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

by Blount, Roy, Jr.

  Then Chico kicks Kennedy’s hat back to Harpo, who picks it up and brushes it off, makes to hand it back to him, but then dangles it from an elastic band that happens to be hanging from it, so that when Kennedy stoops to grab it, it bonks him in the face, and when Kennedy does grab it, Harpo gives his foot, in effect, to Kennedy’s hat—he’s got his foot in Kennedy’s hat the way he had his hand in Kennedy’s pocket earlier.

  A beat. Fume. And Kennedy jerks his hat away from Harpo’s foot. Harpo slaps it out of Kennedy’s hand back onto the ground.

  Now Chico gets more involved. He picks up Kennedy’s hat and puts it on over his own inveterate soft-pointy hat, which looks, does it not, like an inverted lily blossom.

  Kennedy looks for his hat on the ground. It’s not there. Harpo meanwhile has picked up his own hat and put it on.

  Kennedy locates his hat on Chico’s head. Takes a beat to wipe sweat from his brow with his sleeve. Removes his and Chico’s hats, together, from Chico’s head and puts them on his head, not realizing he has put on two hats. Jams ‘em on good and firm. Harpo confuses matters by handing Chico his hat.

  Kennedy eyes this transaction closely. Can’t see anything wrong with it, because he assumes he has his own hat on, which of course he does, but he also has Chico’s hat on under it, so when Harpo now removes Kennedy’s hat while Kennedy is watching Chico put on Harpo’s hat, Kennedy is left with just Chico’s hat on. And now Harpo is wearing Kennedy’s hat. We have something like a shell game working now, only it’s not about Kennedy guessing what shell the pea is under, it’s about him trying to figure out where his hat is and which hat he is wearing. It almost amounts to not knowing where his head is.

  Looking at Chico, Kennedy senses something is not right. He turns his head, slowly, pensively, toward Harpo.

  Sees his hat on Harpo, but can’t quite take on board how that can be. Turns back toward Chico. Then begins to turn back toward Harpo (who now has taken Kennedy’s hat off and is holding it at chest level), but does a double take toward Chico. Then back toward Harpo, who’s in the process of putting Kennedy’s hat back on his own head.

  Then Harpo brings out the artillery: he throws Kennedy a Gookie.

  The Gookie, like so many aspects of the Marx Brothers’ performance, went back to their childhood. A man named Gehrke, called Gookie, was a cigar roller in the window of a Lexington Avenue cigar store. He would get so absorbed in his work that his cheeks ballooned and his lips pooched out and his eyes bulged and crossed. Harpo couldn’t mimic people’s voices like Chico, but he was good at facial expressions. (In this scene, he has already gone through a gamut of them.) He could work on his Gookie imitation by simultaneously staring at Gookie and at his own reflection in the window. When he had Gookie down, he called Gookie’s attention to it. Gookie chased him down the street. But Harpo kept coming back. People in the neighborhood started noticing how well Harpo did Gookie. “For the first time, at the age of twelve, I had a reputation. Even Chico began to respect me.” Chico would introduce Harpo to people:

  “Shake hands with my brother here. He’s the smartest kid in the neighborhood.” When the guy put out his hand I’d throw him a Gookie. It always broke up the poolroom.

  Confronted with a Gookie, Kennedy lurches away, toward the camera, with his own cheeks puffed out and lips jammed together—not in imitation but out of frustration—and then on back toward Chico, who is doing a low-grade Gookie of his own. (I never noticed this until just now, going through frame by frame.) Kennedy lurches back the other way, but then double takes back toward Chico, covers his face with his hands, turns back toward Harpo, who is holding his Gookie (Chico’s Gookie has faded); then (notice that that was the first semicolon I have resorted to in regard to this scene) Kennedy does a quick little stutter take; and Chico’s hand is going back up to Harpo’s hat on his head, and I’m thinking the intricate gag breaks down at this point in the take, because the next frame is shot from farther back.

  Chico still has Harpo’s hat on, and Kennedy is fuming at Chico—who, I see now, is semi-Gookie-ing again—and Harpo is snatching Chico’s hat off Kennedy’s head and putting it on his own head and passing Kennedy’s hat to Chico, who puts it on his own head and hands Harpo’s hat to Kennedy, and while Kennedy is holding Harpo’s hat and staring at Chico donning his, Kennedy’s, hat, Harpo takes his own hat from Kennedy and puts Chico’s hat on Kennedy’s head.

