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

by Blount, Roy, Jr.

  American literature has produced no single Jewish-Irish character as juicy as James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, but in The Great Gatsby, by the Irish-American Scott Fitzgerald, “the narrator is horrified and amused,” as Adam Gopnik has put it, “by the Jewish gangster Wolfsheim, and toys with and hints at the idea, never quite firmed up, that James Gatz/Jay Gatsby is not just linked to Jews but is Jewish himself.” Norman Mailer’s swaggering Sergius O’Shaughnessy strenuously, finally, brings Denise Gondelman to orgasm in “The Time of Her Time.” The late Frank McCourt often claimed his next project would be, to quote the New York Times, “a bodice-ripper about Mordecai O’Callaghan, the nonexistent first Jewish Irish pirate on the high seas.”

  As to business, Joseph Kennedy in the twenties said, “Look at that bunch of pants pressers [which was to say, Jewish men] in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them.” Between l926 and l930 he took over three studios. He managed, barely, to escape with his pants.

  The last woman in Groucho’s life, when he was in his eighties and she half a century or so younger, was named Erin Fleming. He made her his secretary and personal manager and expressed his regret, to most anyone who would listen, that he was too old to have sex with her. When he was dying, a terrible legal struggle arose between Ms. Fleming and Groucho’s son, Arthur, which she lost, but in happier days she had converted to Judaism. Groucho joked that he was going to become a Catholic and change his name to “the Reverend Patrick O’Hoolihan.”

  Then there is the case of Duck Soup’s producer, Herman Mankiewicz. Duck Soup has enough elements in common with Million-Dollar Legs, the W. C. Field vehicle that Mankiewicz had produced the year before (it too was set in a mythical kingdom, Klopstockia), that we may assume Mank at least tossed ideas into the hopper during script development meetings, but at some point during the shooting of Duck Soup he was fired. He had supervised Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and would contribute to the screenplay of the classic Dinner at Eight and share an Oscar with Orson Welles for the writing of Citizen Kane, which is widely regarded as the greatest movie ever made. But Mank was forever shooting himself in the foot. He was, if anything, even less of a respecter of persons than the Marxes—he didn’t have much good to say for, or to, them. When Harpo, who had temporarily let his reviews go to his head, asked to see the script of Monkey Business so he could find his character, Mankiewicz said his character was “a middle-aged Jew who picks up spit because he thinks it’s a quarter.” What he lacked was the Marxes’ self-preserving canniness. When asked, in l969 by Tom Stempel, why Mankiewicz had such a checkered career in movies, Nunnally Johnson (whose mother was Irish) replied:

  There was a comedian named Ted Healy. He was an Irishman that had been playing in Shubert shows and vaudeville … [Healy] drank with Mank when Mank was at Paramount … But Mank said, “I never felt that we were really in sync though we got along very well. Then one afternoon we were having a few.”

  Healy looked at him for a minute, completely illuminated. He said, “I’ve got it.”

  Mank says, “What?”

  “I cannot be happy with a fellow till I’ve got him pegged. Now I’ve got you pegged.”

  Mank says, “Well what is it?”

  He says, “You’re an Irish bum.” Perfect description of Mank. He was Jewish, but he was an Irish bum.

  Note that Mankiewicz had told this on himself. He was a vainglorious underachiever, generally drunk and always broke (from gambling mostly—he admitted to being “a well-known pigeon”) and in need of a loan. After writing for the New York Times and the New Yorker, he’d been among the first of the Algonquin crowd to go Hollywood, back before sound. (One of his assignments was writing the inter-titles for the silent version of Abie’s Irish Rose.) He wired his friend Ben Hecht to come join him: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” Driving to a Hollywood party down a steep downhill street and happening to catch a policeman’s eye, he lifted both hands from the wheel, cried, “Look! No hands!” and totaled his new car against a telephone pole.

  He was witty, though. When a friend asked him, “How’s Sara?” he looked puzzled. “Your wife, Sara,” said the friend.

