[To read an eight-part biography of the Marx Brothers, click here. To read about Margaret Dumont, my choice for best supporting actress of 1932-33, click here. And to read about the drafting of Duck Soup's screenplay, click here.]
The award year running from September 1, 1932 through the end of 1933 was an unusually rich one for both comedies and musicals with more than a dozen must-see movies, including a pair from Ernst Lubitsch, three by Busby Berkeley, comedies starring Mae West, Charles Laughton, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, Laurel and Hardy, and even a groundbreaking cartoon short from Walt Disney. But the best work of the year came from the Marx Brothers, who contributed two indispensable classics, Horse Feathers and my choice for the best comedy of the year—or indeed, any year—Duck Soup.
In case you don't know, the Marx Brothers—Julius, Leonard, Adolph and Herbert, better known to the world as Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo—were the premiere comedy team of an era that also boasted such classic acts as Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges. Duck Soup was their fifth film and despite being delayed for nine months by a contract dispute with Paramount, proved to be the best of their career, featuring some of the funniest and most famous scenes in the Marx Brothers canon.
Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: Freedonia's economy is in shambles, with a prohibitive increase in taxes ("I've got an uncle in Taxes—Dollars, Taxes!") in the offing if the rich widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) won't come through with another $20 million. And if that's not enough, Freedonia's bellicose neighbor, Sylvania, is massing troops on the border, threatening not only death and destruction, but also to introduce a plot into the picture's foreground, a development which in previous Marx Brothers movies tended to bring the comedy to a grinding halt.
With a month's rent already paid on the battlefield, war seems inevitable and the country teeters on the brink of anarchy. Desperate for a savior, Freedonia turns to that fearless man of the people, Rufus T. Firefly.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
Playing Firefly is Groucho Marx, he of the lacerating wit, the greasepaint moustache and the most impeccable timing in the history of comedy. While the chief obstacle to achieving peace in our time is ostensibly Sylvania's conniving ambassador Trentino (Louis Calhern), in fact, it's Firefly himself—his temper, his paranoia, his inability to make heads or tails of things a four year old child would understand.
"I'll be only too happy to meet Am- bassador Trentino, and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure that he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered. But suppose he doesn't. A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it! ... Why the cheap, four-flushing swine—so you refuse to shake hands with me!"
And thus just like that, Freedonia finds itself at war.
The humorist Roy Blount, Jr., in his recent book Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, called Duck Soup "the greatest war movie ever made," and while I wouldn't say Harpo carrying a sandwich board reading "Join the Army and See the Navy" around a battlefield is as harrowing as the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, I will agree that it's the best treatment ever of the causes of war. As a student of history, majoring in the subject in college and maintaining a lifelong interest in the to-ings and fro-ings of elected officials, I've concluded that nobody has ever launched a war thinking it was a bad idea, no matter how uninformed, misinformed or half-formed his reasons may have been for thinking so. (Yes, yes, I'm thinking of the War of Jenkins' Ear. Sue me.)
Don't get me wrong. Occasionally the world finds itself in a death match with, say, fascism, and it would be futile, not to mention suicidal, to sit on the sidelines, but more often than not, from the Crusades to Iraq's invasion of Iran and a hundred other major conflicts in between, the thinking leading to war is typically characterized by ego, paranoia, stupidity and shortsightedness, with very little afterwards to show for it but a pile of corpses, and when the smoke clears, everybody scratches their heads and promises to do better—until the next time, that is, when they go off and do it again.
And thus I believe Rufus T. Firefly when he says, "There's no turning back now! This means war!" Or I believe he believes it anyway. But a classic movie, like a well-written history, strips away the comforting lies and the self-delusion and leaves only the truth—in this case, that Rufus T. Firefly might not have been, shall we say, the best choice to lead a country in crisis. (Filmed shortly after the Nazis seized power in Germany, Harpo said later he and his Jewish brothers listened to Hitler's speeches on the radio between scenes and were quite consciously targeting both him and his fascist ally Mussolini with their humor. Indeed, Mussolini banned the film in Italy as a personal attack.)
Egging Firely on are Chicolini and Pinky (Chico and Harpo), who serve not only as Secretary of War and chauffeur, respectively, but also as the most incompetent double agents in history, infiltrating Freedonia's government on behalf of Trentino only to get sidetracked by scissors, doorbells and a cantankerous lemonade vendor.
"Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said follow him? Well, we get on the job right away and in one hour—even-a less than one hour—"
"Yes?"
"—we lose-a da picsh. That's-a pretty quick work, heh?"
