[To read previous entries in this essay, click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
Duck Soup: The Brothers At Their Best Let's just cut to the chase. If you've never seen Duck Soup, back away from the blog, turn off your computer and go find it—right now! It's available for instant streaming from Netflix, if you're set up for that, and you can always buy it here from amazon.com if you're not.
Because the fact is there are certain works of art so essential to the human experience that, love them or hate them, not to have experienced them at least once dooms you to a life of aimless wandering in the desert of cultural ignorance. Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David. And if I had to choose just one Marx Brothers movie that meets the definition of essential, Duck Soup would be it.
Now, those of you who have been following this blog for a while know I'm not prone to dogmatic pronouncements. I'm a live and let live guy (in a live and let die world) and if you don't like the same movies I like, that's perfectly alright with me. There are no wrong answers, I always say, just movies you haven't seen yet.
So when I tell you in such uncertain terms that this is one of the movies you should see, well, you know I'm not kidding around. Go. See the movie. Then come back and read this post. We'll wait.
For everybody else, here's a quick reminder of why Duck Soup is so wonderful:
Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: Freedonia's economy is in a shambles, it's treasury depleted, and only the largess of a wealthy benefactor, the rich widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) keeps the country afloat. Moreover, Freedonia's bellicose neighbor, Sylvania, is massing troops on the border, and with a month's rent already paid on the battlefield, war seems inevitable. The country teeters on the brink of anarchy.
Freedonia is desperate for a savior and riding to the rescue is that fearless man of the people, Rufus T. Firefly. A fighting progressive—or an iron-fisted dictator, depending on which news source you follow—Firefly takes office pledging broad reform.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
If this sounds like a cynical critique of every head of state since Pontius Pilate last washed his hands, it is. It's also the funniest. That Duck Soup seems as fresh now as it did when it first premiered seventy-seven years ago is a testament both to how well it was made and to how little human nature ever really changes.
The film features some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon, especially the mirror scene, but also Chico's trial for treason, a running battle with the owner of a lemonade stand, and the wild finale where the besieged Brothers are rescued by, among other things, a school of dolphins. Many factors are responsible for Duck Soup's greatness: Leo McCarey's face-paced direction; the expert supporting work of Margaret Dumont, Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern; and a top-notch screenplay that despite contributions from many sources—not just credited writers Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, but also Grover Jones, Norman Krasna, Herman Mankiewicz, Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers themselves—was the most cohesive and inventive of the Paramount era.
Above all, though, Duck Soup works thanks to the performances of Groucho, Chico and Harpo themselves. Groucho, of course, was already without peer in terms of comic timing, and his delivery could take jokes that on the printed page were pretty flat—asking Margaret Dumont to take a card, for example ("Keep it. I've got fifty-one left")—and turn them into brilliantly absurdist gems. But in Duck Soup, he also looks physically comfortable for the first time, no longer worried about hitting his mark (always a problem for him), inhabiting his character and commanding the screen like a seasoned movie actor instead of a transplanted theater performer.
Harpo's business is not quite as anarchic as in previous movies (personally, I think Animal Crackers is his best showcase), but it's tighter here, tying back into the plot. He's just as easily distracted as ever, but now, for example, when he tries to crack a safe and winds up breaking into a radio by mistake, there are consequences which lead directly to two of the movie's best moments—the mirror scene and Chico's trial for treason. And, to reiterate an earlier point, he for once has a nemesis (two, actually, in the persons of Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern) worthy of his antics.
As good as Groucho and Harpo are, though, the real surprise of the movie is Chico. I'm not suggesting Chico wasn't good in previous movies, but his role had been limited largely to malapropisms, piano solos and translating for the silent Harpo, a role Chico seemed content to play as long as he got his paycheck on time. In Duck Soup, however, entire sequences that have nothing to do with tormenting Groucho or supporting Harpo—the meeting with Louis Calhern, the peanut vendor scenes with Edgar Kennedy, the scene in Margaret Dumont's bedroom, and the trial for treason—are built around him and in these scenes, Chico showcased a comic talent the equal of his brothers.
