EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-00976-0
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blount, Roy.
Hail, hail, euphoria!: presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the greatest war movie ever made / Roy Blount Jr. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-180816-6
1. Duck Soup (Motion picture). 2. Marx Brothers. I. Title.
PN1997.D845B57 2010
791.43’42—dc22
2010021740
10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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* Harpo gets in bed with a horse, sure, but he would never tongue kiss one, as Chris Kattan has done in a recent yuk-fest.
* Aside from the one joke that has died, as we shall see.
* Unless you count the Woody Allen character in Hannah and Her Sisters working out a reason not to shoot himself while watching the “Freedonia’s Going to War” scene, which we will come to.
* The closest thing to this in any of the brothers’ movies is one of the few high points of The Big Store, in which Harpo and Chico play their only filmed piano duet, and they do some rumba moves together, while playing, and then Harpo is banging the keys from behind Chico, through his legs, and then Harpo is on Chico’s back … This was supposed to be the brothers’ last movie. At the beginning of the duet, Chico says to Harpo, “You remember I used to give you lessons,” which in fact his mother told him to do in their boyhood and which he did, if at all, only perfunctorily. Pretty much anything a Marx brother ever learned, he figured out for himself.
* Harpo told the Saturday Evening Post in 1951 that the role he played in Duck Soup was his favorite because “Brownie was an even dumber person than I usually play. I love to play illiterate characters. I’m almost one myself, having read only two books in my life, and Brownie was super-illiterate.” Two problems with that statement: by 1951 Harpo had in fact become, by many accounts, a keen book reader, and the name of his character in Duck Soup—except in certain copyright documents, which do call him Brownie—is Pinky.
* In one of the movies a quasi-legal Groucho-Chico exchange ends in Chico explaining “Habeas Irish Rose.”
* In some enchanted clime far, we may assume, from Pasadena. That city’s Arbor Mansion and Arden Villa, however, provided suitably palatial locations for Duck Soup, as they would many years later for the TV show Dynasty.
* Ingrid on Leo: “I couldn’t believe how full of ideas he was. You couldn’t not like him. If you didn’t like him, there was something wrong with you.”
† Later, McCarey could use a camera nimbly. In An Affair to Remember, Deborah Kerr’s character (Terry) doesn’t want Cary Grant’s character (Nickie) to know that the reason she didn’t show up to meet him was that an accident rendered her paraplegic. But Nickie suddenly suspects. As Chris Fujiwara notes in Defining Moments in Movies, “He crosses the vast Cinemascope living room, the camera following him, and opens the door to Terry’s bedroom. McCarey cuts to a close shot inside the bedroom, where Nickie sees the painting on the wall—proof that Terry was the wheelchair-bound buyer of whom he was told by his gallery owner. Because the camera is on him as he enters the room, we first see his face as understanding dawns on it, and only then does McCarey pan slightly to frame the painting reflected in a mirror. This simple camera movement is a heart-wrenching double-whammy moment of pure cinema.”
* In Ruby and Kalmar’s largely abandoned Duck Soup script, Chico tells a prospective female spy that she will have to “make love to men. Come on—let’s see you make love.” So she “bends him over and kisses him madly,” after which he “staggers around in a daze.” No. That is not Chico. We don’t want to see that.
* When Bob Roland (Zeppo) tells Firefly that Trentino slapped Bob when he told an off-color story to Vera Marcal, and Firefly wants to know what the story was, and Bob whispers it to him, and Firefly slaps him and demands to know where he heard such a story, and Bob says, “Well, you told it to me,” and Firefly says, “Oh yes”—so far, so good, but it seems odd for him to claim then that he heard it from Mrs. Teasdale. In real life, Groucho didn’t care much for jokes as such, but he did like to tell one of Chico’s favorites. It seems a man got lost in the woods for days, and he was hungry and thirsty, but what was driving him mad was having no female companionship. So when he came to a cabin, the first thing that caught his eye was a knothole. Something about it was so inviting that he couldn’t help himself, he pulled down his pants and inserted his member into the hole and was pounding away when a man came to the door and said, “Excuse me, but could you come inside, and do that toward the outside? We’re just sitting down to dinner.”
