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

by Blount, Roy, Jr.

  Independently Harpo decides to don a Groucho costume too. You might think Mrs. T would pick up on how much more loosely than Groucho Harpo does the Groucho walk. Or that she would at least suspect he is not Groucho when she asks, after giving him the combination to the safe that the plans are in, “Is there anything else you want to know?” and instead of snapping at her (in the beat-repetitive-beat structure that his writers felt was unnecessarily redundant but that Groucho knew the laughing audience’s level of cognizance required) something like, I don’t know, this—

  GROUCHO: Do I wanna know anything you might know that I don’t know? No.

  But no, Harpo silently tilts toward her bosom and honks the horn he has under his nighty. And as far as Mrs. T can tell, Pinky is “Your Excellency.” In all due respect, we may say that Margaret Dumont, or at least Mrs. T, is not a highly intuitive person, thank God.

  Quick platonic-bedroom-farce shuffle of Chico-as-Groucho, Harpo-as-Groucho, and Groucho-as-Groucho, about which not much needs to be said other than Chico’s famous question to Mrs. T, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”*

  Now that he has the safe’s combination, it’s back to the parlor for Harpo—sliding on his sock feet in a way that may have inspired Tom Cruise’s doorway sock hopping in Risky Business. But Harpo’s slide evokes youthful abandon better than Cruise’s preeny dance.

  Again silent Harpo unleashes traumatic sound. What he takes to be the safe becomes a radio that won’t stop blaring “Stars and Stripes Forever,” although Harpo does to it everything that strikes him as called for—squirts it with seltzer and dashes it to pieces.† Harpo hears Groucho coming. He runs headlong, for some reason (you’d think he’d see himself coming), into a big full-length mirror and dashes it to pieces.

  And here we go. The mirror scene.

  Freeze, please, because this scene warrants introduction. From Snow White to Taxi Driver, and including Fearless Vampire Killers, Illusion of Life, The Lady from Shanghai, Duplicity, Dark Passage, The Earrings of Madame de … —we all have a list, don’t we, of mirror shots in movies.* What does any camera produce but a mirror image, flopped?

  But what we are about to watch now is the mirror scene. The routine had predecessors, and it has often been copied, but this is the copper-plumbing standard. Three minutes and fifty seconds not only without dialogue but—which is not always evident in a laugh-filled theater—entirely soundless. A hush falls. Two brothers, in nightgowns, dance, as one. It is absurd. It can’t be happening. It is a beautiful thing. Let’s watch it now, and talk about it after.

  Were you with someone? I went downstairs and got my wife and watched it with her. It was her severalth time, my twentieth or thirtieth. It was still good. I am tempted, although she is outside now clearing brush,† to try to get her back in here for one more time.

  But okay, commentary. Variety’s review said that Duck Soup “has the Marxes madcapping thru such bits as the old Schwartz Bros. mirror routine, so well done in the hands of Groucho, Harpo and Chico that it gathers a new and hilarious comedy momentum all over again.” The only thing I have dug up on the Schwartz Brothers is a 1913 newspaper ad that shows them performing “The Broken Mirror” on a vaudeville bill including the Royal Jiu Jitsu Gladiators, Mado Minty “in her French spider speciality,” and the Kauffman Family of bicycle riders. The Marxes may well have caught the Schwartz Brothers’ act, or even shared a bill with it, but their mirror scene has movie roots as well.

  In The Hallucinations of Baron Munchausen (1911), George Melies used a hollow frame with a lookalike performer and a mirror-image set behind it to create eerie illusions.

  In The Floorwalker (1916), Charlie Chaplin is a bull-in-a-china-shop shopper who, in flight from detectives who think he is up to no good, runs into the store’s office, where he encounters a man who looks pretty much exactly like him, except that his clothes aren’t shabby. (He is the floorwalker, who was about to flee himself with a satchel of embezzled money.) Both men are dumbfounded. Moving in unison, they look each other over from head to toe, lean in closer, turn aside to scratch their heads, and so on. They reach out to touch hands, and then, spooked, they bolt in opposite directions. Then they reconsider, and exchange clothes and therefore identities. Much, much better than all this are Charlie’s many entanglements with the store’s escalator.

