kneed, as if he’s dancing tied to a chair, and somehow it makes him look downright rural. Then suddenly the gravity of the situation hits everyone for about five seconds until Harpo gets them back on track by playing “Turkey in the Straw” on a fiddle, and they’re square dancing again, but Harpo has lost his fiddle bow, seems he has stuck it in his butt somehow.
It’s the only time in a movie that all four boys played music together. One thing that is so appealing about this segment of Zeppo’s last movie is that he and the other three boys are equally involved, having a fine old time together. No reason for anybody to feel left out. In the early forties, Ben Hecht got several Hollywood people, including Harpo and the composer George Antheil, together to play chamber music. Groucho wanted to lend his talents on the mandolin, but was rebuffed on the grounds that his instrument wasn’t dignified enough. The group had just begun their first rehearsal at Hecht’s house, upstairs, when there was a loud banging on the door of the room and the uninvited Groucho flung it open.
“Quiet, please!” he shouted, then slammed the door behind him.
; “Groucho’s jealous,” Harpo explained. The group began to play again. Once again Groucho burst in, shouting, “Quiet, you lousy amateurs!” After an awkward pause, he slammed the door again. Then, as the group resumed their rehearsal, they heard, from downstairs, at great volume, the overture to Tannhäuser.
Antheil recalled that the group was “thunderstruck. We all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing, with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them.” Okay. Groucho was allowed to join the Ben Hecht Symphonietta.
In “To War …,” sibling rivalry rises to revelry. Where do we go from there? We go to the solo midnight ride of Harpo. Another nightmare for Edgar Kennedy. Harpo’s got to mobilize the citizenry against invaders, but wouldn’t you know he’d ride past a window and see a blonde in her undies? And wouldn’t you know whose wife she is?
In At the Circus, Harpo manages to get inside the mattress of an ill-natured strongman while the latter is trying to sleep on it. In the famous stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, Harpo winds up limply asleep on a large tray that waiters have used to serve food. And we have seen Harpo get into Edgar Kennedy’s pocket and his lemonade. But to come up, fully dressed and blowing a bugle, from underneath an Irish-American man in his own bathtub!
Duty calls, Harpo’s body language expresses rather more eloquently than necessary, and he’s off to alert the nation. It’s a tough job, but it’s okay because Harpo finds another lady in another window, and—didn’t I tell you Marxes don’t get the girl? Maybe they would if Judd Apatow were directing, but he isn’t.
Harpo winds up, by preference, in bed with the horse. A note here: McCarey supervised a Laurel and Hardy, called Wrong Again, in which a horse winds up standing on a piano, and the Harold Lloyd vehicle The Milky Way, in which Lloyd loads a young horse into the back of a taxi. In the latter case the colt would not vocalize, so McCarey did the whinnies, and they were so convincing that he left them in.*
Okay, last time we saw Groucho he was posing heroically in the uniform of a revolutionary patriot. Now he’s in, I don’t know what uniform, maybe Civil War or Zouave, and his aides are in something like World War I Prussian. They’re under bombardment, and the enemy has seized certain hills, “throwing thirteen hillbillies out of work.” Want to know what French for “hillbillies” is? Péquenauds. Not in my French dictionary. We should all watch this with a French person sometime. Maybe you are a French person! Watch it with a hillbilly!
Sometimes Groucho’s jokes seem almost pointedly thematic:
“Any answer to that message?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, in that case, don’t send it.”
That thinking is a lot like the thinking that finally got Freedonia into this war: welcoming an opportunity to extend the right hand of good fellowship, but what if he doesn’t take it how will that make me look so instead slap him with the right hand of paranoia.
What is Groucho satirizing? The insecurity that gives rise to warmongering, or his own insecurity? Why not both?
The French for “this is the last straw” is evidently c’est la goutte d’eau qui fait deborder le vase, which I’m going to go ahead and translate as “this is the drop of water that makes the vase overflow.” The French translator would seem to have thrown in the towel.
Zeppo informs Groucho that he’s shooting his own men. After shooting some more of them, Groucho takes this on board, offers to bribe Zeppo to keep it secret, then takes the money back. Some viewers, I have read, are put off by this. But for one thing, c’est la guerre, and for another thing, as Buster Keaton said of the Marxes, “Pathos had nothing to do with them. They never even got into a situation where you’d feel sorry for anybody.” That’s true at least when they are really cooking, when the romantic subplot isn’t dragging them in. “Course, they’d kid themselves in and out of everything,” said Keaton. Yes. They are kids. They kid. They give each other, and everybody else, a hard time. That didn’t go over so well in hard times evidently. But that is their heroism. The kids I was watching the movie with at the Thalia were eating this up.
Now Groucho is in a Confederate uniform. And Chicolini pops in. When last seen, he was being tried for treason against Freedonia. Since then he has apparently re-upped as Freedonian Secretary of War, because now he’s done something about the fact that Freedonia is losing the war—he’s quite frankly gone over (again) to the other side, but the food is better over here—have I lost track of this sentence? What matters is, all the boys are back together.
