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

by Blount, Roy, Jr.

Why is it so gratifying to me, then? And why was it so gratifying to that audience of contemporary children and young parents and nannies with whom I was watching Duck Soup at the Thalia? Why is it so climactically gratifying for the boys to turn and start throwing their fruit at poor, gallant Mrs. T? Who is on their side! Who is the figurehead of their ship of state. A nice proper lady who loves them (or anyway loves Groucho, the least lovable) and who, by the way, is bankrolling this whole war.

  Are they throwing at Mom? A mother who, in the Marxes’ case, deprived them of a normal childhood by pushing them onto the stage? Nah. Where would they have found a normal childhood at the time and in the place where they grew up? And what would they have done with a normal childhood? Less, surely, than what they did with the childhood they had.

  Are they throwing at Collectivism? We don’t know whether Freedonia’s economy will ever rebound, but we do know, now, that it wasn’t the New Deal alone that pulled America out of the Depression. It took World War II.

  Are they throwing at Fascism? The report that Benito Mussolini took the movie personally and banned it in Italy has the ring of studio publicity. (The mayor of Fredonia, New York, did protest Duck Soup, just before its premiere, as a blot on his town’s fair name, but that was a put-up deal, enabling Groucho’s public response: “Change the name of your town, it’s hurting our movie.”) Another classic film that came out in l933 was Zero for Conduct, French, directed by Jean Vigo. Schoolboys in revolt against their school. Zero for Conduct bears some eerie resemblances to Duck Soup:

  Its protagonists are three rebellious boys and a new boy who becomes their fourth.

  During the film’s most celebrated scene, the pillow fight, the boys are in white nightgowns and the sound track goes from a raucous score to spooky silence.

  There is a remarkable hat-and-mirror scene in which the headmaster, a dwarf, is at great pains to position his hat on a mantelpiece, and then we see a mirror, and the headmaster starts straightening his tie, as if in the mirror over the mantel—but he’s too short to show up in the mirror, so a tall man standing behind him serves as his reflection, standing back (we see him alone in the mirror), straightening his own tie, smoothing his own hair as, presumably, the headmaster does, then sitting down as the headmaster does.

  Two of the boys bow to each other remarkably like Groucho and Harpo in their mirror routine.

  The film moves not according to plot logic but— ineluctably—more like a dream.

  The boys smoke cigars.

  The boys and a sympathetic teacher chase after an attractive woman in the street, inconclusively, like Harpo.

  That teacher does a drawing that becomes magically animated, like Harpo’s tattoo. And he does funny walks, like Groucho.

  The boys smash dishes with the abandon of Harpo wielding his scissors.

  The boys mock war. (“It’s war! Down with school! Liberty or death!”)

  The movie is even shorter than Duck Soup, only fifty minutes.

  The movie ends with the four boys throwing things (garbage, from the roof) at stuffed shirts.

  Zero for Conduct came out in time—April of ‘33—to have influenced Duck Soup. But it was shown only in France, and only to small audiences there, before being suppressed. Could Mankiewicz, say, have caught a screening of it? Unlikely. Maybe there was something in the international atmosphere, under whose pressure both movies bubbled up.

  Say both movies were responses, at some level, to looming totalitarianism. Zero for Conduct had a distinctly political heritage. Jean Vigo’s father was a famous anarchist who took the name Almereyda, an anagram of y a la merdre* (“there is shit”), and was strangled in prison when Jean was twelve. Jean himself died in 1934, leaving a few films so oddly put together that they would not be appreciated until many years later. But Zero for Conduct, for all its elements of farce, is rationally, pointedly anarchic, a protest against the hypocritical, unjust authority. The freedom-loving, uncorrupted boys are the good guys, the stiffs are repressive, predatory grotesques. We are frightened for the boys. They have feelings. They are able to form sympathetic alliances. At the end you sort of want to say, Aww. Unless you have totalitarian sympathies, in which case you’re presumably saying, Get those boys off that roof and into a camp.

