Uh-oh. Are the writers getting serious here? Miss M’s scripted speech may have been inspired by an Irving Berlin song that Groucho liked to sing in performance, no doubt in part because Berlin himself hated it so much that, he told Groucho, “if you ever have an urge to sing that song again, if you’ll get in touch with me, I’ll give you a hundred dollars not to sing it.” Berlin was moved to write that song by the First World War. The Devil is telling his son about people on earth: “They’re breaking the hearts of mothers, / They’re making butchers out of brothers.” That sentiment, Groucho opined during the Vietnam War, when Duck Soup was enjoying a revival among antiwar youth, “applies today just as much as it did forty years ago.”
In the script, Firefly is all about business, not peace. He interrupts Miss Marcal: “You keep that up and you’ll crab the whole war.” And to Trentino, “How’re ya fixed for ammunition?”
Back to war writ small. That’s a nice-looking dog Chico has, isn’t it? Pastrami’s a nice name for him.* What could be nicer than a nice fella with a nice dog and a nice small trade in peanuts? And a fella has to take a break every now and then, but it would have been wiser to leave Pastrami in charge of the stand instead of Harpo. Because Edgar Kennedy shows up. Wearing a nice new hat. Straw, this time. Immediately we know what must happen to that hat. The escalation that leads to what must happen to that hat, happens: peanuts, mustard, sash, scissors, more peanuts, and now that nice new hat is burning (as we knew it would be, and if we feel bad for the hat, and for its owner, as perhaps in fact we do, then we are too soft for this game), and the peanut stand is overturned.
Downer. So it’s up to Harpo. Harpo with his pants rolled up, like Groucho’s at the gala. “Of course,” David Thomson writes about The Man with a Movie Camera, “the film is full of tricks and editing but they are all as candid and innocent as someone warning you that he’s going to cheat you.” Every move of lovable Harpo is a warning. Upstart isn’t the half of it: the man will stop at nothing. To slosh bare-legged in a lemonade vendor’s lemonade is to impose even more egregiously than when you handed him your thigh or entangled your hand in his pocket or wiped mustard on his sash or leaned against him, belly to belly, to honk your horn. Harpo is not standoffish. As Raymond Durgnat puts it, “He steals things like a baby grasps an adult’s nose to play with. Like a baby, he tries to eat inedibles, especially telephones,* and being a magic baby, invariably succeeds.” To a baby, one may suppose, lemonade is a treat to get your legs into. Harpo told the Saturday Evening Post that he never liked lemonade until he discovered in Duck Soup that it was “wonderful when properly used.”
Can big war be averted? “Not if His Excellency will listen to reason.” Another of my favorite lines. There need be no war, says Trentino, if Firefly will only behave like other deranged dictators and be rational.
To that end, Mrs. T calls Firefly over to her place, and he arrives (with a glove in his breast pocket for some reason), and the two of them put their heads together, literally. When they’re temple to temple, looking forward to utterly notional married days, it is actually kind of sweet, isn’t it? War, schmar, Mrs. T is in love. Unlike many straitlaced characters, she is by no means an awkward figure. She is much more comfortable in her skin, or at any rate her clothes, than Groucho is. And yet, she is touched by his attentions. If she were not bottomlessly, rechargeably gullible, the way he behaves toward her might well fail to amuse. Don’t we like to see her big happy smile? (The extent to which she is a Minnie Marx figure that the boys can push around, as opposed to one who pushed the boys around, awaits consideration.) I don’t know about you, but I’m freeze framing that smile for a while. We are fully aware that Groucho is going to pull the rug from under that smile, but she, Ms. Dumont, is not. Bless her. Maybe I should want her to shake Groucho by the scruff of the neck and say, “Listen here, Your Excellency, stop being crazy. You’re about to drive us to war.”
But I don’t want her to. I trust her to enable, in the face of all reason, this comedy.
Is she in on the joke? The real question is whether she’s in on the seriousness. How can she keep translating the insults against her into harmless kidding? Such a good smile, and Groucho keeps dispelling it, and it bounces back when he asks for a lock of her hair, and she says, “A lock of my heh-ah?” (or however you would spell the way she pronounces hair), and then he says, “I’m letting you off easy. I was going to ask for the whole wig.”