In part, Chico's expanded role was an unexpected dividend of the Brothers' otherwise unsuccessful radio venture. Without Harpo and the piano to fall back on, the show's writers (Perrin and Sheekman) were forced to devise new ways to feature Chico and to beef up his role to equal Groucho's and many of these new sketches, including the "Shadow-day" business in Calhern's office and the trial scene late in the movie, wound up in the movie to Chico's benefit.
Leo McCarey was the other driving force behind Chico's more visible role. A veteran of the Hal Roach Studios, McCarey had his own comic sensibilities and the confidence to impose them on the Marx Brothers. He perceived that the perfect complement to their comedy of aggression was the comedy of the "slow-burn" reaction—what Houghton Mifflin defines as "a gradually increasing sense or show of anger"—perfected by such Hal Roach acts as Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields. To that end, he brought in veteran performers Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern, adapted bits from the silent era such as the three-hat gag to bring them to a slow boil, and let Chico and Harpo go to work on them.
I wish I could tell you Zeppo fared as well. In consciously setting out to make the best Marx Brothers movie ever, director Leo McCarey ruthlessly streamlined the story, eliminating every element not directly related to producing laughs. In addition to cutting the usual harp and piano solos, he also cut a scripted romance between Zeppo and Raquel Torres (who played dancer Vera Marcal) as well as Zeppo's number "Keep On Doin' What You're Doin'" (recycled a year later for the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy, Hips Hips Hooray), effectively reducing the youngest Marx Brother to a bit player in his own movie.
Duck Soup premiered on November 17, 1933 to mixed reviews. The usually supportive Mourdant Hall of the New York Times called it "noisy" and not nearly as funny as previous efforts. Variety complained that the movie "could easily have been written by a six-year-old," but overall recommended the film. Everybody loved the mirror scene.
In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. In part, the movie was done in by Paramount's financial difficulties which left little money in the budget for promotion, but the Marx Brothers were also victims of bad timing—as Tim Dirks at The Greatest Films put it, "audiences were taken aback by such preposterous political disrespect, buffoonery and cynicism at a time of political and economic crisis, with Roosevelt's struggle against Depression in the US amidst the rising power of Hitler in Germany."
Of course, Duck Soup's reputation as a masterpiece is now secure, the sort of movie that—as Woody Allen posited in Hannah and Her Sisters—can give you a reason for living even on the worst of days. In 1990, the Library of Congress selected Duck Soup for preservation in the National Film Registry. Ten years later, the American Film Institute ranked it as the fifth best American comedy of all time. Personally, I rank it even higher than that.
Despite its status as an essential film classic, the experience of making Duck Soup was not a happy one. The Brothers and Leo McCarey did not enjoy working together—and indeed never worked together again. Chico and Harpo missed the piano and harp solos, and Zeppo was so miffed, he left the act permanently and never performed in another movie.
In addition, shortly after production began, the studio fired producer Herman J. Mankiewicz. Although he and Mankiewicz remained friends for life, Groucho was blunt in describing Mank's efforts as a producer, calling him "an irritating drunk who didn't give a hang about the movie project." (Apparently a typical day at the office would consist of napping, drinking and talking to his wife on the phone, and Mankiewicz only kept his job because Paramount executive B.P. Schulberg owed him large sums of money from their frequent poker games. When Paramount reorganized in 1933, Schulberg lost his job and Mankiewicz soon found himself on the curb.)
Mostly, though, the unhappiness on the set was a direct result of the Brothers' deteriorating relationship with the studio and soon after Duck Soup's premiere, the Marx Brothers and Paramount Pictures would permanently part company. For the first time in more than a decade the Brothers found themselves out of work and at a crossroads.
Trivia: When watching Hollywood films made between 1933 and 1935, you're likely to see the "NRA" logo before the opening credits. No, that's not an endorsement of the National Rifle Association, but instead refers to the National Recovery Administration. Part of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" effort to lift the country from the depths of the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act allowed the NRA to negotiate with various industries on behalf of the federal government to establish codes of "fair competition," including a minimum wage for workers and collectively-agreed-upon prices for goods and services.