* Groucho’s walk contradicts itself: he slouches, and yet he scoots. Raymond Durgnat called it a “sneaky, bent-double walk-cum-slide,” a “physical metaphor for moral snakeyness,” and “a sleek hunchbacked lope.” Stefan Kanfer: “that hilarious slinking crouch.” Jack Kerouac: “that furious, ground-hugging walk with coattails flying.” Max Eastman: Groucho “bends in the middle in a highly impractical manner, as though he were working himself not very successfully on a pair of ill-adjusted hinges.” And yet the walk has a certain psychological universality. Groucho was indignant when George S. Kaufman’s biographer suggested that the walk imitated the way Kaufman paced around while thinking, but the walk’s thrust (unlike that of trucking, in which the head cools it in the wake of the strut) does seem cerebral. “Headstrong,” Trentino will call Firefly, and in this walk there is something of a locomotive writing a check its caboose can’t cash. Robert Benchley, according to his son Nathaniel, had “a slightly stooped forward, stern-out kind of walk that he used when intent on accomplishing something … as though he were already on the defensive against the inanimate objects that were about to lash out at him.” Benchley’s gait befit a lovable bumbler. Groucho’s is exhilarating for the way his head expects the rest of him to look after itself. In 2003 researchers who had studied slow-motion film of elephants making haste reported that the animals did what could be described as “Groucho running”—a kind of headlong, bent-leg shuffle. (That’s hard to see, though, even in slo-mo, when the elephants come running, as we shall see, to join Freedonia’s war.) Groucho, for his part, said that in vaudeville “I was just kidding around one day and started to walk funny. The audience liked it so I left it in.” When Harpo tries to alert Chico to something Groucho is doing in A Day at the Races by imitating the walk with his finger beneath his nose like a mustache, Chico’s first guess is “Buffalo Bill goes ice skating.” Now people teach others how to “Groucho walk,” not for comedic purposes but as a dance move, as an exercise for butt and thigh muscles, as a handheld-camera-steadying technique, as a gun-steadying technique for target shooting or police work, or as the best way to approach a running helicopter safely. It may be (Michael Jackson’s moonwalk being a contender) the best-known walk in history.
* In midnote, he’s got the gray jack
et back on, but without the glove in the pocket. McCarey seems to have gone with the best takes rather than matching ones.
† Nowhere near as good as in Animal Crackers, when a butler announces him as “the Professor,” and he saunters in wearing a long black cape and top hat and puffing a cigarette, and Groucho says, “The gate swung open and a fig newton entered.”
* Far be it from me to indulge in loose speculation, but the secretary is played by Verna Hillie, age nineteen, who would go on to a small role in McCarey’s next picture, Six of a Kind. Maybe McCarey chased her.
* “The lack of reason,” writes David Thomson, “is suited to the arbitrariness of the screen and its ability to unfold events which one can do nothing to stop or control. Anything can be put on the screen from one frame to the next and its appearance will do away with the need for explanation. The Marx Brothers’ films rely more than most on this autonomy, and Harpo more than any of his brothers.”
* In case you’re interested, the French subtitle translates “a big pain in the neck” into vraiment casse-pieds, which I believe is literally “truly a feet-breaker.”
* In the script there’s a line about not having seen his chiropodist in years. Don’t forget that Groucho had once aspired to a career in chiropody.
* Groucho made his famous joke that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him in a letter to the Friars Club announcing his resignation because he was seldom in New York anymore and didn’t use the membership. In Hollywood he was a regular at the Hillcrest Country Club, which was restricted to Jews until Harpo, by his account, led a campaign to de-restrict it. McCarey belonged to the Lakeside Country Club, which was restricted to non-Jews. In her review of Hannah and Her Sisters, in which Duck Soup inspires the Woody Allen character not to off himself, Pauline Kael complained that Allen had in fact gotten away from his early, heavily Marx-influenced strengths to fall back on conventional Upper West Side of Manhattan cultural values: “He has found a club that will have him.” Pauline duly appreciated Duck Soup and the Marxes (when asked what movies she’d like to see again, she would cite Duck Soup and Million-Dollar Legs, a W. C. Fields vehicle produced by Mankiewicz), but she had a soft spot for the Ritz Brothers, whom most critics hold up as vastly inferior. (The Ritzes are in fact terrific in On the Avenue.) I have a photo of Pauline at lunch with, and making a face comparable to a Gookie with, Harry Ritz. She told me she had lunch with Groucho, in his old age, and prevailed upon him to go say hello to Dean Martin, who was at another table with a blonde or two. Dino cut Groucho dead.
* I don’t know what generation Irish-American McCarey was, but his immigrant juices were less fresh than the Marxes’. His father, who had been a big-time boxing promoter in Los Angeles, made enough money to send his son, against his will, to law school. McCarey did not last long as a lawyer. When he turned against his own client, on ample grounds of taste, the client chased him out of the courthouse and down the street. McCarey fled past an acquaintance, who said, “What are you doing?” “Practicing law,” said McCarey.