  Only no—Chico’s hat never quite gets fully onto Kennedy’s head this time, because while Kennedy is fumbling with it, trying to keep it off his head, Chico grabs it and replaces it with Kennedy’s hat.

  Now everybody’s got the right hat on. But Kennedy is still trying to collect his wits. When Harpo reaches out toward Kennedy’s leg, Kennedy unaccountably gives it to him. When Kennedy realizes what he has done, he is further horrified, takes his leg back, and reaches back to throw a punch at Harpo, but Chico takes that opportunity to give Kennedy his, Chico’s, leg. Kennedy rejects Chico’s leg, lunges at Chico, and chases him out of the frame. Harpo takes this moment to fill up one of his rubber-bulb horns with lemonade from Kennedy’s stand and to put the horn through his belt in such a way that when Kennedy—bursting back into the frame with no Chico and much vexation—collides with Harpo, lemonade squirts up into his face.

  “Why you!” Not much of a rejoinder on Kennedy’s part, but let us not, unless we have ever found ourselves in such a set of circumstances, be quick to judge.

  And again, another belly bump squirts Kennedy in the face.

  Kennedy covers his face with his hands as Harpo beams. If Chico’s grin is engaging, how would you describe Harpo’s beams? Demented, yes. Morally indifferent, maybe. But not really in a bad way.

  And then, slowly, wetly, Kennedy begins to laugh, a slow deep heh-heh and then HAH-HAH Victor McLaglen kind of laugh, and Harpo silently shares it with him, even slaps Kennedy on the shoulder, both of them having a hearty guffaw—and finally Kennedy scores a point: he grabs the lemonade-filled horn from Harpo’s belt, and as Harpo is deep into an eyes-shut, mouth-wide-open silent belly laugh, Kennedy turns the horn around and squirts it down inside the front of Harpo’s pants.

  Several times. And Harpo’s expression changes. He gets a horrified, lemonade-down-the-pants look. Kennedy throws him a double take and then heads off toward Chico again. Harpo, standing in a big puddle, screws up his face in a sort of defensive semi-Gookie and minces off camera, whistling and shaking each leg in turn, moist by his own petard.

  I say, moist by his own …

  GROUCHO AND CHICO: Go right ahead. Don’t mind us.

  We may be reminded that Harpo was so nervous the first time he went onstage in the family vaudeville act that he wet his pants. We may also think of the lovely woman in a nice black silky dress who happens to be walking down the street in the vicinity of the all-time-great pie-throwing orgy in Battle of the Century, the Laurel and Hardy silent that McCarey supervised. She steps in a splattered pie, slips, sits down on the pie, registers an obscure befoulment, rises, and walks off in a gingerly, ick-expressive, picking-at-her-backside, shake-a-leg way.

  And now Kennedy is accosting Chico, by the peanut stand: “I’ll teach you to kick me.”

  “You don’t have to teach me, I already know how” (so much for progressive education), says Chico as he kicks Kennedy in such a way that Kennedy’s hat flies off and Harpo, entering, catches it and puts it on the peanut-stand burner and taps Kennedy on the back and whistles and points at the hat so Kennedy can watch it burn up. As Kennedy himself slow burns.

  And Chico says what I couldn’t get him or Groucho to say about “moist by his own petard.”

  “Ah,” says Chico. “‘At’s-a good, eh?”

  All that in four minutes and thirteen seconds.

  Does any of this advance the plot? No. But none of it seems dragged in either. McCarey’s theory of construction, he told Bog-danovich, was “the ineluctability of incidents. The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitably flows from
it—like night follows day … I always develop my stories that way, in a series of incidents that succeed and provoke each other. I never really have intrigues.”*

  Exactly what this movie doesn’t have: intrigue, which is to say, plotting, which is to say, plodding. Trentino and Miss Vera Marcal try to scheme, but the Marxes are a series of chain reactions, too fast to be strategized against; they expose machinations as mechanical. Much of Duck Soup’s volatility derives from the Marxes themselves, but none of their other movies flows like this one, like shining from shook foil that keeps on shaking. We may recall Vera’s warning to Trentino early on, “It may not be so ee-see.” Not for him, it won’t, but for the Marxes: duck soup.