Participation was voluntary and those businesses which adhered to the negotiated fair competition codes displayed the NRA logo on their products. (Those that didn't participate often found themselves subject of a boycott.)
In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared the NRA an unconstitutional delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch. Although the National Recovery Administration ceased to operate, several of its basic concepts, including the minimum wage, were included in the National Labor Relations Act (a.k.a. the Wagner Act) passed later that same year.
[To continue to Part Eight, click here. To read more about Duck Soup, click here.]
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Sons Of The Desert) Herbert Marshall (Trouble In Paradise) (here, with Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus) The Marx Brothers (Horse Feathers and Duck Soup) Michel Simon (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
Thelma Todd made 119 features and short subjects in her all-too-brief career, appearing with such film legends as Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, John Barrymore and Clara Bow, but she'll always be known primarily for the two movies she made with the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.
Born in 1906 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Todd worked as a school teacher for two years before attaining notice as a contestant in the Miss America pageant; shortly thereafter, she signed with Paramount Pictures and made her movie debut in 1926. Promoted as both "The Ice Cream Blonde" and "Hot Toddy," Todd excelled in comedies and wound up at the Hal Roach Studios where she made dozens of films including six shorts and features with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Many of her best films, though, were made while on loan to other studios, including her two pictures with the Marx Brothers. Both films were big financial successes and helped keep Paramount afloat during the depths of the Depression.
In addition to her film work, Todd also owned a highly successful nightclub in the Pacific Palisades called Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café.
Ironically, one of Groucho's quips from Monkey Business—"You've been getting nothing but dirty breaks; we can clean and tighten your brakes, but you'll have to stay in the garage all night"—proved to be Todd's epitaph. On December 16, 1935, Todd was found dead in her garage of carbon monoxide poisoning. The coroner labeled her death an accident but others have speculated that it was either suicide—she had argued with her ex-husband that same evening—or the work of gangsters who had recently tried to muscle in on the Sidewalk Café hoping to turn it into a gambling den.
She was just twenty-nine.
On August 30, 2010, Turner Classic Movies will feature the work of Thelma Todd as part of its annual Summer Under The Stars promotional event. Mark your calendars.
One of two Marx Brothers movies preserved in the National Film Registry (the other is A Night At the Opera) and the last to include Zeppo, Duck Soup is the funniest of their films, an exercise in inspired anarchy that nevertheless works with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Without ever feeling overburdened by superfluous plot, Duck Soup is one of the few Marx Brothers movies that actually has one, or at least one that serves not merely as an excuse for humor, but as a catalyst for it. Considering how many chefs stirred this particular cinematic pot, however, not just the credited writers but also director Leo McCarey and the Brothers themselves, all concerned likely counted themselves lucky that the movie worked at all. A study of the screenwriting process reveals that the story was actually a mishmash of old vaudeville gags, Laurel and Hardy routines and entire scenes lifted nearly intact from the Marx Brothers' short-lived radio program. That Duck Soup wound up the most effortlessly brilliant entry in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre is something of a modern movie miracle.
Immediately after the release of the Marx Brothers' 1932 hit, Horse Feathers, work began on a follow-up, Firecrackers, to be set in the mythical Eastern European kingdom of Oo-La-La, with Ernst Lubitsch, whose resume was filled with comedies set in mythical Eastern European kingdoms, slated to direct. The script started as a handful of songs and a rough story idea from the songwriting team of Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who had written songs for two other Marx Brothers movies, Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers.
His Excellency is due To take his station Beginning his new Administration. He'll make his appearance when The clock on the wall strikes ten.
Zeppo, by the way, who sings this opening number, was initially to play Groucho's son, as he had in Horse Feathers, and only at the last minute was the part rewritten to be Rufus T. Firefly's secretary, Bob Roland. It was probably just as well—it's his smallest part in the five films he appeared in and he was ready to leave the act and pursue a career as a Hollywood talent agent.
For the opening scene, a long sequence in a palace ballroom where foreign dignitaries and government officials have assembled to await the arrival of Freedonia's new leader, Kalmar and Ruby wrote two other songs, the two-line Freedonian national anthem and a big song and dance number for Groucho.