Providing brilliant support are Margaret Dumont and Edgar Kennedy. Kennedy was a veteran of the Hal Roach Studios, and a master of what is known as slow-burn comedy, with laughs derived from a gradually increasing show of anger. Dumont, simply put, was the most talented straight-(wo)man in the history of movie comedies.
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.
McCarey also beefed up the supporting cast, calling in veteran actors Calhern and Kennedy for key parts, writing two classic sequences involving Harpo, Chico and a lemonade stand for the latter (it was Groucho himself who talked Margaret Dumont into playing Mrs. Teasdale). As a result, the Brothers finally found themselves working with a cast of expert straightmen whose set-up lines and reaction shots heightened the payoffs of the Brothers' already brilliant jokes.
In addition, McCarey's experience as a director of top comedy acts (Laurel and Hardy especially) shows in his ability to tether otherwise unrelated gags and one-liners to the framework of the story. On paper, Duck Soup is no more cohesive than Monkey Business or Horse Feathers, but McCarey is forever stitching scenes together with repeated dialogue, visual cues and recurring gags. $20 million is mentioned several times and many scenes are introduced with the Freedonian national anthem. Three times you see Groucho in bed, three times you see Chico or Harpo at the peanut stand. Several scenes involve eating—peanuts, donuts, crackers, apples. We see Groucho at his desk more than once—first in the newspaper photo that introduces him, then for a cabinet meeting, then yet again for a conversation with Zeppo and a sequence involving Harpo and the telephone. For that matter, we see Harpo on the telephone in two scenes, and Chico once as well. And, of course, there are recurring gags involving Harpo and scissors, a blow torch, a motorcycle, an alarm clock and Edgar Kennedy's hat.
These links, though unobtrusive, satisfy the mind's instinctive need for order and create a resonance that keeps the momentum of the picture from jerking to a halt every time the story changes gears.
"Duck Soup," wrote Roy Blount in Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, "is a seamless blend of just about every form of American comedy up to its time," and I attribute this versatility to Leo McCarey. As a source of inspiration for many of Duck Soup's gags, McCarey dipped into the bag of silent comedy tricks he had learned at the legendary Hal Roach Studios and came up with several scenes crucial to the film's success, including the three-hat gag, the break-in scene from Laurel and Hardy's Night Owls and most unforgettably, the mirror scene, which the Schwartz Brothers originated for the stage, and which showed up again in Charlie Chaplin's The Floorwalker and Max Linder's Seven Years' Bad Luck, but which was never essayed more brilliantly than by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
Most importantly, McCarey provided visuals that for the first—perhaps, only—time in the Marx Brothers' career matched their subversive, surreal wit. I'm thinking particularly of the battle scenes at the tail end of the movie, when Groucho changes uniforms with every shot and the army of elephants, monkeys, dolphins, swimmers, fire engines, etc. that responds to his call for help. But there's also the scene where a dog emerges barking from Harpo's chest, and another scene where Harpo climbs out of Edgar Kennedy's bath in full-dress uniform. (That McCarey used these tricks to turn what in previous movies would have been a plot-heavy resolution into an surrealist's dream is just another reason why he was the best director the Marx Brothers ever worked with. In fact, I'm willing to bet all the surrealists' efforts combined had less impact on attitudes about war and authority than this one Marx Brothers movie. But I digress. Again.)
But of course ultimately Duck Soup is about the Marx Brothers and simultaneously reigned in and unleashed by an expert director of comedy, they were never better. Groucho was never more comfortable in front of the camera. Harpo, the act's unrestrained id, is not as wild as he was in such movies as Animal Crackers, but his bits are better integrated into the flow of the film than ever before. And Chico has the best role of his career, serving not just as a foil for Groucho's wit and Harpo's destructive impulses, but as a showcase talent in his own right. (If you want to read more about the Marx Brothers themselves, click here, but I'm warning you in advance, few who venture there ever return to talk about it.)
In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a modest profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. Ironically, we most desperately seek meaning at those moments when the world most forcefully reminds us that life has no meaning, and in 1933, as the world teetered at the edge of the abyss, audiences had no taste for Duck Soup's bitter recipe. Because let's face it, while at first blush Duck Soup is delightfully silly and absurdist, its underlying riff—that our leaders are fools, that our institutions are corrupt, that young men and women die in wars for no reason, and that, above all, people are born to torment each other without hope of ever getting along—is as bleak and jaundiced a world view as Hollywood ever committed to film. That's not a message a paying audience is prepared to receive on an empty stomach, and in 1933, there were plenty of empty stomachs to go around.
Fortunately, the Marx Brothers signed with Irving Thalberg shortly after Duck Soup's premiere and at MGM, the Brothers made two of their most successful movies, A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races. Audiences were in the mood to laugh at the Marx Brothers again. They've been laughing ever since.