  In Seven Years Bad Luck (1921), Max Linder plays a cook who pretends to be the master of the household’s reflection, for seven minutes and thirty-two seconds, so the master won’t discover that his valet has broken his new mirror. It helps that the master has awakened with a hangover. The illusion nearly breaks down when Linder has no shaving cream, just water, in his cup, so the master can’t understand why he apparently has no shaving cream on his face. When the master turns to shout at the valet, Max quickly dips his brush into the master’s cup and remedies the situation. But the master drops something, bends over, and turns around, and when he turns back, Max still has his butt pointed toward him. He’s about to whack Max with his shoe—Max still doing his best to mimic him—when the phone rings in the next room. A lady friend invites him to come out, and while he’s talking to her a new mirror is delivered, so when he returns and throws his shoe at what he thinks is Max, it smashes the mirror. You can see it on YouTube.

  But the most germane predecessor to Duck Soup’s mirror scene, because it was directed by McCarey, is in Mum’s the Word (1926). Charlie Chase slips out onto a second-story deck outside a bedroom so as not to be caught by a jealous husband, and when the husband sees Chase’s shadow on the window shade, Chase imitates the husband’s every move so that the husband will think he’s seeing his own shadow. When the husband pulls out a cigarette and Chase can’t come up with one, the husband sweeps aside the shade and there is Chase, offering him a light.

  McCarey is generally given credit for suggesting the Marxes’ version. Since Duck Soup, it has been copied by Abbott and Costello, by Tom (of Tom and Jerry) and another cat, by Bette Midler and herself playing the identical twin she didn’t know she had, by David Niven and Robert Wagner wearing gorilla suits in The Pink Panther, and also, I am told, by characters in The X-Files and in several video games. These are just a few examples.

  The best variations I have seen (they’re both available online) are in cartoons. In Lonesome Ghosts (1937), Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy (who doesn’t have a last name, does he? Goofy Dog?) are attempting, as proto-ghostbusters, to exorcise spirits from a house when Goofy looks into a dresser-top mirror and sees himself with the semitransparent face of a ghost. Goofy springs up and down, and the ghost springs with him. Goofy stops springing to fake the ghost out, but the ghost doesn’t care, it keeps springing and grinning, which really puts Goofy off, so he dives into the mirror, smashes it, gets stuck, the ghost comes out through one of the drawers and grabs him by the feet, now Goofy’s all wound up in the frame and the dresser drawers, he’s wrestling with himself, choking his own neck, and his momentum carries this strange struggling amalgam of Goofy and dresser out the door and down the stairs, where it collides with Mickey and Donald and drives them into barrels of molasses and bags of flour, turning them into specters that scare away the real ghosts.

  In Hare Tonic (l945), Elmer Fudd is carrying a basket with Bugs Bunny in it. Bugs sticks his head out and asks, “Whatcha got in the basket?”

  “I have a wabbit. I’m gonna make a wabbit stew.”

  Bugs jumps out of the basket: “Hey, lemme see d’ wabbit, Mister! Can I see d’ wabbit, huh? Please let me see d’ wabbit.”

  “All wight.”

  Bugs goes into the basket, comes out the other side. “No wabbit in there, Doc! You’ve been robbed!”

  Elmer crawls into the basket himself, and Bugs starts carrying it—then Elmer realizes, “Oh, you twickster! You’re the wabbit.”

  Elmer gets Bugs back in the basket, says he’s going to take him home and make a stew of him.

  Bugs, talking from the back of the basket: “He don’t know me vewy well,
do he?”

  At Elmer’s house, Bugs pretends to broadcast through the radio that people should beware of highly contagious rabbits with rabbititus—in advanced stages, sufferers assume the characteristics of rabbits.

  This induces Elmer to throw Bugs out of the house, but that’s not enough for Bugs: he returns. Introduces himself, in disguise, as a doctor. Elmer denies feeling “any rabbit inclinations.”

  “What’s two times two?”

  “Four.”

  “Aha! Multiplying!”

  Then, having slid Elmer’s mirror out of its frame, Bugs summons him to it and imitates his every movement, only in rabbit ways.

  “I’m a wabbit!” cries Elmer.