The last man nearly ruined this place He didn't know what to do with it. If you think this country's bad off now Just wait 'till I get through with it.
Together with "His Excellency Is Due," the scene plays out more or less as it did in the final film.
During these early stages of the story's development, Kalmar and Ruby also penned the opening lines of what would later become the song and dance number, "The Country's Going To War," which was a spoof of, among other things, the spiritual "All God's Chillun Got Wings," and a 1924 Eugene O'Neill play of the same name starring Paul Robeson.
Then it's war! Then it's war! Gather the forces! Harness the horses! Then it's war!
Taken together, the songs suggested something of a story arc—Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) becomes leader of Freedonia and the country winds up in a war—but stitching those two bookends together proved to be a bit of a problem.
Grover Jones, a veteran of more than a hundred screenplays in his career, including the Ernst Lubitsch classic, Trouble in Paradise, made the first attempt at hashing out the storyline. Working with Kalmar and Ruby, Jones's draft of the script, now entitled Cracked Ice, imagined that Groucho, in addition to being president of Freedonia, is also an arms manufacturer who conspires with Chico to start a war to gin up a demand for his product, anticipating by nearly three decades Dwight Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech, with Margaret Dumont throw in for comic relief.
Some of the jokes survive—the recurring bit with "His Excellency's car," the "gala day" line, opting for a "standing" army to save on chairs—as does the scene introducing Firefly and the garden party at Mrs. Teasdale's, but everything after the first act went out the window. (One of the rejected ideas was an opera sequence, with Chico and Harpo disrupting the performance. An expanded form of the idea was revived two years later as A Night At The Opera.)
Aside from the fact that many of his gags were belabored and not very funny, Jones fundamentally misunderstood the Brothers' appeal. It was one thing for Groucho to scam the sorts of people we instinctively root against—gangsters, gamblers and rich buffoons—or for Chico to scam Groucho; it was another thing altogether for Groucho and Chico to be those people we root against. (You can read this draft online here.)
Next the studio brought in Groucho Marx's favorite writer, Arthur Sheekman, who along with Nat Perrin, had been writing a radio show for the Brothers, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, which briefly aired on NBC radio from late November 1932 to May 1933. Arthur Sheekman had been a show business columnist for the Chicago Sunday Times where Groucho sought him out, befriended him and hired him to work on two Marx Brothers films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, the latter without credit, before becoming the chief writer on the radio show. Perrin, a former lawyer working in the Warner Brothers' publicity department, landed a job as a gag writer for Groucho after forging a letter of introduction from Broadway playwright Moss Hart.
The new script, now called Grasshoppers, was cobbled together from previous drafts and from the radio show. With minor refinements, Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel provided fifteen of Duck Soup's gags and routines, including Chico's trial for treason, and lines such as "Go, and never darken my towels again" and "Would you give me a lock of your hair—I'm letting you off easy, I was going to ask for the whole wig." (I knew there was a reason I bought the transcripts of the radio show some twenty years ago.)
Chico's first scene in Duck Soup was lifted nearly verbatim from the program's first episode. This, from the show's transcript:
"Hey, you remember when you giva me that picture of your wife?" "Yes." "Well, I start right out. Joosta like a bloodhound, I tell you. And in one hour, even less than one hour—" "Yes ..." "I losa da pisch." ... "Then you didn't shadow my wife?" "Sure, I shadow her all day." "What day was that?" "That was Shadowday. ... Monday I shadow your wife. Tuesday I go to the ball game—she don't show up. Wednesday she go to the ball game—I don't show up. Thursday was a doubleheader. We both no show up. Friday it rain all day—there'sa no ball game, so I go fishing."
For the movie, the jokes were further polished and the characters altered to suit the story. In addition, business was written for Harpo, who as a silent act was of course not on the radio.
(Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, who later won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane, also contributed to the finished product—what, exactly, I can't tell you.)
