Duck Soup

I have been feeling especially busy lately, little time, it seems, to get into a good writing mode. Yet, of all things, I have off and on been picking up Roy Blount, Jr's little book about the Marx Brothers classic movie Duck Soup. I like his approach, almost a kind of DVD commentary, but much, much more discursive. He basically watches the movie and reports on what he sees and thinks about. He thus shares with us his favorite parts of the film and as he does so reflects on the people and the incidents that the flashes on the screen make him think of.

I have always loved Duck Soup, apparently for the same reason that Blount does. Because it is so utterly anarchic. It is one of the freest, most improvised, most outrageously absurd movies ever made, with little logic or plot, but a lot of energy, ridiculousness, and charm. It is now famously the movie that Woody Allen's character in Hannah and his Sisters wanders into when all he can think of is suicide and it cures him of the blues once and for all, sending him straight into the arms of one of the sisters. How silly! How perfect!

But wait! Is Duck Soup quite as absurd and as outlandish as it first appears? This is a movie made in 1933 about two countries relentlessly and foolishly going to war over an insult or maybe two. A slap here, a slap there. And abruptly the insistence that "this means war." That's the basic story. Is that so different from our own time or the period around 1933 as Hitler and Mussolini rise to power or, perhaps most pointedly, the events that push the great European powers into endless and destructive conflict between 1914 and 1918? Hardly. In fact, the clever people who wrote Duck Soup had all of these conflicts in mind as they constructed the script. They wanted to write a hilarious movie, but they also wanted to underscore all the absurd events that seem to force countries to go to war with each other. They were doing nothing less than writing an anti-war movie. They were doing nothing less than expressing their own dismay with how foolish people can be and reminding us perhaps that it doesn't have to be this way.

Of course, the Marxes are forces of nature. They are hard to tie down, to quiet down, to put down. Because they always have another comeback, another way to make somebody else look silly. There is a scene with the wonderful actor Louis Calhern as the president of the rival country, Sylvania, that wants to make war on the country Groucho is now head of, Freedonia. And in this scene Chico and Harpo have supposedly come in to help him, but all they do is annoy him, delay him, and impede him. They cut his necktie and the tails on his coat. They pull out a revolver and shoot at a recording that one of them has just thrown into the air as if rigging a skeet shooting event. They stamp his papers and his forehead, they staple his official documents and his fingers, they bruise him and abuse him until he is literally delirious. It is silly and even cruel, but it is also completely unhinged. To see something that far out, that removed from reality on a movie screen of any kind, even if it is a computer screen, is to see a form of disorganized genius that we have largely lost. We have become a little too mature and, well, sophisticated for the Marx Brothers.

Finally, there is that most modern of characters, Groucho, the man who for some still resonates, because he always has another wisecrack, another retort meant to keep the other person from gaining an advantage. And in the case of Groucho this is all done verbally, with nary a hint of violence. Groucho's character doesn't want war. What he wants instead is a license to insult, to make the other guy look ridiculous. And if he can't take it, then he would just as soon go to the neighboring town in the next county and insult him. 

Using language to impress, to cajole, to seduce, to diminish, to prevail over someone else, that is Groucho's idea of a good time. And it should remain exactly that, a good time. No one's ego should be so fragile as to need to retaliate with violence. That is Groucho's point and in a very real sense the point of this whole brilliantly harebrained movie.