Oof. Is Duck Soup misogynist? The Marx Brothers (except for Chico at the piano) do tend to appeal less to women than to men. Speaking demographically, I will venture to say that many, many women these days would push aside Duck Soup in favor of Mamma Mia, which I once watched, horror-stricken, in a hotel room. I cite Mamma Mia because it has several parallels to Duck Soup. Frankly, I forget the details. If you insist, I will go back and watch Mamma Mia again—but basically, it moves as constantly as Duck Soup, its protagonists are three or four sibling-esh women …
Why did I even bring this up? Instead, we could be focusing on a joke that comes in here somewhere and holds up well today: Firefly can’t call off the war, he says, because it’s too late, he has already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield. The military-industrial complex writ small, you might say—but remember, this is not so much an antiwar movie as a dance to the music of belligerence.
Belligerence and prejudice. Here comes the one blatantly politically incorrect one-liner of Duck Soup, the one moment when the laughing New York City children and young parents with whom I watched the movie at the Thalia fell silent.
“Isn’t there something I can do?” asks Miss Vera Marcal, and okay, Groucho does give her a flicker of sidelong lust, but we know he won’t follow it up. (Zeppo would, but he is probably off somewhere weaving the halves of his straw hat back together.)
“Maybe I am a little headstrong,” says Firefly, “but I come by it honestly. My father was a little headstrong. My mother was a little Armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.”
(“Un Tetu a epousé une Costaud et c’est de la que viennent les negros.”)
Okay. Two years before Duck Soup appeared, a fat, hearty white person named Kate Smith, in her day the biggest lady of radio-floated popular song, got high up onto the charts with a song called “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” I have not been able to find any recording of that performance online. In the same year, Paul Robeson, an eminently serious African American, recorded the same song, and that version is listenable online. Its drift, which is congruent with “Old Man River,” which Robeson sang in the first movie version of Showboat, is that somebody had to pick the cotton and “laugh at trouble,” given that white people (presumably) weren’t up to it. No doubt about it, the sentiment is terrible: that black people’s existence is justified by what white people couldn’t do, or didn’t want to do.
And I am not aware of anything that either McCarey or any Marx brother did specifically for racial equality, though Groucho and Harpo were liberal Democrats. (Chico or Zeppo, who knows?) According to Stefan Kanfer’s biography of Groucho, all four of them had “rued the days of segregated vaudeville” and were “appalled when the Daughters of American Revolution denied the black singer Marian Anderson the use of its auditorium.”
But I can’t think of any black people in Marx Brothers movies except for the bearers who have carried Captain Spaulding all the way from Africa in Animal Crackers; a glimpse of Willie Best, bug-eyed, as a porter in At the Circus; and singers and dancers in A Day at the Races and At the Circus. Simon Louvish decries the “mawkish and bizarre” scene of Harpo in A Day at the Races (no pun intended) tootling a flute and playing “‘Gabriel’ to a strange community of shack-dwelling blacks which seems to have sprung up,” a scene that “labors the point of Harpo as an elf for all races, a soul mate for the dispossessed.” There is that aspect, and there are unpleasant close-ups of wide-eyed African Americans asking, “Who dat man?”
But most of that number consist
s of rousing African-American singing and swing dancing, including the only movie appearance of the elegantly twinkle-eyed Ivie Anderson laying down “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm.”* As it happens, that number was the only part of any Marx Brothers movie to be nominated for an Oscar (for dance direction). When the Marxes see the sheriff coming for them, they black up their faces (Harpo, only the left side of his) with axle grease and mingle with the dancing. They hold their own well enough for middle-aged white boys.
Also problematic is the “Swingali” number in At the Circus, in which Harpo is again a kind of spell-casting juju-man. Stefan Kanfer complains, not without reason, that “the chorus in Harpo’s number is composed almost entirely of … the kind of wide-eyed, grinning exaggerations who disfigured … A Day at the Races.” But among the musicians are serious-looking little kids, with whom Harpo interacts eye to eye. It’s all very broad, God knows—but if there ever was a wide-eyed grinning exaggeration, or an innocent-babe blank-looking exaggeration, or a squinch-eyed scowling exaggeration, or a slack-jawed befuddled exaggeration, it’s Harpo exaggerating himself. If Harpo is burning in hell for racial insensitivity, then the afterlife isn’t fair.