[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.]
[To read previous entries in this essay, click 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Contract Disputes, Radio Shows And The Return Of Gummo Nearly simultaneous with the August 1932 release of the Marx Brothers' fourth film, Horse Feathers, Paramount's publicity department announced the Brothers' next project as Oo-La-La, a comedy set in a mythical Eastern European kingdom, with Ernst Lubitsch slated to direct. Mythical kingdoms were right in the wheelhouse of the already-legendary Lubitsch—see, e.g., The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant—and it's intriguing at first blush to imagine the what-might-have-been collaboration between the studio's best comedy director and its best comedy act, but on further reflection it's hard to picture the happy wedding of Lubitsch's cool, precise, sophisticated style with the Marx Brothers' free-wheeling, free-spirited anarchy. In any event, the script for Oo-La-La never got past the talking stage and Lubitsch was eager to move on to his next project, what would turn out to be the best film of career, Trouble In Paradise.
Production of the new film, now called Firecrackers, was further delayed by a contractual dispute between the Brothers and Paramount Pictures. Under the terms of their contract with the studio, the Brothers were entitled to a percentage of the profits from their pictures, but not only had they never seen a dime of that money, by 1932 they were worried that the financially-shaky studio—its principal owner, Adolph Zukor, had borrowed heavily against over-valued company stock during the Roaring Twenties only to find the debt unsustainable during the Depression—would never be able to pay.
Zukor eventually led the studio out of bankruptcy in 1936, but in the meantime, the Brothers formed their own production company, The Marx Bros., Inc., with brother Gummo as one of the executives, and began casting about for the company's first project. They very nearly worked out a deal to star in a film version of George Kaufman's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing, but wound up signing with the National Broadcasting Company to produce a thirty minute radio program. Because Harpo's talents wouldn't translate to radio (and because Zeppo evidently didn't have any), the resulting show, about a comically-shady law firm initially called Beagle, Shyster and Beagle, featured only Groucho and Chico. The Brothers' rate of $6,500 per episode was an astronomical sum for thirty minutes work at a time when Greta Garbo was receiving little more than that for forty hours a week on the set of Grand Hotel. (After a New York lawyer named Beagle threatened a libel suit, the show was renamed Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel.)
During the long delay, a rotating team of writers continued to work over the script. The title changed from Firecrackers to Cracked Ice to Grasshoppers, but the essential storyline remained the same: Groucho would play the leader of a fictional Eastern European state who leads his country into war. (For more on the writing of Duck Soup, click here.) Once Lubitsch left the project, Leo McCarey took over the helm. Unlike the directors of the Brothers' previous films, McCarey was an experienced director of comedy, getting his start as a writer at the Hal Roach studios where he eventually wrote for and directed Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields.
After the death of their father, Sam Marx, on May 10, 1933, and the cancellation of their low-rated radio program a couple of weeks after that, the Brothers settled their dispute with Paramount and returned to Hollywood. The settlement was more a matter of necessity than a real meeting of the minds—Marx Bros., Inc., lacked the operating capital to get its ambitions off the ground.
The resolution to the dispute over profit-sharing was temporary as it turned out—eighteen years would pass before the Brothers received their contractually-promised profits—but in the meantime, the script of their next movie, now titled Duck Soup at McCarey's probable suggestion, was completed on July 11 and the film went into production shortly thereafter.
The nominees for best director of 1932-33, Take Two.
As with the acting nominees, some of the nominees for best director could have gone into either the comedy/musical category or the drama category; I chose one or the other based on a complex and proprietary calculus known as "doing whatever I felt like."
Best Director (Comedy/Musical) Lloyd Bacon (42nd Street and Footlight Parade) (on left, with Jane Russell) George Cukor (Dinner At Eight and Little Women) (here with the cast of Little Women) Victor Fleming (Red Dust and Bombshell) (here with Clara Bow) Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living) Leo McCarey (Duck Soup) Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved From Drowning) Jean Vigo (Zero For Conduct) Best Director (Drama) Frank Capra (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Lady For A Day) Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (King Kong) (with Marguerite Harrison) Carl Theodor Dreyer (Vampyr) Fritz Lang (The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse) Mervyn LeRoy (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Gold Diggers Of 1933) (on right) Rouben Mamoulian (Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina) (center, on set of Queen Christina) James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man) (with Paul Robeson)
George Cukor (Dinner At Eight and Little Women) (here with the cast of Little Women) Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (King Kong) (with Marguerite Harrison) Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living) Leo McCarey (Duck Soup) Jean Renoir (Boudu Saved From Drowning)
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 award year running from September 1, 1932 through the end of 1933 was an unusually rich one for both comedies and musicals with more than a dozen must-see movies, including a pair from Ernst Lubitsch, three by Busby Berkeley, comedies starring Mae West, Charles Laughton, Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, Laurel and Hardy, and even a groundbreaking cartoon short from Walt Disney. But the best work of the year came from the Marx Brothers, who contributed two indispensable classics, Horse Feathers and my choice for the best comedy of the year—or indeed, any year—Duck Soup.