* Personally I am glad that the following dialogue in the script did not make it to the screen. After Chico avoids saying what his dog’s name is, Groucho persists: “How do you call your dog when you want him?” “I don’t want him,” says Chico. The script is often harsh to animals. At one point Harpo, at the sight of a mouse, is called upon to produce a mousetrap, get down on the floor and whistle, and draw the mouse into the trap, which snaps on him. We don’t want to see Harpo picking on little mice. Edgar Kennedy is a much more suitable outlet for aggression. Harpo and animals worked well together—the most nuanced performance I have ever seen a seal give in a motion picture is in At the Circus. Harpo is playing checkers. The seal is kibitzing, giving Harpo pointed nudges. Thanks to the seal, Harpo’s opponent jumps all of his checkers in one fell swoop. Harpo gives the seal a reproachful look. A beat. The seal shrugs, Harpo gives the seal a big forgiving smile and nuzzle. Kalmar-Ruby’s antagonism toward animals wouldn’t have suited even Groucho. In an early draft of a script they wrote for The Big Store, Groucho interrupts a man who is beating a dog—“Don’t hit her, she’s man’s best friend.” The dog bites Groucho in the rear. “Go ahead,” he says, “beat the hell out of her.” Kalmar and Ruby gave us lovely love songs, and they were better writers of primo Marxian comedy than their literary superior, S. J. Perelman. But they had a coarse streak.
* That happens in The Cocoanuts. He also eats a bellboy’s buttons and drinks ink.
* Dorothy Dandridge, fourteen years old, is said to be among the dancers, but I don’t know that anyone has identified which one she is. My bet is that she is one of the two fleetingly seen girls in white blouses and gray jumpers. (Might the other one be her sister, Vivian? The two of them and Etta James were a trio calling themselves the Dandridge Sisters at the time.) Members of Duke Ellington’s band, way uncredited, are said to be among the musicians.
† One reason probably for his critical neglect. But his last two movies, Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! and Satan Never Sleeps, were awful by any standard, and so on the whole was Once Upon a Honeymoon (l942), and Good Sam (1948) wasn’t much better. His best comedies, however, are finer than Capra’s.
* Robert Warshow called it “an attack on Communism and an affirmation of Americanism that might legitimately alarm any thoughtful American whether liberal or conservative.”
* You probably don’t remember this, no reason you should, but back there when Harpo was plaguing Edgar Kennedy at the peanut stand, I mentioned that Harpo had cut off Kennedy’s pocket and made a little peanut bag from it. In an earlier draft of this commentary, however, I wrote this: “Don’t we hope he will work that little bag into the scene? Fill it with peanuts maybe? According to a shooting script published by Simon & Schuster, ‘built up from a dialogue continuity provided by Universal City Studios, Inc., amplified with material gained from a shot-to-shot viewing of [the] film,’ Harpo ‘starts happily filling the amputated pocket with peanuts.’ But that’s not on the DVD. I want a small bagful of my money back.” That’s what I wrote. Then it occurred to me to see whether the pocket filling was on the VHS version, so I watched that, and aha!, it was, so I thought, there’s an interesting discrepancy, and I went back to the DVD, and uh-oh, it was there too. Despite my adamantine previous belief that it wasn’t. So don’t take my word as gospel about anything you see in this movie. I know I don’t.
† We might wonder whether Harpo had just been listening to Hitler on the radio.
* Not to mention Las Meninas and the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek.
† Light brush, not chainsaw brush. I would not sit here idly watching a movie over and over while my wife toils as if she were a Republican president or a lumberjack.
* A question sometimes raised: what happened to all the broken glass? The technical answer: someone in the crew swept it up between shots.
† Packer, in the New Yorker, was accusing Republicans of projecting aims of “tyranny” upon Barack Obama—who, I would say, as of this writing, has turned out to display far less in the way of Marxian high-handedness than many, on the left and the right, had hoped.
* This move inspired Gene Kelly to pull a similar one in his dancing-with-himself scene in Cover Girl.
* It’s empty now, but still standing—they couldn’t tear it down for a condo, because it’s art deco.
* During the filming of The Milky Way, by the way, McCarey was poisoned by some bad milk.
* She may have shot Groucho in the butt accidentally, which led to his calling for water and his being crowned with a chamber pot, but that is not entirely clear. Note that big brother Chico is the only Marx who—with help from little brother Zeppo, who probably could have done the job himself—actually dispatches an enemy soldier coming over the top. Conks him on the head with something—a brick? Where do you come up with a brick in a moment like that? Maybe growing up the way Chico did, you keep a brick for emergencies. If you click your way through this sequence fr
ame by frame, by the way, it looks for all the world like something from All Quiet on the Western Front except for Groucho with the pot on his head.
* The very interesting contemporary American director Michael Almereyda (see his Hamlet, with Ethan Hawke in the title role and Bill Murray as Polonius) assumed that name with the anagram in mind.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 13