Finally, although director Leo McCarey wasn't credited with writing the script, I suspect he played a major role in the way the story played out. Originally a lawyer by trade, McCarey broke into the film business as a writer for the Hal Roach Studios; by 1929, McCarey was in charge of production there. A veteran director of comedy shorts, McCarey dipped into his past to provide the Brothers with new material. The scenes with Edgar Kennedy as the long-suffering owner of a lemonade stand are much more characteristic of the slow-burn frustration routines of W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, whom McCarey had worked with extensively, than of the sort of comedy the Brothers had been doing. The scene where Chico and Harpo rob the safe is a reworked bit from Laurel and Hardy. And the famous mirror scene, which McCarey also suggested, was an old vaudeville routine.
McCarey was the first veteran comedy director the Brothers had ever worked with and to their delight, he encouraged improvisation on the set. And to the delight of many film fans, he also insisted on dropping the usual harp and piano interludes.
His main contribution, though, was knowing from experience what was funny and how to capture that comedy on film.
As filming came to an end in June 1933, the studio finally settled on a title, Duck Soup. The origin and meaning of the title has been the subject of speculation for years, and with his usual directness, Groucho explained it thusly: "Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life."
In fact, though, "duck soup" was slang for "something easy to do," and Leo McCarey almost certainly suggested it—in 1927 while at Hal Roach's studio, he proposed pairing comedic actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy for the first time in short named, yes, that's right, Duck Soup.
In any event, Duck Soup was in keeping with the three previous Marx Brothers movies which had worked an animal into the title.
The movie premiered on November 27, 1933. Legend has it that Duck Soup flopped on its initial release, but in fact, it broke even at the box office, and although it did receive mixed reviews from critics, its relative lack of success (compared to its predecessors) may owe more to Paramount Pictures' lack of a marketing budget than to any inherent lack of interest on the part of the public. In any event, Paramount, which had been tottering financially throughout the Depression, soon after went bankrupt and the Brothers decamped for MGM where Irving Thalberg remade them in his own image. But that's a story I'll leave for another day.
Despite their ups and downs, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby worked together as a songwriting team from 1920 until Kalmar's death in 1947. The pair wrote such songs as "Who's Sorry Now," "I Wanna Be Loved By You," and their biggest hit, "Three Little Words," which provided the title of the 1950 fictionalized film account of the partnership starring Fred Astaire and Red Skelton.
Grover Jones was twice nominated for an Oscar, for the original story Lady and Gent and for the screenplay for The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer (shared with four other writers). He also wrote Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and during the silent era, he directed twenty-one movies. Jones died at the age of forty-six following surgery.
After hopping a train from New York with Groucho and Nat Perrin to write Duck Soup, Arthur Sheekman continued to work in Hollywood, and met his future wife, Gloria Stuart, while writing the Eddie Cantor musical, Roman Scandals. (You may remember Stuart for her Oscar-nominated turn in the 1997 movie Titanic.) Sheekman and Stuart married in 1934 and remained married until his death in 1978.
Nat Perrin also stayed in Hollywood and did some uncredited script doctoring on Go West and wrote the screen story for The Big Store (recycling the name "Flywheel" and the plot of that movie from the radio show). He also wrote the hit play Hellzapoppin' and later produced The Addams Family for television. Although Duck Soup provided him with an entree into Hollywood, Perrin wasn't a fan of the movie. "[It] was so crazy—that was Leo McCarey's approach, and the boys loved working with him. But, to me, [A] Night at the Opera is a far better film. Of course, plenty of people disagree with me." He died in 1998.
Both Sheekman and Perrin remained lifelong friends with Groucho.
During a career which began in the silent era and ended in the early '60s, Leo McCarey directed 110 shorts and feature films. He was nominated for nine Oscars, winning four, one for directing Cary Grant's breakout performance in The Awful Truth, and three for writing, directing and producing 1944's best picture winner, Going My Way.
And as for the Marx Brothers? We'll be returning to them soon enough.
[To read about frequent Marx Brothers co-star Margaret Dumont, click here.]
The results of the latest poll are in— despite intense lobbying efforts on behalf of both the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers were your favorite comedy team of the 1930s, taking a plurality of the 37 votes cast, with 18. The Stooges received eleven heartfelt votes, and Laurel and Hardy and Our Gang 3 each. Burns and Allen and the Ritz Brothers closed out the voting with one vote each, although support for the latter was strongly suspected of being an inside joke between readers Muleboy and bellotoot.