And whom have we been missing? Here she is, Mrs. T!
Groucho greets her as a uniformed Boy Scout. You can see by Harpo’s outfit that he is an admiral, or something, employed at the moment as a rifleman. Another cut, and it’s Groucho in a stupendous busby and a snappy frogged-front jacket. Another one, and Groucho is in Davy Crockett garb, and Zeppo is seizing the opportunity, at last, to show off how buff his upper body is.
Someone’s got to go for help. A kid’s ritual to choose who’s it. Chico cheats, so Harpo’s it. Must have happened all the time in their boyhood. “And remember, when you’re out there risking life and limb … we’ll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.” An unpalatable sentiment if I ever heard one. Those kids I was watching with at the Thalia—kids who knew from siblings—were eating it up.
You know Harpo had to cut Groucho’s coontail off. The tail was there, the scissors were there. Master’s theses have no doubt been devoted to Harpo and … whatever it’s called, psychologically, I forget here now in the heat of battle, when brothers cut tails off brothers.
Help is on the way … Never before or since in the history of cinema has there been such a spontaneous outpouring of stock footage: firetrucks, motorcycle cops, distance runners, rowers, swimmers, baboons and stampeding elephants (clipped from the great semi-documentary Chang, by Merion Cooper, the primary creator of King Kong), and last but not least, dolphins. Dolphins not frolicking as these aquatic mammals are wont to do but coursing determinedly toward our side (we’re Freedonia) by sea.
Firefly as angel of mercy? No wonder this was cut.
And look here. Far from going all tony and wilting on us in a pinch, Mrs. T is right there at the barricade, in couture by Molly Pitcher, loading rifles for the boys. And now that Groucho has his head caught in a chamber pot (to a wartime president, things happen), she’s firing a rifle herself.* And she’s helping to hold the door against a battering ram—but there’s a rearguard line to be drawn as well: “Oh, don’t touch me! Keep away from me!” (Ne me touchez pas! Laissez-moi tranquille!) has the heartfelt ring of Maggie Dumont speaking ad-lib for herself. She will not have horrid Harpo help her by placing both hands firmly on her ass.
Freedonia has captured Trentino, his head jammed into the broken door! What a perfect opportunity to throw fruit at someone. Someone on the other side even.
The u-word is still stuck in Groucho’s craw: “Call me an upstart, eh?”
And the Marxes run to the throwable fruit.
Freeze a moment, if you will, for a few words about artful throwing. Hear the great and fastidious silent craftsman Buster Keaton lay this down:
For one we don’t use a regular baker’s pie, and throwing the pie in a cardboard plate is no good because that plate flying off detracts. So, what we used to do is our prop man would get our baker … to make pie crust, two of them, with nothing in them, and take just a little flour and water to make a paste, just enough to glue the two together. That was so that your fingers wouldn’t go through the bottom of it. Now you fill it, about an inch, with just flour and water mixed, which clings like glue and stretches. Now, on top of it, if I’m going to hit somebody in dark clothes, a brunette, you put a lemon meringue type of topping to it and garnish with whipped cream, you see. When it was a light costume, a blond, something like that, you put in blueberry and then enough whipped cream just to spatter.
Ke
aton once threw a pie twenty-seven feet, he says, and “caught the villain plum in the puss with it.”
The Marxes are not that old-school. In this, the last gasp of Duck Soup, they throw fruit from close range. What kind of fruit is unclear. It would appear to be some kind of stage fruit. It is round. It bounces gratifyingly enough off Trentino’s nose. It does not smash. The throwing rather than splatter is the thing.
All four boys, throwing together. One day, decades before, Minnie had booked Harpo, Groucho, and Gummo’s act “Skule Days” into Waukegan, Illinois. Harpo, as he recalled in Harpo Speaks!, was doing some bit of business involving an orange and a hat when he looked into the orchestra pit and “let out a whoop.” He threw the orange at the guy playing the piano, who threw it back. When Groucho and Gummo looked, they whooped too. “We heaved everything we could get our hands on into the orchestra pit—hats, books, chalk, erasers, stilettos. The piano player surrendered. He climbed up onto the stage … and joined the act. It was Chico.”
Chico, who had been traveling independently, playing the piano for gambling money, had found himself in Waukegan on the same day as his family and had bribed their regular pianist to let him sit in. From then on, Chico was a brother not only by blood but also onstage. And Chico took over management of the act from Minnie and the act evolved into brotherly war.
So.
Why is it so gratifying that as soon as Mrs. T pipes up with “Victory is owahs!” and starts to sing, quite suitably one would think, the Freedonian national anthem—why is it so gratifying that the boys turn and start throwing at her? You don’t find it gratifying?
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 11