Roy Blount, Jr. Talks (about the book he plans to write for HarperStudio about the Marx Brothers’ masterpiece, “Duck Soup”)
Seventy-five years ago a slim, agile, quick-witted, self-assured young man, identifying with but transcending his ethnic minority, was summoned to save a nation from financial ruin. As the nation’s new president he brought together a team of rivals, a band of brothers. And those brothers’ names: Pinky, Chicolini, and Lt. Bob Roland. And that leader’s name: Rufus T. Firefly.
It was a movie, and what a movie: Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers at their most intense, in their finest hour. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen’s character, Mickey Sachs, is considering suicide when he happens to see a bit of Duck Soup and has an epiphany: How can anyone even think of killing himself when this world affords such high-low comedy as the Brothers’ spectacular musical number, “The Country’s Going to War,” in which the call to arms involves, among many other rousing elements, takeoffs on gospel (“All God’s Chillun Got Guns”) and the Virginia reel. I feel confident in asserting that there is nothing anywhere else in the history of American culture quite like Harpo’s contribution to the do-si-do.
Duck Soup came out in the midst of the Great Depression, which to be sure would not end until the U.S. went to war, but who knew, then? The general public did not find Rufus inspiring enough to make the movie a box-office success, but critics, without any exception I am aware of, have pronounced it the Marx Brothers’ finest.
You can’t write a whole book about how funny a movie is. But this is a movie that can be opened out in lots of directions. The parallels to current politics are obvious. And then there are links to be made involving Woody Allen and mirrors (the Duck Soup scene in which Harpo pretends to be Groucho’s reflection is famous, but there’s a little-noted Allen mirror scene whose autobiographical resonance is startling), George W. Bush and projectiles, Margaret Dumont and moms, Groucho and Karl, Jews and Irishmen.
One reason for Duck Soup’s excellence was the flamboyant but underappreciated director, Leo McCarey, who left us a wide variety of iconic-to-semi-iconic movies (the first thing he did in the business was bring Laurel and Hardy together) without ever becoming an icon himself. This is one of the least sentimental movies ever made, and McCarey directed some of the most sentimental moments in movies, some incomparably moving, others embarassingly mushy.