"I knew it!" Zeppo Marx crowed at the awards ceremony. "I knew I'd win an award someday! I've been carrying these guys for years and finally it's my moment to shine. I'm king of the world!"
In an expansive mood at MGM Queen Norma Shearer's always raucous after-party, Chico Marx opined, "Comedy is a chair. I'm an artist and if you give me a tuba or perhaps a French horn or any of the wind instruments, I'll bring you a laugh out of it, either by falling into it or maybe by blowing on it and making a funny sound."
His brother Julius, who performs under the stage name "Groucho," was more subdued as he shared a quiet drink with his cigar and grease-paint moustache. "I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member. Those are my principles," he added, "if you don't like them, well, I have others."
Accepting the silver medal on behalf of the Three Stooges was an eloquent Jerome "Curly" Howard whose tearful speech was the highlight of the awards ceremony. "Woo woo woo!" he said at one point, which he followed quickly with, "Nyuck nyuck nyuck."
George Burns was philosophical in defeat. "Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that's down can come up."
"They laughed at Joan of Arc," his wife and lifelong partner, Gracie Allen, interrupted, "but she went right ahead and built it."
"Gracie, did the maid ever drop you on your head when you were a baby?"
"Don't be silly, George, we couldn't afford a maid. My mother had to do it."
"Say goodnight, Gracie."
"Goodnight!"
On the other hand, Spanky McFarland, one-time star of the Our Gang comedies, now every day third baseman for the Washington Nationals, was inconsolable after the loss.
"I blame Buckwheat," he said bitterly. "The Little Rascals were a tight little comedy act—me, Darla, Alfalfa, Stymie. Even a no-talent stiff like Dickie Moore could get a rise out of an audience from time to time. Then Buckwheat goes on Saturday Night Live and gets himself shot and suddenly we're a national joke! Comedy is no laughing matter, dammit!"
For the first time in Monkey Blog history, intense lobbying efforts from outside interest groups attempted to influence the outcome of the poll, no doubt a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate spending in elections. Who Am Us Anyway and Thingy, who supported the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, respectively, sparred good-naturedly but passionately in favor of their candidates.
"Look what I'm up against," Who com- plained, "a basic misunder- standing on the part of the electorate regarding the actual question presented. And since there seems to be some confusion on this point, let me put it plainly: Comedy, to the aficionado, means 'falling, hitting and making funny noises.'"
His ardent support for the Stooges, he said, was motivated by "my continuing quest to drive away all high-class, intellectual readers who are smarter than me," and added that if you couldn't at least muster a wry grin at the antics of Moe, Larry and Curly, "I don't want to know you."
For her part, Thingy would stop at nothing to boost the chances of Laurel and Hardy, even at one point posting an enticing cheesecake photo of her legs. Yet afterwards, she shrugged off the duo's defeat. "I think I'll go watch The Thin Man," she said. "Now, that was a comedy team."
I'm working on my essay for the best director of 1931-32. A thousand words so far and I don't know who the winner is yet.
In the meantime, be sure to vote in this week's Monkey Poll: Who is your favorite comedy team of the 1930s?
Here are your choices:
Burns and Allen Laurel and Hardy The Marx Brothers Our Gang (The Little Rascals) The Ritz Brothers The Three Stooges Other Remember, every vote counts and the results have no effect on anything. So vote early and vote often.
What did E.B. White say about analyzing humor? that like dissecting a frog, you can do it, but both tend to die in the process?
Or maybe the appropriate quote belongs to Mel Brooks who said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."
In the award-winning comedy short The Music Box, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, nobody walks into an open sewer and dies, at least not quite, and I'm sure that if I fell down a flight of stairs 131 steps long and had a piano land on me, I wouldn't be the least bit amused, but watching Laurel and Hardy do it, not once but three times, is hysterical, and it gets funnier with each repetition.