At any rate, nobody holds anything against Harpo. Leo McCarey’s politics is another matter. In the fifties,† he was anti-Communist to the point that he testified as a friendly—but evidently not name-naming— witness before the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. His movies didn’t make money in the Soviet Union, he told the committee. “I think I have a character in there that they do not like.”
“Bing Crosby?”
“No, God.”
In 1951 McCarey made a documentary, You Can Change the World, in which tribute is paid to anti-Red Americanism by an actual Catholic priest and Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, William Holden, Bob Hope, and just about the only black man who might, with a stretch, have been called a movie star at the time, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. In 1952 McCarey directed a joltingly antiliberal feature film, My Son John.* It was Mae West, not McCarey, though he was duly appreciative, who insisted on involving Duke Ellington and his orchestra in Belle of the Nineties.
If you want to wince at something racist in a fun 1933 movie, try Footlight Parade, which features some of Busby Berkeley’s most kaleidoscopic numbers. As the musical director trying to come up with a concept for one of those numbers, Jimmy Cagney sees black kids playing in an open fire hydrant and has an epiphany: “I’ve got it! A crystal-pure waterfall playing over beautiful white bodies.”
Online you can join in discussions of just how disappointed we should feel, or how much we should forgive ourselves for not feeling, about Duck Soup because of its d-word joke. That joke is a dead spot today, and Groucho would doubtless have thrown it out by now—in Groucho’s aesthetic, if they don’t laugh, it’s no good. But you could say he was making edgy fun of a dumb song, couldn’t you?
Mince! (Which I gather from a Duck Soup subtitle is French for Gosh!) Yes, you could.
Firefly says “Gosh” because he can’t even remember which of Trentino’s insults so outraged him. All four parties chuckle together as Trentino helpfully runs through the list. Worm? Swine? Anh-anh, says Groucho. “No, it was a seven-letter word.”
Let us pause, if we may, to acknowledge the genius of Groucho’s perversity here. Not only is he encouraging the now-jovial Trentino to recollect the casus belli, he is archly giving him hints. All this is in the script, but look how Groucho sells it.
And Trentino comes up with upstart again, and Groucho slaps him with his trusty glove, presumably brought along for this purpose. Trentino declares Groucho to be “impossible,” and war inevitable, and Groucho tops that with a snappy towel joke.
UOH! cries Mrs. T.
Madness! How can a run-of-the-mill snake like Trentino intrigue against slipperiness so unabashed? He can’t. He would have to be Harpo and Chico. But Trentino persists—he’s got Miss Marcal at Mrs. T’s house looking for Freedonia’s war plans, which “I happen to know” are in Mrs. T’s possession.
In the script he happens to know because Miss Marcal (oh, let’s start calling her Vera) has overheard Firefly stashing the plans with her. Next, in the script, Trentino bumps into Harpo at the opera (!) and tells him that Mrs. T has the plans. Chico appears to know this already, because he is sitting next to Mrs. T and getting too familiar with her for her taste and mine, because she is sitting on her purse, which has the plans in it. Meanwhile, Harpo produces a bow and arrow and shoots several apples off the head of William Tell’s son before Tell himself can do it, and he produces a fishing rod and baits a hook with “a real live worm” and casts into an onstage pool and catches a carp. Then, with a hand from Chico, he catches the purse.
A Night at the Opera is funnier than that. And so is what replaces, in Duck Soup as shot, all this scripted snatching and grabbing. Kalmar and Ruby have Groucho and Vera dancing ballet together. Vera has the plans in her bodice, and Groucho tries to dip her deeply enough to dislodge it. (In At the Circus, Eve Arden, playing an acrobat, has $10,000 hidden in her bodice, and Groucho talks her into walking on the ceiling with suction-cup shoes so it will drop out.) Chico and Harpo join in, and “a four-cornered adagio” ensues.
Let us return to the movie as made. We are just over halfway through it now, most of the best stuff is coming up, and almost none of it is in the script. What’s coming was partly worked out at McCarey’s beach house and partly improvised on the set. The proportions, we don’t know. But we do know this:
People think of Marx Brothers movies as impromptu, but most of them, before and after Duck Soup, were hammered out onstage, on the road, before being shot. Tight as it is, Duck Soup—directed by a master of improv inducement who was also a walking repository of silent-movie gags—is their freshest confection.
