Duck Soup (1931)
The opening image is four ducks being cooked for dinner; that is four live ducks, preening and quacking in a metal pan, over roaring a fire. Not exactly comforting, but in a certain sense, literal. Like the Marx Brothers themselves this image trades on a literality which is semantic based — words are oft-as-not taken at face value: “A four year old could understand this report. So run out and get a four year old — I can’t make head or tail of it.” But there are also puns: “It’s a gala day” which leads to “A gal a day is enough for me — I don’t think I could handle any more.” The instability of language is also the instability of meaning and communication — and ultimately of life itself: anarchy ensues. This includes sexual anarchy as well. Apparently in their real life the Marx brothers were just as horny as they were on screen. Some anecdotes about their real life survive: “Harpo told [Nathaniel] West and his sister to come into the dressing room, asking — ‘Are you decent?’ — when he didn’t have a stitch on.” “At a bridge game at the Whist Club somebody had said to Zeppo, ‘you haven’t got anything,’ and he said ‘that’s a lie’ and took out his privates and put them on the table.” The unlicensed madness in Duck Soup hasn’t aged well, as when Groucho says: “The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs and that’s why darkies were born,” or when a song in praise of war turns into a negro spiritual. Chico wears ‘brownface’ and his schtick is a parody of a dumb, immigrant Italian. (Groucho says: “He may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot, don’t let him fool you, he is an idiot.) And I can’t say, frankly, that I actually find Groucho funny. His painted moustache and eyebrows are somewhat frightening to me. And most of his jokes are bad — although to his credit he acknowledges that. Harpo is another matter; my heart eternally goes out to him. He is — unlike the other brothers (there was fifth— Gummo — who left vaudeville to become a raincoat salesman -- and the sixth Marx brother died at birth) sweet, good-natured, and innocent. Harpo is a child, and there is no viciousness in him, nor could he ever be violent — it seems, because he simply delights in the world; all actions are to him, beautiful actions. It’s about joy; there is no other purpose. Is that not a kind of godliness? This doesn’t mean that Harpo's sexuality, too, isn’t anarchic. But unlike Groucho -- who crawls all over the massive Margaret Dumont, flattering her for money -- Harpo is polymorphously perverse. His philandering is innocent, and when it is not, that's an accident really. He spies a pretty blonde through a window — and since he happens to be riding a horse — he quite naturally dismounts and races up to her room. She is running a bath, and her husband comes home (“My husband! My husband!”), so, naturally, Harpo hides in the bathroom. The husband — a hairy brute — takes a bath, but whenever he leans against the back of the tub there is a disconcerting fart. Harpo rises from the tub soaking wet, honking his horn — and then disappears. Innocent enough. But then Harpo sees another pretty girl through another window, and this time he takes his horse up to her apartment with him. Cut to a shot of a row of shoes by a bed: her shoes, his shoes, and finally the ‘horse’s shoes’ — (horseshoes). Sure enough, the horse is in bed too. This is -- unequivocally -- bestiality, and as anarchic as it gets. But because it's Harpo, we forgive. After all, there is nothing traditionally male about him, with his dopey smile and blond curls. And in Duck Soup he seems to enjoy cutting up phallic symbols with scissors (sometimes they are drooping and sometimes erect) — cigars, pant pockets, coattails. Why? Because it pleases him. He foils masculine rage by making fun of it — he would never fight -- he just imitates the act of fighting -- as masculinity is just a game to him. His habit of inserting a hanging leg into people’s otherwise unoccupied hands -- is disconcerting to say the least. Coming from anyone else it might seem like sexual harassment (with women) or aggression (with men). The classic mirror sequence in Duck Soup is the heart of this film. Chico and Harpo dress up as Groucho. When he sees Harpo, Chico thinks he’s looking in a mirror. Harpo proceeds to imitate Chico’s actions - with impossible ingenuity — anticipating his every move — like suddenly running by the mirror, or at it. At one point The Two Grouchos change places and Chico steps into the imagined mirror, ending up on the other side; this smells of Alice in Wonderland, as well as the metaphor of art itself, and the tantalising possibility that we might enter another world (do other worlds exist?). The mirror game ends when the real Groucho appears, and then there are three. I don’t imagine the Marx brothers — though considered ‘classic’ in a pretentious way today — would be very popular now, as nothing at all is funny anymore. In our world people are either good or bad, right or wrong, and all is serious; the Marx brothers exist outside this paradigm, so we would find them suspicious. Even Harpo’s innocence, would, I think, be suspect today — after all, he randomly chases after strange women, and breaks into their apartments — never mind the ridiculousness of the bathtub or the horseshoes by the bed. I named Buddies in Bad Times Theatre after a poem by Jacques Prevert (Paroles), because Prevert — a French surrealist poet, had the innocence of Harpo Marx. He was fond of children and birds, and suspicious of authority -- i.e. policemen, government officials, and fathers — all those who tell us what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. He valorised ‘the dunce’ (exemplified by the character he created for Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis) and spoke of ‘Kids who love each other / Kiss each other where they stand / Against the gates of night / Passersby in passing / Point their fingers at them / But kids who love each other / Are dead to all the world.” And indeed we are. That is the ‘power of love’ that these days unfortunately has also been judged; some might not think it’s love if you chase some girl and end up making farting sounds in her bathtub — or when a gentle horse lays its shoes beside your bed. The Marx Brothers’ gift is comedy; they plead with us only to stop this infernal judging. But alas, the end of judgement is more frightening, even, than the beginning of love.
