I confess that I never cared much for the Marx Brothers. I was always aware that this was a minority opinion. I just didn’t find them funny. As a teenager, I thought they were basically just cut-ups, forcing laughs and trying to take control of every situation — uncomfortably, now that I look back, like my own temperament at the time. I couldn’t let an opportunity go by to make a joke. I thought they were low class, and it didn’t occur to me that that was the point. They were making fun of me! In my freshman year of college, Philip Roth gave a lecture arguing that Kafka’s The Castle — one those great modern classics that every teenage intellectual of the day revered for being enigmatic and metaphysical — should have been filmed with the Marx Brothers in the main roles. Groucho would be the perpetually befuddled K., Chico and Harpo would be his zany and useless assistants. Threw me for a loop. Kafka is supposed to be funny? Later, I read that Beckett was inspired to use the hat-switching routine in Waiting for Godot by the hat-switching routine in Duck Soup. Nowadays, it’s the orthodox view: many of the darkest modernist writers adored Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and the Marx Brothers. They thought chaos, darkness, and fate were laughing matters, and their victims (i.e., us) were clowns. Kafka is said even to have planned to buy a movie house to screen nothing but slapstick comedies.
Still, the penny didn’t drop for me until I taught Duck Soup in a college course on comic cinema. Most of the other films assigned were sophisticated, witty social comedies, the kind that are in a literary scholar’s comfort zone. But I knew better than to take the lead on the Marx Brothers in a class of 20 year olds, so after they had viewed the film I asked those who liked it to sit on one side of the room and those who didn’t, the other side — and each side should prepare to make its taste-case. The critics went first, and I heard a lot of my own thoughts: show-off clowning, immature silliness, arbitrary structure, blah blah blah. Well before they were done, the Marxo sympathizers started hooting and throwing spitballs at them. It wasn’t the politest critique, but they made their point. Even I got it.
I like a lot of anarcho-comedy. Million Dollar Legs, some of whose ideas leaked into Duck Soup (as the former’s Klopstockia becomes the latter’s Freedonia) is a favorite of mine; so is Hellzapopin’. But I still don’t like the Marx Brothers movies very much. Duck Soup is generally treated as the best of them, at least nowadays. The purest. The least influenced by Hollywood conformism. Even though I now know how admired they were by great artists I admire — Lubitsch, René Clair, Dorothy Parker, and countless others — I still see them as kibbitzers. They probably thought so, too. (Not incidentally, more than one of my elementary and middle school teachers kept telling me to stop kibbitzing all the time.)
I’m not entirely alone in all this. Leo McCarey, who directed Duck Soup with great style, is said to have wanted to avoid directing the Brothers at all costs. It would be too hard and fatiguing to control the set or the finished product. The problem was that they definitely wanted to be directed by him. And so it happened. Paramount eventually made McCarey do it. (They also wanted to be directed by Lubitsch, Clair and Mamoulian; I was surprised to learn recently that Lubitsch and Clair would have been more than willing.) Even so, McCarey — famous for his improvisational directing — came up with many of the most revered gags in the movie, including the mirror-scene.
Duck Soup is usually talked about as an anti-war satire. I didn’t see it. Too broad to be satire, too fantastic to have a real-world object. But recently I read an exchange between Groucho and the great restorer of films at the Cinémathèque Francaise, Henri Langlois, that has changed my attitude. (The exchange is quoted in Charlotte Chandler’s Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and his Friends.) Langlois tells Groucho:
I see Duck Soup many times in my life. But in 1940, just after the end of the French war and the invasion, I go to the South of France and I see Duck Soup. Fantastic! It was exactly like a documentary of the time I was a soldier in France. It was absolutely mad. So, if you want to know what happened in France between May to June 1940, you must see Duck Soup. It’s the only film to explain what happened in France at this time.
Groucho then mentions the Maginot Line, the great defensive fortress wall built to block a German invasion. Groucho observes: “Instead of attacking it, they went around it.” Langlois rejoins: “It’s just like Duck Soup exactly.”