  “Oh, you mean poor Sara,” said Mankiewicz.

  She was a devoted wife, and he doted on her to the point of soppiness, but jokes trumped sentiment. When a friend came to their house to announce that he’d sold an original script for big money, Mankiewicz turned to Sara and said, “Dance for the gentleman.”

  Mankiewicz attended a formal dinner party given by a socially pretentious producer named Arthur Hornblow Jr., who liked for everything to be just right. Mankiewicz got so drunk that he threw up. In such a situation, many people would be mortified, and indeed the host and the other guests were stunned. But Mank—no more mortified than he apparently was, deep down, all the time—saw the moment as an occasion to reassure his host. “That’s all right, Arthur,” he said, “the white wine came up with the fish.”

  So he wasn’t too refined for the Marxes. Bert Kalmar is quoted as saying of Mank, “To know him was to like him. Not to know him was to love him.” But it may have just come down to this: who needed another jack-of-all-supervision when they had McCarey, who could hold his liquor?

  And who was Bert Kalmar? He and his partner, Harry Ruby, as you can see on the screen, are credited with writing the story, music, and lyrics of Duck Soup. Ruby, over the years, was probably Groucho’s closest friend. Wherever Ruby walked, he kept his eyes to the ground, looking for lost change. He found quite a bit over the years. “It’s all profit,” he pointed out. “No overhead.”

  Kalmar and Ruby contributed to other screenplays, but they were primarily songwriters: Kalmar the lyrics, Ruby the tunes. To Animal Crackers they had contributed “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” (“the African explorer—did someone call me schnorrer?”), which introduces Groucho’s character, and “Hello, I Must Be Going,” which keeps Groucho’s character spinning. In the fifties and early sixties, the tune to the former number would be the theme music for Groucho’s radio and then TV quiz show, You Bet Your Life. For Horse Feathers, Kalmar and Ruby had written Groucho’s statement-of-principle song, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.” And they wrote the absurdist novelty song “Show Me a Rose,” which Groucho loved to perform in person. A number of Kalmar and Ruby’s love songs became standards: “Three Little Words,” “Everyone Says I Love You,” “Nevertheless (I’m in Love with You),” “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” “Who’s Sorry Now?” and “I Wanna Be Loved by You (Boo-Boop-a-Doo).” In 1950 Warner Brothers turned out a biopic, Three Little Words, with Fred Astaire as Kalmar and Red Skelton as Ruby. In this movie they have a falling-out that is similar to the international one that we will come to in Duck Soup. They resolve their falling-out not in war, however, but in a song.

  Those “additional dialogue” credits, to Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, recognize gag men who contributed to several of the Marxes’ movies. In 1934 Sheekman would marry actress Gloria Stuart. They stayed married for forty-four years, until Sheekman’s death. In l998, at the age of eighty-eight, after portraying a one-hundred-year-old survivor in Titanic, Stuart was named one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world by People magazine. Perrin gave Groucho credit for giving him a start in show business and remained a friend until Groucho died. Sheekman and Perrin apparently helped rework the Kalmar-Ruby script extensively, but such fingerprints as they may have left have long faded away.

  Enough with the ducks and the credits—we’re in Freedonia! Cozy-looking, pointy-roofed little land nestled in mountains.* But all is not well with the commonweal. Its economy is dowager-based, and you know how that goes—you get $20 million from a dowager and you’ve got to have more, you’re addicted, you’ve got a dowager jones.

  CHICO: Watch-a the puns. Before you know it, you got a punsy scheme.