Stan Laurel was the stage name of Arthur Stanley Jefferson, an English actor, director and playwright who began his career at the age of sixteen as a music hall comedian before eventually emigrating to America where he enjoyed moderate success as a solo act at the Hal Roach Studios in over fifty silent comedy shorts. His partner, Norville "Babe" Hardy, was born in Georgia and took up acting after running his own theater there and deciding he could do better. He took the name Oliver in tribute to his dad and wound up making over 250 silent comedy shorts between 1914 and 1926. Although the two had appeared together in short films before, Hal Roach paired them as "Stan and Ollie" for the first time in the 1927 short The Second Hundred Years. The team was an instant hit and supervising director Leo McCarey (later of Duck Soup, The Awful Truth and Going My Way) suggested they become a permanent team.
Laurel and Hardy made their first talkie in 1929 with Unaccustomed As We Are and, unlike many of their colleagues, discovered that sound improved the act. Hardy's blustery bass voice was a perfect foil to Laurel's squeaky English one; sound allowed them to place the more violent payoffs to their gags off-stage; and because sound made the slapstick more realistic, it forced them to make the gags smaller, letting the team concentrate instead on the comedy of anticipation and frustration, Laurel's forte.
In 1932, Laurel, Hardy, director James Parrott and a film crew drove out to the Silver Lake District of Los Angeles to a public staircase on Vendome Street and dared to ask that age old question, what if Sisyphus had had a partner. The answer not only provided Laurel and Hardy with the plot for one of their best comedy shorts ever, it also reiterated the comedy formula they followed with such success for most of their career together.
Watching The Music Box, unfortunately, isn't nearly as easy as it ought to be. The DVD collections that include it are out of print and even the usually reliable Netflix seems to have been caught napping on this one. I myself happened to have a copy on tape (although finding the tape was an adventure. You know how they say it's always in the last place you look—obviously, since you stop looking after that—well, The Music Box was literally in the first place I looked, the very first tape, except that because of the lighting and the angle and the way it was jammed into the bookcase, I wound up going through a thousand titles, first forward, then backwards, not once but twice, until to my chagrin, I returned to the beginning again. But I digress). But today is the maid's day off, the place is a mess, and I regret I can't be inviting you over to watch it with me.
Fortunately, I found a copy on the internet—a legal copy, at that, which is all the better. I suggest you watch it first and then come back and let me yack about it, ad nauseam. Or better yet, watch it and you yack about it, down there in the comments section.
The action is simple—getting a piano up a long flight of stairs—but like a composer who takes a simple theme and then builds on it, Laurel and Hardy add variations, play with our expectations, delay the payoff and even go in wholly unexpected directions, for example, that pond at the top of the stairs which you just know is going to wind up with the piano in it, but how it ends up there, long after you've forgotten the pond, is real genius. What starts out simple winds up as baroque and complicated as a Rube Goldberg contraption. And yet it's bright, it's elegant and it's as light as a souffle.
Only funnier.
It had been a while since I'd seen Laurel and Hardy—they don't show up on cable much anymore—and watching The Music Box again, I was struck by how much I had forgotten about the duo. Yes, I knew that Laurel had flawless comic timing and that Hardy could break the so-called "fourth wall" better than anybody in history. But I had forgotten, for example, that Hardy is just as dumb as Laurel, he only thinks he's smart, and that Laurel isn't always a passive recipient of whatever the world dishes out: after all, it's he, not Hardy, who kicks the snotty nurse in the pants.
I was also unaware, before I started watching silent movies and early sound comedies for this blog, just how much all these guys recycled gags, both their own and everybody else's. The Music Box, for example, is actually a remake of an earlier Laurel and Hardy silent film, Hats Off, now lost, which centered around the delivery of a washing machine rather than a piano. The routine with the boys' bowler hats—I suspect a staple of vaudevillian comedy—was later honed to perfection by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup; and Cary Grant did a riff on it as well in his first great movie, The Awful Truth. And of course the Three Stooges filmed their own short, An Ache in Every Stake, on this same flight of stairs. None of them seemed to mind much, and in the case of the good acts at least, the jokes got better each time they retold them.
The Music Box won a well-deserved Oscar for best short comedy subject at the 1932 ceremony, the only award the team ever won—and technically, the award went to the film's producer, the legendary Hal Roach. Stan Laurel was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1961 for "his creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy," three years after Hardy's death.