  In 1955, on I Love Lucy, Harpo and Lucille Ball, both dressed in Harpo outfits, re-created the Duck Soup mirror scene, sort of. They tried to do it before a studio audience, but couldn’t get it together until many takes after the audience left. At first, Harpo kept adding new moves, apparently expecting Lucy to read his mind, and Lucy asked him to break it down into discrete bits of movement, which caused Harpo to start thinking, which made him lose track of what he was doing. Neither he nor Lucy was lissome anymore. They mainly succeeded in showing how much better Harpo and Groucho did it twenty-two years before.

  The New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall, who found Duck Soup to be, “for the most part, extremely noisy without being nearly as mirthful as their other films,” was such a close watcher that he identified the mirror scene’s principals as Harpo and Chico, with Groucho coming in the end. That makes no sense on the face of it, since Harpo and Chico aren’t trying to impersonate or fool each other—but it is unusual, in any of the movies, for Groucho and Harpo to pair off. When it’s two brothers in a scene, it’s almost always Chico and Harpo or Chico and Groucho. (I can’t think of any scenes in which Chico is the only brother, except when he’s playing the piano.) Chico and Harpo have a knockabout rapport, but the closest thing to an in-sync brotherly moment between Groucho and Harpo is in A Night at the Opera when Groucho demands of the villain, who is beating up on Harpo, “Hey, big bully, what’s the idea of hitting that little bully?” This gives Harpo an opening to knock the villain out with a hammer. Then Harpo puts on a semiregretful face. “You’re sorry for what you did, huh? That shows a nice spirit,” says Groucho. Then Harpo hammers the villain again. Groucho and Harpo never come to fisticuffs, as Chico and Harpo do, but Groucho’s usual response to Harpo is to look at him, cringe, and make a remark along the lines of this one in A Night at the Opera: “That’s as grisly-a-looking object as I’ve ever seen.”

  Groucho and Harpo have a lot to work through. Groucho is the wiseacre, Harpo the mooncalf. Groucho the head, Harpo the soul, or something. In the mirror scene they establish that their bodies, at least, have a lot in common.

  Here’s a big difference between this mirror routine and the Max Linder or the Charlie Chase or the Bugs and Elmer version: it is clear enough, about forty-nine seconds in, when we see the back of Groucho’s head but his nodding, yeah-yeah, can’t-fool-me expression is reflected by Harpo, that Groucho has, literally, not been fooled for a minute.* And yet he keeps on testing Harpo’s illusionist chops for another two minutes and one second.

  Why?

  The purpose of acting, Hamlet informs the players, is “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” As ‘twere, indeed. The players might have answered, “Excuse us, Hamlet, but it seems like you’ve been trying to make nature be a mirror that you look justified in.” Hilton Als, in the New York Review, writes that Michael Jackson saw in stardom “a chance to defend himself and his mother from the violent ministrations of his father … and to wrest from the world what most performers seek: a nonfractured mirroring.”

  Working well with another actor, actors say, has a mirroring effect: each player, by looking at the other’s reactions, can get a fix on where he or she is, physically and emotively. On the other hand—as George Packer puts it† —there is “what’s known in intelligence as ‘mirror-imaging’: seeing in an enemy’s mental structure a reflection of one’s own.” Evidence-based imaging on the one hand, faith-based on the other. But the two are not mutually exclusive. If evidence can create faith, faith can also create evidence, and that’s how the dark side is born.

  This is not so much a movie about how nations go to war as it is about something deeper—the way brothers fight, compulsively, appetitively, because they can’t help it. As they grow on each other they grow over against each other. They get in each other’s way, they pick on each other, they put each other down, they look for excuses to regard each other as threats—thereby acquiring moves not taught in the classroom but essential, if not necessarily salubrious, in life. Brothers, usually, don’t quite kill each other, but they do know each other perhaps better than either would like. The Marx Brothers, when not in differing costumes, strikingly resembled each other. Once Harpo went on the panel quiz show I’ve Got a Secret, answering questions with horn honks. Turned out, his secret was that he was Chico pretending to be Harpo. In Animal Crackers, Groucho tells Chico he used to know someone who looked just like him, named Emanuel Ravelli. “Are you his brother?”

  Chico says he is Emanuel Ravelli.