  Erwin Panovsky, the German iconologist, said this about the movies: “Whenever … a poetic
emotion, a musical outburst, or a literary conceit (even, I am grieved to say, some of the wisecracks of Groucho Marx) entirely lose contact with visible movement, they strike the sensitive spectator as, literally, out of place.” McCarey felt the same way about Groucho’s punning. In fact, he told Cahiers du Cinéma that Duck Soup was “the only time in my career, to my knowledge at least, that I made the humor rest with the dialogue: with Groucho, it was the only humor you could get.” That is just wrong: Groucho in those days was—as we shall see once we get going in the actual movie here—an eloquent mover, from his greasepaint-enhanced eyebrows to his journeyman-dancer’s feet. It is true that Groucho, with or without gag writers, could sparkle verbally. And although McCarey was credited with being a great wit in his day, there is scant evidence of that in surviving records. His remarks in Cahiers read as though they were translated into French and back into English (which they may have been). In the interview with him that Peter Bogdanovich did for his book Who the Devil Made It, McCarey was limited by severe emphysema, but even so, he sounds less witty on the page than one would hope. He is said to have gone around on the set of Duck Soup proudly trying out a line he had come up with—“They fought this war with laughing gas!”—on everyone he came to until finally giving it up. And consider this recollection in the Bogdanovich interview:

  I always remember the time I met Deborah Kerr in Madrid and she said, “Do you remember the dialog on the bridge? ‘Winter must be very cold for those who have no memories to keep them warm, and we have already missed the spring.’ Do you remember that, Leo?” I said, “Of course, I stayed up one whole night writing that line.”

  The memory-within-memory of “no-memories” may be appropriate, since the line in question appears in A Night to Remember, but Groucho might well have wisecracked that that line’s spring had sprung.

  So McCarey’s contributions to Duck Soup were conceptual and visual. “Study the stuff that McCarey made,” said his friend and admirer Howard Hawks, “and you’ll find that it didn’t depend on words, it depended on something that was funny to look at.”

  Which didn’t mean playing with the camera. I know you are eager to get on with the show, but I neglected to mention the credit “Photographed by Henry Sharp.” Cinematographer Sharp worked on 117 movies and TV shows between 1920 and 1959. None of them has gone down in history as being of purely cinematographical interest. Irving Pichel, who directed some pretty good movies, once pointed out that in McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s (another Bing-as-priest flick, this time with a demure Ingrid Bergman* as foil instead of Barry Fitzgerald), “the camera is moved not more than half a dozen times—only when it is panned, as the spectator might follow with his eyes a character moving purposively from one part of the scene to another.” Nunnally Johnson said McCarey’s “camera technique was to tell the actors, ‘If you want to be in the movie, get in front of it.’ “†

  In previous movies, the Marxes, accustomed as they were to doing the same material onstage, had been hard to corral within the frame. The only filmed example of Harpo’s celebrated stolen-silverware-pouring-from-his-sleeve gag scarcely registers, in Animal Crackers, for that reason. Even in their later years, the brothers were elusive on-camera as well as off. Eddie Buzzell, who directed At the Circus and Go West, said:

  They never hit the spots they are supposed to in a moving shot … It isn’t that they don’t know any better or are not co-operative. It’s just that their comedy is spontaneous … The camera boys tell me they once tried to solve the problem by using three cameras. One was supposed to stay with Harpo, another with Groucho, and a third with Chico, but the names confused them, and when the rushes were shown, they had all “caught” Harpo.

  In Duck Soup they stay on-camera. They know McCarey is not going looking for them.

  Heaven knows Duck Soup is not static. It “flows,” as Robert Frost said a poem should, “on its own melting.” Like a dream, and you know how it is when you try to tell someone your dream the next morning, it’s so hard to recapture the flickering images—

  CHICO: You can’t get-a the flash-a-back.

  Exactly, or to put it another way—

  CHICO: Anh-anh-anh … Once a pun at a time.

  Okay, here we go. Once upon a time there lived a rich widow, Mrs. Gloria Teasdale, played by the monumentally fluty (surely vocal tones such as hers gave rise to the vernacular term “highfalutin”) Margaret Dumont. For Monkey Business, Groucho had decided she wasn’t needed, but he has admitted his mistake and she is back. Here she is confronting the Freedonian government: a bunch of overdressed old men who want her to lend them another $20 million. (So they can lower taxes, they say. Right.) The man she addresses as “Your Excellency” is, I believe, the one listed as “Zander” in the credits, and portrayed by Edmund Breese, who in this same year was Doctor Wong in International House. (No, he doesn’t look very Chinese here, but when he faces the camera we can see that he had heavy lids, which with makeup assistance enabled him to take on several Asian roles.) This Excellency will have to go, Mrs. T tells all the old farts, because the government has “beeeen mismehnnaged.” She has already lent them “mooorr than hoff” of her late husband’s fortune, and they have blown it. In return for future investment, she demands fiscal responsibility, by which she means …

  Here we make a leap. She means that Rufus T. Firefly must become the nation’s leadah.