  The Marxes and McCarey, in conflict, in Hollywood, on the pre-Code cusp between silent and screwball, managed to make a movie more uncompromisingly anarchic than that French art film. Everybody in Duck Soup, except maybe Miss Vera Marcal and sometimes Zeppo, is grotesque. There is no one to feel sorry for, not even Mrs. T. “The Marxes revolt against kindly Margaret Dumont,” observes Raymond Durgnat, “because, through our comic heroes, we sense the smothering quality of such ‘niceness.’”

  In l933 Europeans should have been so lucky as to be smothered by niceness. But after Duck Soup the Marxes got nicer themselves, in movies, alas. When asked what Duck Soup was up to, Groucho always insisted, “We were just four Jews trying to be funny.” But so were they in their later movies. In Duck Soup they manage to have it both ways—they are solidly in charge, yet thoroughly insurgent. Maybe that combination of rooted and rebellious is, or was, the American dream.

  Let’s say they are liberty personified, throwing at Miss Liberty, as represented by statuesque Mrs. T. Are they making a statement to the effect that liberty, by its nature, will turn on you if you try to set it in concrete? Nah. Liberty is not to be set in statement either.

  But we can freeze liberties, on film. That’s what I’m doing now—examining the pelting of Mrs. T frame by frame. Look carefully, and what do you see hanging slightly downstage of her and just to her right?

  A noose.

  “Victory is ow-ahs!” she flutes (or rather, oboes) with right arm raised, and indeed she does evoke Madame Liberty, for all her lack of a torch. And she begins to sing, operatically, “Hail, hail …”

  And the boys turn and begin to pelt her. My grandsons would love to have some of those prop fruits—apparently denser than Nerf but softer than tennis balls. I like to think they wouldn’t throw them at Margaret Dumont.

  But look! The boys aren’t throwing at her! They’re throwing at the noose! There’s your answer, Alvy Singer, there’s the purpose of life: to throw things at death!

  Or maybe McCarey, their romantic director, has told them: we don’t want to hit Maggie, of course, we’ll cheat it—aim at the noose.

  But then Harpo hits the noose. And they do start throwing at her. If we wonder why McCarey had such negative things to say about Duck Soup—he was a sentimental Irishman. He would go on to direct some of the fondest mother scenes ever on film. In Going My Way, tottery Barry Fitzgerald’s ancient, even-more-tottery mother, whom he hasn’t seen in God knows how many years, arrives, surprise!, from the mother country and takes him to her bosom. He’s retiring, belatedly, but he’s still her baby. It doesn’t get any less like throwing fruit at a doting older lady than that.

  “… Freedonia, laaaand of the braaav”—that’s as far as Maggie gets, and it looks like Chico at the end has gone back to targeting the noose, but the others have Mrs. T fending off projectiles with both hands (at one point she appears to catch one with her left hand, whereupon it melts—but that’s an illusion*) as we close. War blown away. Happy endings scorned. Triumphalism trumped.

  “We didn’t care about defending Freedonia,” Groucho once explained. “We just liked throwing things.”

  Reviews were mixed, and the movie was much less profitable than the Marxes’ earlier ones. The Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1934: “Every indication points to the Marx Brothers’ being through with the movies for the time being. They played the game for what it was worth but the screen is relentless in its exactions on comedians. It’s their duty to be funnier in each succeeding picture …

  “Groucho Marx dropped the word in New York that they’ve finished up for the time being. It looks like a stage show, and then maybe back to Paramount.” But Paramount was in receivership. On the radio, someone asked Groucho why he w
anted to make movies anyway. “The movies is classy,” he said.

  His scapegrace eldest brother stepped up. Many years later, Irving Brecher, who wrote the screenplays of At the Circus and Go West, related Groucho’s version of Chico’s intervention. It seems that Al Lichtman, the head of distribution at MGM, was a fellow member of the Hillcrest Country Club. Lichtman considered himself a gin rummy player. “Everybody says you’re the best at the club,” he said to Chico. “Me, I don’t think so.”