Harpo and Chico are still Sylvanian agents, even though the latter is Freedonia’s Secretary of War. So they have to steal the war plans. The two of them and the servant who answers the door at Mrs. Teasdale’s mansion go through an old in-and-out routine, virtually silent. According to Wes D. Gehring’s critical biography of McCarey, he had supervised less elaborate versions of this business in 1925 (Fighting Fluid, with Charlie Chase) and 1928 (Early to Bed, with Laurel and Hardy). The boys can’t engage in espionage like grown-ups, or even like rational beings. (But then, have you ever read a novel by John le Carré?) Harpo rings the bell and hides from Chico behind the same hedge Chico was just hiding from him behind, which might not seem very clever—but ah, Harpo has his fingers crossed!
Miss Marcal lets them in, and would you get a load of what she is wearing now? A negligee (with furry short sleeves, perhaps Persian cat) that she has to hold together in front with one hand at all times. And yes, Harpo does for the moment take almost-sufficient cognizance of her charms: jumps straight up in the air and then in one fluid motion (comprising two shots, one from outside and one from in) runs headlong into her, grabs her in a bear hug, and foxtrots her into the parlor. God knows how she manages to preserve her modesty, not to mention her balance: note that she is holding the long train of her garment up with her other hand.
She also retains presence of mind. The boys are here for spying, not amour. “Whatever you do, don’t make a sound,” she says. “If you’re found, you’re lost.” Of course that’s a big fat verbal softball for Chico. But consider the scenes in Mrs. T’s house, all the shushing and clangor of them, in the context of movie history. In 1933 the industry was just emerging from the transition portrayed in that other great comedy, Singin’ in the Rain: sound pictures were still wet behind the ears. As late as mid-1930, Hollywood studios had still been producing their films in silent as well as sound versions. Sound technology was still presenting technical problems that tended to constrain the spontaneity and fluidity of film comedy. In 1934 comedy would begin going screwball: some slapstick, yes, but mostly snappy patter. McCarey had learned his trade in the silent era. Harpo—no wonder McCarey was so fond of him—was the only nontalker lef
t.
“Remember,” insists Vera, “whatever you do, don’t make a sound.” Which means they will be making—although almost wordlessly—a great deal of clatter. If the cinema, in l933, had just come screechingly indeterminate out of a soundless tunnel, in Mrs. T’s house that traumatic switch is rethrown over and over. Rather than shut down the clock, Harpo resets it so that it rings out at midnight. He picks up a music box and at first tries to turn it off but then begins to dance to it as he plucks the strings on the handy piano.
This passing lick is so poignantly vestigial that I can’t help interrupting the flow of events to point out how poignantly vestigial this passing lick is. In any other Marx Brothers movie, Harpo would himself have interrupted the action at this point, to lose himself in arpeggios. Before and after Duck Soup, the Marxes’ movies featured not only intermittent cooing and crooning by vapid young couples but also musical solos by Chico, on piano, and Harpo, on harp. There were two Harpos in the movies, Harpo said in his memoir: the crazy one you see mugging and running around, and the one you see at the harp. The Harpo at the harp, said Harpo, was Harpo. As a child, he had fixated on the harp that his grandmother Fanny Schoenberg brought over from the old country. By the time he was a teenager he was performing publicly on his own harp. In retirement he progressed to playing the music of Arnold Schoenberg, no relation.
So for his own and also for Chico’s sake, he can’t pass up the chance to strum the piano. Although he may be shot for it! And now more racket as the piano top whangs down on his hands. As we see here briefly, Harpo’s hands themselves are highly expressive dramatic instruments. (Whereas in other movies, Chico’s right hand—dancing on a keyboard, twiddling confidently for our attention and shooting the keys—is more than an instrument, it’s a character.)
Got to get Groucho involved. Where is he? Mrs. T entreats him by phone to “come over here,” which sounds like he’s in another house, but no, because here comes Chico sneaking into his bedroom and locking him in the bathroom. “Hey, let me out of here, or throw me a magazine.” (Okay, one potty joke.) The important thing is, Groucho is wearing a nightgown. So Chico can disguise himself as Groucho in every particular but the accent, and even for that he has an explanation: he’s practicing up maybe he goes to Italy sometime.
Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made Page 9
