- Groucho Marx in Cocoanuts (1929)
Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
In my early teens, when I was already an avid and devout cinephile, I was quite comfortably a fan of the films of Woody Allen, from the early days of zany schtick to the more adult tragicomedies of later years. A kind of biologically programmed contrarian even then, I would have likely told you that though perfectly agreeable fare for the most part, both Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) were overrated, whereas Radio Days (1987) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) were profoundly undervalued. It never dawned on me that Woody Allen might be a creep or a sex pest, and the jury’s still out on that as far as I’m concerned. To me it always appeared that he had the whole field of adult experience more or less corned and that, if anything, he wrote women even better than he wrote men. He started out in standup comedy and as a very young jokester, more than a little wet behind the ears, he worked as a writer on Sid Caesar’s pioneering sketch comedy program Your Show of Shows (1950-1954), so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that Allen’s mature films are characterized above all by standalone gags and/or individual bits of business. As an often maudlin and even suicidal preteen, one short sequence from 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters made a huge and lasting impression on me (it’s one I imagine many stalwart fans of this shady and-at-least-a-little-problematic filmmaker esteem to the degree I once did and I suppose still do). Fresh off a failed suicide attempt, the gun having slipped off his sweaty forehead and the bullet having missed, Allen’s character wanders the New York City streets in a daze until he comes upon a movie theatre playing the classic 1933 Marx Brothers spoof Duck Soup, the brothers’ outrageous charade of geopolitics and martial fanaticism. Watching the Marx Brothers restores the faith of the Allen character, however fundamentally epistemologically atheistic he may be, as it reminds him that the chaos in God’s world is above all an expression of antic divinity. One may not be able to choose one’s first reaction to chaos, meanness, and randomness in the lived moment, but we do choose how we subsequently react to our initial reaction and to the greater presiding situation. Our freedom and control lie in consciously selecting how we look at what the world is doing right in front of us (in stereo). In Duck Soup itself, even total conflagration and the end of us all are an open question and invitation to militarized merriment without much need of rhyme or reason, no concessions made to folks without a sense of humour. A sense of humour will pull you through and if you haven’t figured that out then you can’t possible be terribly content with yourself, the world, or the God-sized missing puzzle piece you yell upward at with raised fist.
We had the opportunity to screen Duck Soup during my six year tenure as a Board Director and the Programming Chair for Calgary Cinematheque. A friend who attended and sat next to me—a Marx Brothers newbie—turned to me less than a third of the way into the film and with big, wide, astonished eyes said: “this is sooooooo silly.” Well, my friend was right. Yes, the laughs keep raining down like antiaircraft fire, and that’s why these brothers were paid the big bucks, first on the stage and then in the cinemas of the world, but our deeper reaction is awe at the absurdist inventiveness and the full-tilt boogie. The despots and war-drunk generals are not characterized as mendacious, calculating, corrupt, or evil in some overdetermined ideological sense, rather they are inept and buffoonish, Mussolini perhaps in mind and Donald J. Trump avant la lettre.
Always the straight man to his deliriously promenading clan, fourth brother Zeppo will appear for the final time in Duck Soup. Straight men and comedic foils can be brought in by the truckload from Central Casting. The three remaining brothers could be said to embody one each of pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories of lived modality—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—as tackled by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his two priceless Cinema books: Harpo is firstness on account of being both mute and maximally expressive, pure affection-image, pure mooning faciality and raw bodily affect; Chico is secondness because he is the action-image, the pugilist who can’t stop talking back, dumb naked fact laid bare, obfuscation plus confusion, resistance, struggle, impassioned reactivity…and hadsy with the ladies besides; Groucho is thirdness because he is the ultimate covert master of language and tongues, entering undefeated into combat with his broadsword all the while appearing to casually/benignly inspect the cleanliness of his fingernails, he is the Master of Ceremonies and as such the mediator of relations. While this may seem to place phallic mastery almost entirely in the, ahem, hands of Groucho, the best reoccurring gag that runs through the corpus of Marx Brothers films is the very real unfeigned virtuosity Harpo and Chico demonstrate on a wide variety of musical instruments (Harpo of course being associated foremost with the harp). Harpo is an overgrown baby and Chico a bullish preadolescent, but when unleashed on musical instruments the two of them play like the greatest concert hall specialists in all the land while pouring all the while the entirely of their individual personae and acumen with respect to subtle visual gags into each nondivisible increment of screen performance time. Is anything quite so sublime anywhere in screen comedy comparative to when Chico turns his index finger into a pistol and hits the exact right piano key at the exact right moment?
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