  “I’m lucky,” said Chico. “I win, I lose …”

  Lichtman suggested they go head to head. Chico shrugged okay. Kibitzers gathered. Chico lost a few hundred dollars. Said he had no money on him. Lichtman: “No problem. See you tomorrow.”

  The next day, even more onlookers, even more gin. Chico lost almost a thousand. Told Lichtman he still didn’t have the money on him. Lichtman said not to worry.

  Next day, Chico suggested doubling the stakes, give him a chance to catch up. Lichtman readily agreed. Before an even larger crowd, Chico lost and lost, until he was down sixty-eight hundred. Lichtman asked him, gentleman to gentleman, whether this was not the point at which he should pay up. Chico was close to tears. Not only did he lack the cash, he confessed, he was about to go bankrupt, because the Marxes had no movie in the works. “If we were doing a movie, then I could pay you, of course.”

  Lichtman was magnanimous. “Just remember to tell everybody who’s the best gin player in the club.” Chico gave him a big grateful hug.

  A couple of days later, Chico answered the phone, and it was Zeppo, now the brothers’ agent. Zeppo was excited: “Out of the blue, I got a call from MGM.”

  “Who over there?” asked Chico.

  “Al Lichtman. He recommended to Thalberg that they sign us up, and Thalberg okayed it.”

  The brothers converged on the offices of Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM. “The Boy Genius,” as he was called, wasn’t there when they arrived. What, he was going to keep them waiting? When he showed up, they were in his inner office, naked, roasting potatoes over a fire in his fireplace.

  Okay, down to brass tacks. Without Zeppo, Thalberg argued, they should get less money. “Without Zeppo,” said Groucho, “we’re twice as funny.” Zeppo negotiated a five-picture deal.

  At the club, Chico thanked Lichtman. “Wanna celebrate?” said Lichtman. “Let’s play some gin.”

  Okay, said Chico. In three hours, nobody watching much, he won back the $6,800 and a little extra.

  “Let’s make them lovable,” said Thalberg. “Pictures,” he had written, “should be made primarily for the feminine mind.” In their first movie under Thalberg, A Night at the Opera, the Marxes run riot through grand opera, but for a good cause: to advance the romance and the singing careers of lovesongbirds Kitty Carlisle and Alan Jones. Bleh.

  Opera also had great comedy. The famous full-to-bursting stateroom scene. Groucho and Chico going over a contract, progressively reducing it to a single shred. The strenuous injection of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (the song and a bit of the game itself) into Il Trovatore. The movie made a lot of money. It was no Duck Soup. In 2009, by the way, according to a website called FemaleFirst, British schoolchildren who were shown a series of classic films voted Duck Soup their number-one favorite, ahead of The Wizard of Oz, Bambi, It’s a Wonderful Life, Dumbo …

  Thalberg died. The Marxes grew older. The romantic subplots grew sappier. Their madness went downhill.

  On the Internet, it is often stated that François Truffaut called Duck Soup the most effective, or the only valid, antiwar movie ever made. But our heroes bring on the war—the bad guy tries to avert it. They enjoy the war. And they win the war. Only then do they seem to be turning against it. But there is no indication that they wouldn’t happily start another war tomorrow.

  An antiwar movie is The Bridge on the River Kwai, whose last word is “Madness!” but before that you get some noble self-sacrifice and a really cool explosion that sends a bad-guy bridge and a badguy train full of bad guys spilling down into the river. What Truffaut did say was in response to the question (posed to him by Robert Hughes), “Which of the films dealing with peace, and war, do you think are the most effective?”

  “It seems to me,” replied Truffaut, “that war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive: La Grande Illusion (which I admire) makes one want to be a prisoner; Paisan (which I admire) to be a partisan; Le Petit Soldat (which I admire) to become a secret agent; and Sergeant York (which I admire) a war hero.