  But the consistency of this movie is not only propulsive, it is also thematic. This is a family drama, a true bromance: brothers constantly rubbing each other the wrong way and giving each other a hard time but then rallying together when faced with a much larger opponent: Mrs. Teasdale, Trentino, Kennedy, Sylvania. And let us not forget that Groucho always called Duck Soup “the war movie.” (In 2007 Military History magazine picked Duck Soup as the twenty-seventh greatest war movie of all time, ahead of The Deer Hunter, Schindle’s List, Pork Chop Hill, The Story of G.I. Joe, Battleship Potemkin, From Here to Eternity, and A Bridge Too Far.) What is war but tit-for-tat?

  Back to the story line. In the script, Trentino exits and Firefly shouts down to Chico. They bandy lines back and forth about Chico’s dog. Of these jokes, the only one that survives in the movie is the pun on license and lice. (The others are pretty bad—Chico says that when he calls the dog he whistles “Yankee Poodle.”) Groucho invites Chico to continue the conversation inside.

  The telephone-grabbing stuff (Identity Issue alert) is in Kalmar-Ruby. The Chico-Groucho riddling back and forth (a swirl of Identity Issues) is better in the film than in the script. In the script, Groucho’s ulterior motive—specifically, selling ammunition—is a prominent factor. Chico, who becomes Secretary of War in the script more or less as haphazardly as in the film (but it’s snappier in the film), says in the script that he doesn’t want any ammunition because there is no war, so Groucho says they’ll start one, and he asks Chico’s advice. Got to insult somebody, Chico says. So Groucho insults Chico. No, no, got to insult somebody from another country. How about Trentino.

  All so sane and venal, in the script. In the movie, Groucho is not trying to sell anything or to save the country. Aside from figuring out that the answer to the riddle Chico poses him is, insultingly, himself,* Groucho’s is a higher purpose: to hold on to a position in which he can keep on making irresponsible wisecracks. If he loses that position, all the brothers are out of their jobs and the movie will have to start making sense in terms other than its own. And Trentino, because he is wooing Mrs. Teasdale with an eye to taking over the country (who cares about the country, but we need that straight lady), is a threat. Zeppo, who is far more outspoken than in previous movies, tells Groucho, “The man is trying to undermine you. Now what are you going to do about it?”

  The idea, let us bear in mind, is to provoke Trentino into leaving the country. Nothing more. So far.

  But first, a word about Harpo’s flashing of tattoos. In the script, it begins when Harpo is still passing himself off as a prospective female spy and continues after his girl parts deflate. And the last tattoo is not of a doghouse with a real dog emerging to bark, as we see in the film, but of an outhouse with “the head of a real man” appearing in the opening, “terribly angry at being interrupted.”

  In 1933 there was no Production Code to command that revision. Just, I suppose, someone’s taste. Whose? McCarey’s? Mankiewicz’s? Whoever’s idea the revision was, it is not surprising, I think. I have wracked my memory of pre-Code movies, and surprising as it may seem today, I am forced to conclude that sophistication then did not extend to potty jokes. Not waggishness but just practicality—he practiced once a day—caused Harpo to keep his harp next to the toilet at home.

  Let’s have a hand for the gag with Harpo and his scissors going out and Zeppo coming in wearing half a hat. Did I mention that this is Zeppo’s last movie? He looks good in half a hat. Funny stuff happening offscreen is another McCarey trademark. In The Awful Truth, for instance, a long and loud fistfight between Cary Grant and a man he thinks has been fooling around with his estranged wife goes on out of sight.

  McCarey was also known for his hat gags. I’m not saying that the Marx Brothers and their various writers couldn’t come up with hat business, but McCarey’s movies are full of them. See Cary Grant studying himself in the mirror in The Awful Truth. His derby doesn’t quite fit. How can that be. New hat. It fit when he wore it into this very same room. Sloowwlly it dawns on him. It’s not his hat. It’s the hat of the man he suspects of dallying with his estranged wife, Irene Dunne. The aforementioned fistfight ensues.

  It was McCarey who put scissors in Harpo’s hands for this movie. We might see a reckless pair of scissors as an homage to the brothers’ dad, Frenchie, the improvisational tailor, who never measured before he cut.

  But enough of this trivia! We have an incident to provoke. Firefly arrives at Mrs. T’s garden party, carrying, note, a single glove. (In the script, there are two of them, and they’re called gauntlets. Too obvious.)