  “Well,” says Groucho, “no wonder you look like him. But I still insist, there is a resemblance.”

  Chico laughs. “Hey, he thinks I look alike.”

  More fraught than Chico’s resemblance to himself is the relationship between Groucho and Harpo. Here (in nighty-night outfits that make them look like little kids) we have the brooding, dark brother vis-à-vis the buoyant, faux-blond brother. The brother who was playing a German in the family act, until the Lusitania was sunk—“So I became a Jew comedian. I never was a Jew comedian before”—vis-à-vis the brother who played silent Irish. The brother of the sidelong looks vis-à-vis the brother who made goony head-on faces. The brother whose mother didn’t like him vis-à-vis the brother who was most like her. Two brothers who didn’t hang out together as kids and—though Groucho’s son said the only time he ever saw his father cry was when Harpo died—were probably not much at ease with each other as grown-ups either, except when performing.

  “You love your brother, don’t you?” Groucho asks Chico, as regards Harpo, in Go West.

  “No, but I’m used to him,” says Chico.

  Groucho and Harpo in the mirror routine are truly, madly, deeply used to each other.

  True bromance entails respect and kinesthetic empathy, but also intense competition. This match between Harpo and Groucho is a lot like basketball. “You’ve got to try and anticipate a little bit,” says former Orlando Magic player Courtney Lee about guarding the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant. “But you don’t want to anticipate too much. He has that great footwork, and you can think he’s going one way, and he’ll feel you and make the right pivot and go the other way.” Groucho and Chico are working together, but this still must have been a hard thing to pull off. And between their characters, it is a duel.

  Harpo, so often put down by Groucho in words, keeps winning this face-off. He can cover Groucho—can be Groucho, to all appearances, when he wants to. When Groucho does a spin move, Harpo doesn’t even whirl around, because he knows Groucho can’t see him when he’s facing away.* When Groucho thinks he’s got him this time, different hats, Harpo switches hats.

  But Groucho never loses his cool. Firefly is failing to fake out Pinky, but Groucho the bookworm is matching his loosey-goosey brother move for move. When Harpo slips up and drops his hat, Groucho graciously hands it back to him, and they exchange a little bow. Groucho is no Edgar Kennedy—he gets this new take on tit-for-tat. He’s mulling a new move when Chico bursts in and the one-on-one is over.

  Harpo gets away. Groucho grabs Chico, who will be tried for treason.

  This courtroom scene is the one T. S. Eliot, a big fan, wanted to discuss when Groucho visited him in London. Groucho demurred—he wanted to discuss Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot demurred.

  The prosecutor is
Charles Middleton, who had played Abraham Lincoln in a short film promoting the aforementioned National Recovery Act. More notably, he would go on to play Ming the Merciless in the “Flash Gordon” serial. His grandfather, Arthur Middleton, had signed the Declaration of Independence. His grandson, Burr Middleton, would play “Sleazy Photographer” in Goodbye, Norma Jean.

  Chico objects.

  “On what grounds?” asks the prosecutor.

  “I couldn’t think of anything else to say,” says Chico. And Groucho can’t think of anything else either. So often in life those grounds must suffice.

  Listen to Groucho saying, “Look at Chicolini. He sits there alone.” Just that part. Doesn’t that sound like Homer Simpson’s voice when he is pitying himself? Dan Castellaneta, who does Homer’s voice, has said that he based Homer’s trademark d’oh on the slow-burn ejaculation of James Finlayson, who often played the Edgar Kennedy foil for Laurel and Hardy when they weren’t playing it for each other. So, I’m just saying, Castellaneta might have been trolling around for vintage comic voice tones and picked up on this one.

  If you don’t have the French subtitles up, I’ll bet you’re wondering how Chicolini’s famous irrelevant/elephant pun plays in that language. It’s hors de propos and hippopo. French for irrelevant and hippo. A hippo has un tronc mais pas de feuilles—a trunk in the sense of torso/tree, but no leaves. Pretty clever. Less felicitous is the replacement of Chicolini’s other famous pun on lemonade / eliminate by a confusion of omettre (omit) and omelette. But how would you like to translate Chicolini into another language? Even pseudo-Italian.