  “A film that truly shows war, battles, almost necessarily exalts war unless it is a question of a parody: Shoulder Arms, Tire au Plane (by Jean Renoir), Duck Soup, The Great Dictator.”

  I haven’t seen Tire au Plane, but Renoir himself remarked ruefully of La Grande Illusion, “In l937 I was told I had made the greatest antiwar picture—two years later war broke out.” Of the other three parodies Truffaut cites, Duck Soup is the least beholden, the most defiant. Defiant not just of war but of pacifism, of fellow feeling, of movies, of everything. This comedy made in the same year that Hitler became chancellor of Germany is not, like The Great Dictator of seven years later, an attempt to send up a fuehrer. “The fact of the matter,” wrote George F. Kennan, “is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.” If only you could be a dictator without the headaches …

  You’d be Firefly, for whom everything is duck soup, except when his even more blithely despotic big brothers are around. Time magazine, calling the recent comedies of Will Ferrell “macho infantilism,” suggested their popularity might reflect “that inside every adult is a backward child ruled by fears and cravings,” or just that audiences like “grownups behaving … like kindergartners making poop jokes.” Either way, too cutesy: buck up, little stinky man. Duck Soup is more radical. In the “Going to war!” number, all of a sudden Zeppo sings, “Oh how we’d cry / For Firefly / If Firefly should die!” Yeah, right. Duck Soup is a feel-good movie with no concession—not even way down deep, not even off in the wings somewhere—to obligatory feeling.

  CHICO: Ya gotta admit, it’s brave and free, donia?

  It is sort of sweet that all the brothers unite there at the end. Should say, most of the brothers. Here’s something I did not know until I read Sally Ashley’s biography of Franklin P. Adams, who was a prominent figure at the legendarily witty Algonquin Round Table. According to that book, only one Marx contributed an unforgotten pun to the Round Tablers’ vaunted word games. It wasn’t Groucho, who must have been furious. Nor was it Harpo, who for all we know sat at the table naked. Nor was it Chico, who had more dangerous games elsewhere.

  It was Gummo. Evidently Gummo had a seat at that table at least once, and he made it count. Everybody knows that Dorothy Parker, challenged to make a sentence with the word horticulture, quipped as follows: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” But who knew that Gummo, taking on euphoria, came up with this:

  LEFT TO RIGHT: Harpo, Zeppo, Chico, Groucho, and Gummo, 1957.

  “Go outside and play,” Minnie told the brothers.

  “Which ones?” they asked.

  And she said: “Euphoria.”*

  PHOTO CREDITS

  John Springer Collection / Corbis

  New York Public Library

  New York Public Library

  Hulton Archive / Getty Images

  New York Public Library

  New York Public Library

  New York Public Library

  New York Public Library

  New York Public Library

  Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images

  Joan Griswold

  About the Author

  Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-one previous books, most recently Alphabet Juice. He appears regularly on NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He lives in western Massachusetts.
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  ALSO BY ROY BLOUNT JR.

  Alphabet Juice

  Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from

  Up South

  Feet on the Street: Rambles Around

  New Orleans

  I Am the Cat, Don’t Forget That:

  Feline Expressions

  Robert E. Lee

  Am I Pig Enough for You Yet?

  I Am Puppy, Hear Me Yap

  If Only You Knew How Much I Smell

  You

  Be Sweet

  Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor

  Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard

  First Hubby

  About Three Bricks Shy… and the

  Load Filled Up

  Now, Where Were We?

  Soupsongs/Webster’s Ark

  It Grows on You

  What Men Don’t Tell Women

  Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

  One Fell Soup

  Crackers

  About Three Bricks Shy of a Load

  Copyright

  HAIL, HAIL, EUPHORIA! Copyright © 2010 by Roy Blount Jr.

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