Duck Soup is the story of a nation in crisis: Freedonia's economy is in shambles, with a prohibitive increase in taxes ("I've got an uncle in Taxes—Dollars, Taxes!") in the offing if the rich widow Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) won't come through with another $20 million. And if that's not enough, Freedonia's bellicose neighbor, Sylvania, is massing troops on the border, threatening not only death and destruction, but also to introduce a plot into the picture's foreground, a development which in previous Marx Brothers movies tended to bring the comedy to a grinding halt.
"If you think this country's bad off now," he promises, "just wait 'til I get through with it!"
"I'll be only too happy to meet Am- bassador Trentino, and offer him, on behalf of my country, the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure that he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered. But suppose he doesn't. A fine thing that'll be! I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it! ... Why the cheap, four-flushing swine—so you refuse to shake hands with me!"
And thus I believe Rufus T. Firefly when he says, "There's no turning back now! This means war!" Or I believe he believes it anyway. But a classic movie, like a well-written history, strips away the comforting lies and the self-delusion and leaves only the truth—in this case, that Rufus T. Firefly might not have been, shall we say, the best choice to lead a country in crisis. (Filmed shortly after the Nazis seized power in Germany, Harpo said later he and his Jewish brothers listened to Hitler's speeches on the radio between scenes and were quite consciously targeting both him and his fascist ally Mussolini with their humor. Indeed, Mussolini banned the film in Italy as a personal attack.)
Providing brilliant support are Margaret Dumont and Edgar Kennedy. Kennedy was a veteran of the Hal Roach Studios, and a master of what is known as slow-burn comedy, with laughs derived from a gradually increasing show of anger. Dumont, simply put, was the most talented straight-(wo)man in the history of movie comedies.
McCarey also beefed up the supporting cast, calling in veteran actors Calhern and Kennedy for key parts, writing two classic sequences involving Harpo, Chico and a lemonade stand for the latter (it was Groucho himself who talked Margaret Dumont into playing Mrs. Teasdale). As a result, the Brothers finally found themselves working with a cast of expert straightmen whose set-up lines and reaction shots heightened the payoffs of the Brothers' already brilliant jokes.
Several scenes involve eating—peanuts, donuts, crackers, apples. We see Groucho at his desk more than once—first in the newspaper photo that introduces him, then for a cabinet meeting, then yet again for a conversation with Zeppo and a sequence involving Harpo and the telephone. For that matter, we see Harpo on the telephone in two scenes, and Chico once as well. And, of course, there are recurring gags involving Harpo and scissors, a blow torch, a motorcycle, an alarm clock and Edgar Kennedy's hat.
"Duck Soup," wrote Roy Blount in Hail, Hail, Euphoria!, "is a seamless blend of just about every form of American comedy up to its time," and I attribute this versatility to Leo McCarey. As a source of inspiration for many of Duck Soup's gags, McCarey dipped into the bag of silent comedy tricks he had learned at the legendary Hal Roach Studios and came up with several scenes crucial to the film's success, including the three-hat gag, the break-in scene from Laurel and Hardy's Night Owls and most unforgettably, the mirror scene, which the Schwartz Brothers originated for the stage, and which showed up again in Charlie Chaplin's The Floorwalker and Max Linder's Seven Years' Bad Luck, but which was never essayed more brilliantly than by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup.
In terms of box office, Duck Soup wasn't quite the flop of legend, turning a modest profit, but nevertheless grossing less than any of its predecessors. Ironically, we most desperately seek meaning at those moments when the world most forcefully reminds us that life has no meaning, and in 1933, as the world teetered at the edge of the abyss, audiences had no taste for Duck Soup's bitter recipe. Because let's face it, while at first blush Duck Soup is delightfully silly and absurdist, its underlying riff—that our leaders are fools, that our institutions are corrupt, that young men and women die in wars for no reason, and that, above all, people are born to torment each other without hope of ever getting along—is as bleak and jaundiced a world view as Hollywood ever committed to film. That's not a message a paying audience is prepared to receive on an empty stomach, and in 1933, there were plenty of empty stomachs to go around.