In 1997, the Library of Congress selected The Music Box for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Even as they were filming The Music Box, the popularity of the comedy short was waning. Laurel and Hardy made their first feature-length film, Pardon Us, in 1931, and went on to score such successes as Sons of the Desert, Way Out West and A Chump At Oxford. Altogether, they starred in twenty-three feature films, the last in 1951. They left the Hal Roach Studios in 1940 and made several commercially, if not critically, successful films. Declining health ended the partnership in the mid-1950s. Hardy died in 1957; deprived of his screen partner, Laurel refused all offers to perform for the last eight years of his life, including an offer of a cameo in Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a virtual Who's Who of comedy acts. Laurel died two years later.
In honor of their stellar work together, I am handing Laurel and Hardy a pair of Katie Awards today, one for the best short film of 1931-32, The Music Box, the other a much-deserved Career Achievement Award. Congratulations, fellas.
Let's just cut to the chase. If you've never seen Duck Soup, back away from the blog, turn off your computer and go find it—right now! It's available for instant streaming from Netflix, if you're set up for that, and you can always buy it here from amazon.com if you're not.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
The film features some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon, especially the mirror scene, but also Chico's trial for treason, a running battle with the owner of a lemonade stand, and the wild finale where the besieged Brothers are rescued by, among other things, a school of dolphins. Many factors are responsible for Duck Soup's greatness: Leo McCarey's face-paced direction; the expert supporting work of Margaret Dumont, Edgar Kennedy and Louis Calhern; and a top-notch screenplay that despite contributions from many sources—not just credited writers Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, but also Grover Jones, Norman Krasna, Herman Mankiewicz, Leo McCarey and the Marx Brothers themselves—was the most cohesive and inventive of the Paramount era.
Above all, though, Duck Soup works thanks to the performances of Groucho, Chico and Harpo themselves. Groucho, of course, was already without peer in terms of comic timing, and his delivery could take jokes that on the printed page were pretty flat—asking Margaret Dumont to take a card, for example ("Keep it. I've got fifty-one left")—and turn them into brilliantly absurdist gems. But in Duck Soup, he also looks physically comfortable for the first time, no longer worried about hitting his mark (always a problem for him), inhabiting his character and commanding the screen like a seasoned movie actor instead of a transplanted theater performer.
In part, Chico's expanded role was an unexpected dividend of the Brothers' otherwise unsuccessful radio venture. Without Harpo and the piano to fall back on, the show's writers (Perrin and Sheekman) were forced to devise new ways to feature Chico and to beef up his role to equal Groucho's and many of these new sketches, including the "Shadow-day" business in Calhern's office and the trial scene late in the movie, wound up in the movie to Chico's benefit.
In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. In part, the movie was done in by Paramount's financial difficulties which left little money in the budget for promotion, but the Marx Brothers were also victims of bad timing—as Tim Dirks at The Greatest Films put it, "audiences were taken aback by such preposterous political disrespect, buffoonery and cynicism at a time of political and economic crisis, with Roosevelt's struggle against Depression in the US amidst the rising power of Hitler in Germany."
In addition, shortly after production began, the studio fired producer Herman J. Mankiewicz. Although he and Mankiewicz remained friends for life, Groucho was blunt in describing Mank's efforts as a producer, calling him "an irritating drunk who didn't give a hang about the movie project." (Apparently a typical day at the office would consist of napping, drinking and talking to his wife on the phone, and Mankiewicz only kept his job because Paramount executive B.P. Schulberg owed him large sums of money from their frequent poker games. When Paramount reorganized in 1933, Schulberg lost his job and Mankiewicz soon found himself on the curb.)
Trivia: When watching Hollywood films made between 1933 and 1935, you're likely to see the "NRA" logo before the opening credits. No, that's not an endorsement of the National Rifle Association, but instead refers to the National Recovery Administration. Part of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" effort to lift the country from the depths of the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act allowed the NRA to negotiate with various industries on behalf of the federal government to establish codes of "fair competition," including a minimum wage for workers and collectively-agreed-upon prices for goods and services.
