Leo McCarey (1933)
A few days after watching Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank, I saw for the first time Duck Soup, which genuinely is weird and wonderful. The Marx Brothers’ last film for Paramount is anarchic in all respects, including – even though Leo McCarey was at the helm – moments of arrhythmic mess. The script by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby includes some great lines, among many others: that they come so thick and fast is part of what makes the verbal comedy almost continuously funny. The celebrated mirror sequence apart, the physical humour isn’t so good: the slapstick centred on Harpo gets a bit tedious and the Chico bits are mostly no more than workmanlike. Even so, I was smiling from the opening shots – of ducks swimming and quacking in a kettle but looking happy enough – onwards. (The film’s title, shared with a Laurel and Hardy silent short of 1927, was contemporary American slang for a pushover.) Groucho is Rufus T Firefly, who becomes President of the small republic of Freedonia for no better (or worse) reason than that Mrs Teasdale, the rich widow who keeps the bankrupt country afloat, carries a torch for him. I liked Zeppo Marx (in his final screen appearance) as Firefly’s secretary. Otherwise, Groucho is comically less well served by his siblings than by his stooges – Louis Calhern, as the exasperated ambassador of neighbouring Sylvania and, especially, Margaret Dumont as Mrs Teasdale. It’s not hard to believe that, as Groucho claimed after her death, Dumont didn’t get most of the jokes – but not hard to believe either that she was simply a superb comedy actress. In retrospect, the political satire and warmongering of Duck Soup were alarmingly prescient. The fact that it wasn’t intended to be politically important and excoriating (in the manner of, for example, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator) only adds to its uniqueness and chaotic power. The Ruritanian settings and costumes and the very American characters and culture existing within them give the film an easy and sustained surreality. The musical numbers, also written by Kalmar and Ruby, are remarkable for their grandiose naffness – until the climactic and involvedly bizarre ‘This Country’s Going to War’, which combines jingoism with a minstrel show. The ending of Duck Soup comes suddenly and almost arbitrarily, as if some unseen parent had suddenly called the kids in for the evening.
Postscript: Duck Soup was shown at BFI as part of the ‘Passport to Cinema’ season and introduced by Philip Kemp. On a similar occasion a few years ago, Kemp was heckled for giving away the plot of Diary of a Country Priest – and thrown by this unexpected audience participation. This time he did something more inexcusable by telling us what he thought were some of the best lines in the film (and delivering them lamely). It was a poor introduction altogether: a miscellany of trivia about what else some of those in the film had done or went on to do isn’t an insight into Duck Soup. ‘I hope you enjoy the movie’, Kemp concluded. ‘How could you not?’ He was right on this last point but it was no thanks to him.
19 May 2014