  Why do we go along with this? I hesitate to raise such an issue in the midst of a leap, but right here is where our disbelief throws up its hands, and attention must be paid. I assume you are watching Duck Soup on your computer monitor, as I am. (Talk about a leap! Technology today! Watching a movie on one corner of a screen while typing away in the middle of that same screen. Oh, I dare say that within a few years you’ll be able to insert yourself into the movie while you watch it. Don’t screw it up.)

  Okay. Rewind just a little bit to where we close on Mrs. Teasdale as she is saying:

  And now, you’re asking for another twenty mill-i-on dollars.

  Freeze it! Hold her right there. Groucho isn’t the only eye roller in Duck Soup. She will be buffeted and disdained in this movie, by diminutive men who in real life have already done things like take her clothes off in a Pullman car and, on another occasion, undress a porter and toss him into her Pullman berth. But she will not show it. She is unlike their mother, in that Minnie would be wearing a wig more or less like Harpo’s and would be just about to take off her corset at this point—but she is as buoyant as Minnie, as formidable, and as essential.

  The wealthy benefactress.

  How often do things happen because of Logic as opposed to how often because of Presence? Regard Mrs. Teasdale in this moment. Not just adamant but also amused she stands, in her fur collar and fur forearm warmers (or high cuffs?) and black gloves and fur muff and black hat and simple but indubitably genuine pearls—she is something. And does she look credulous? Does she look like a pushover? No. She is skeptical. She is confident in her skepticism. Her eyes flash. She smiles to herself.

  If this woman’s faith in Rufus T. Firefly is implicit, why shouldn’t ours be?

  You see how straightforwardly the Freedonia Gazette reports his accession: big banner headline (the visual news medium in 1933):

  FIREFLY APPOINTED NEW LEADER OF FREEDONIA

  And we pan down to a big photo of the man. So his mustache and eyebrows are smudges of greasepaint. (Originally, in vaudeville, Groucho glued on a more naturalistic version, but one night he was running late and greasepaint worked. For the movies, he was told, he would have to resort to something more convincing. Oh no, I won’t, he said, and he was right. For TV, many years later, he would grow a real one. That’s TV for you—rather than selling an imaginary mustache, it co-opts reality.)

  Even if he didn’t have the Teasdale endorsement, when we look in this man’s eyes, are we going to question the credibility of someone who, on the very face of him, doesn’t believe in anything?

  Pan farther down to
the subhead: we’re going to have a “Mammoth Reception.” And so we do.

  Whew. Pretty fancy place here. Is it Mrs. Teasdale’s home or the Freedonian reception palace? Either way, I am reminded of an anecdote in Stranger at the Party, a memoir by Helen Lawrenson. She’s arriving at a party at the residence of Condé Nast (who at that time was a person):

  The private elevator leading to the penthouse at 1040 Park Avenue was loaded with Vanderbilts, Astors, Whitneys and their ilk, all dressed to kill, when two men squeezed in, just before the door closed. Once before, I had seen them without makeup, so I recognized them, but I doubt if the others did, because Groucho, minus fake eyebrows, mustache and spectacles, and Harpo, minus wig, looked ordinary to the point of anonymity. As we rode up, in dignified silence, the brothers looked us over and then Groucho said, loud and clear, “This is a classy joint.” “Yeah,” replied Harpo, just as loudly. “You said it!” The others acted as if they hadn’t heard, eyes averted, while the two Marxes tried to keep from laughing.