  You’re wondering what the French is for “a Rufus over your head,” aren’t you? Since I have watched this movie with the French subtitle option provided by the DVD, I can tell you. In French, Groucho’s name isn’t Rufus T. Firefly. It is Antoine Luciole. Luciole is French for firefly, but why Antoine? Solely for the sake of this pun. When Mrs. T says, “Oh, Rufus!” and he says, “All I can offer you is a roofus over your head,” the French subtitles are, “Oh, Antoine,” and “Je peux vous juste offrir un An-toit-ne sur votre tête.”

  Groucho’s character’s name has been changed solely to put a toit in it. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think it’s as funny in French.

  The roofus joke is in the Kalmar-Ruby script. But in the script Groucho doesn’t get around to calling Trentino a baboon. His interruption of Trentino’s wooing of Mrs. T, and his suggestion that when Trentino gets finished with being at her feet he perform some chiropody on Groucho’s,* is enough to make Trentino call him, as in the film, a swine. (Saligaud.) A worm. (Larve.) And then, finally, an upstart! (Arriviste.) Swine and worm are like water off a duck’s back, but for Firefly upstart tears it, inasmuch as, he maintains, Fireflies came over on the Mayflower (with horseflies on them).

  These days, when start-up has a positive entrepreneurial ring, upstart may seem too obviously ludicrous, but in the thirties there was still enough old-line stuffiness around to lend the term some sting. To insult a Marx brother by calling him an upstart, however, would be like calling Mother Teresa a bleeding heart or Andy Warhol an arty type and expecting them to take offense. Upstarts the Marxes were proud to be. And very American it was of them too.

  Both of the brothers’ parents, Minnie and Frenchie, were born in Germany, and they arrived in America with no money or social position. The brothers presumed their way up from there to wealth and fame, mocking the pretensions of the well-born all along the way. In Monkey Business (as in Night at the Opera) they are shipboard stowaways. At one point Chico confuses mutinies and matinees, and Groucho, who has slipped into the captain’s quarters and donned the captain’s coat and hat, exclaims, “There’s my argument. Restrict immigration.” But that was Groucho onscreen, forever trying to dissociate himself from that rabble, his brothers. In life he was ambivalent about himself and pretty much everything else and was famous for remarks such as, when told he couldn’t swim in the pool of a restricted country club,* “My daughter is only half Jewish—can she go in up to her waist?” But he flaunted his humble background, knowing it to be comedy gold.

  In an article, “Smile Stranger,” in Literature/Film Quarterly, Mark Winokur writes that the Marxes act out “the tension about placement between two cultures” and that they “honor their parents by dishonoring th
e culture they’ve been thrust into.” This is not just recalcitrant but heroic, a refusal to give in to what Winokur calls “the shame that the second-generation child feels for his parents … superseded periodically by the shame he feels for rejecting them.” The Marxes “evade assimilation into or segregation from the dominant culture by creating official roles for themselves which they then allow their immigrant sub-personae to subvert.” So haute America looks at us through its lorgnette—

  GROUCHO: Are you lorgnette?

  CHICO: Nah. Sometimes I’m-a lone, but I ain’t lorn yet.

  GROUCHO: And no hoity-toity ambassador is going to lorn us a thing or two neither.

  —and finds us strange? We’ll dress up in top hats and swallowtails too, ratty ones, and we’ll show you strange.

  Winokur compares Groucho’s wisecracking to the rat-a-tat snarls and tommy-gun fire of ethnic gangster types in movies of the period. But the gangsters, in their gaudy and violent ways, are desperately trying to get a piece of the American pie. The Marxes, he points out, are not “trying to gain entry to the mainstream.” They have stronger juice than the mainstream, and they’re squirting it in all directions. Arriviste indeed! They have arrived.*

  But affecting to be deeply affronted gets Groucho’s juices flowing, and here we go tit-for-tat. The stated purpose of insulting Trentino, you may recall, was only to get him to leave Freedonia, not to bring Freedonia and Sylvania to the brink of war. But Firefly has his face-slapping glove with him, and one thing has a way of leading to another.

  In the script, Miss Marcal tries to intervene between Firefly and Trentino. “You can’t do this!” she says.

  Trentino rebuffs her: “War is not a woman’s problem.”

  “It is every woman’s problem,” she responds angrily. “Who supplies the sons?—the brothers?—the husbands?”