DUCK SOUP (1933) and von Sternberg

The Marx Brothers made 5 great films before the decline:

The Cocoanuts (1929)

Animal Crackers (1930)

Monkey Business (1931)

Horse Feathers (1932)

Duck Soup (1933)

-all the above with Paramount

Night at the Opera (1935)

-the above with MGM. This is both the high point and the beginning of the end.

Films to follow include Go West, A Day at the Races, The Big Store, Room Service, A Night in Casablanca, and Love Happy.

The Marx Brothers (Gummo, Zeppo, Harpo, Groucho, and Chico), like many early comedians such as Keaton and Chaplin, began their work in vaudeville. Their first films were stage productions first with those elaborate musical numbers.

Coming at the very beginning of sound, they combine physical humour with verbal humour, and we can see some division of labour here:

Harpo’s humour is entirely physical – for obvious reasons (and yes, he could speak)

Groucho’s humour is irreverent, salacious (as is Harpo’s), and absurdist

Chico’s humour is based on ethnicity and linguistic games (puns and deliberate malapropisms)

Zeppo’s humour is difficult to locate (although he was supposed to be funny in real life).

Kinds of humour: we have so far listed physical or slapstick humour, and verbal humour based on play with language.

Satire and parody also form the basis of the Marx’s humour.

Absurdity through the literal

A sort of Punch and Judy with live actors (see Monkey Business)

The attack on class

1. Absurdity:

Take one example: the scene in which Pinky (Harpo) shows Firefly (Groucho) his tattoos. Firefly asks Pinky where he lives, and Pinky opens his shirt to show the tattoo of a doghouse on his chest. The camera moves in close to Pinky’s chest and suddenly the head of a dog emerges from the doghouse, and it barks. This kind of nonsense informs some of the humour we will see developed in later comedy by the likes of the Goons and the Monty Python group. It relies on the impossible, the improbably, and the nonsensical, such as Scotsmen in kilts turning into blancmanges. You might find other examples in Duck Soup. One example might be Mrs. Teasdale mistaking the disguised Chicolini for Firefly. The mirror scene is another example.

2. Verbal humour:

The fun with language that both Chico and Groucho have – “I can give you a Rufus over your head,” or Chico’s transforming of the words “taxes” and “dollars” into Texas and Dallas – turns up in the verbal play of Woody Allen (an obvious example occurs in Everyone Says I Love You (1996) at the end when all the characters are dressed up as the Marx Brothers).

3. Sexual humour:

We can’t avoid noting the sexual humour in the Marx Brothers’ films. In Duck Soup we have the obvious “wooing” that takes place between Firefly and Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont). We also have the lady spy who uses her physical charms to get what she wants (or she tries anyway – she is not too successful here, but we know the kind of character she is). We have Harpo eyeing any girl he meets such as the secretary to the leader of Sylvania. We also have that scene in which he plays a randy Paul Revere and ends up in bed with a girl and a horse. And we have the more cerebral (can I say this?) sexual comedy in the many phallic jokes in the film, the most obvious ones coming when Harpo uses his scissors to castrate various other characters. The question is: does this sexual humour make a serious point (so to speak)? Or is it just throwaway humour?

4. Satire:

Most obviously this film is a satire on war, its absurdity and stupidity. The reason war between Freedonia and Sylvania begins has to do with what?

An insult?

Sex?

Economics?

Desire for Power?

Territorial Claims?

Ideology (e.g. ethnicity or religion)?

Whatever you choose from the list above, the war is, as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, over an eggshell. In other words, it is meaningless.

Aspects of war that come under satiric fire: everything from war rhetoric to rouse the population to support the war, to uniforms, to masculinity and male posturing, to death and enslavement.

-note the various costumes Groucho wears in the battle scene at the end: these outfits bring in reference to a range of wars. They also allude to the Boy Scouts!

The most obvious war that comes under scrutiny is the First World War with its trench warfare (Groucho tries to buy trenches that are so high there will be no need to fight). But the message touches on war generally, and we might reflect on what was happening in Germany in 1933.

Other targets of satire: governments and the source of government authority; the judicial system; military ritual and ritual generally; high society; sex based on money, lust, and position; pomposity; art (this is, I think, the only film in which neither Chico nor Harpo play their respective instruments).

5. Parody:

The film parodies a number of things, most obviously the musical productions of the emerging Hollywood musicals such as The Love Parade (1929), which is set in a pseudo-Balkan state called Sylvania. The musical production number that precedes the war in Duck Soup covers most of American popular music from Yankee Doodle to “All God’s Chillen.” The various set pieces allude to big budget films, to the music halls, to clichés of war, to minstrel shows, and gospel singing.

What else is parodied? The spy film (cf. Mata Hari 1932), the society film (more of these would follow in the 30s), the silent cinema (especially in the mirror sequence), the bedroom farce (that precedes the mirror sequence); the conventional linear film (perhaps more so in earlier Marx Brothers films, but we can see an anarchic spirit here too).

We can add film itself. In one scene, Groucho speaks directly to the camera, breaking any sense of a self-contained world in the cinema.

Comedy: like earlier silent comedy, Duck Soup breaks the conventions of both high and low mimetic comedy. Traditionally, comedy is about social dissolution, the breakdown of community (see just about every situations comedy on TV for examples of this). The story begins with social cohesion, then something happens to break this cohesion, but finally things come round to a celebratory ritual of renewed communion (often a marriage). Comedy ends happily. Duck Soup ends with warfare and the pitching of vegetables at a lady.

Context: this is an early 30s film, and therefore a product of the Great Depression that followed from the Stock Market crash in 1929. How is this background reflected in the film?

How do we “read” the four brothers? Do they represent anything? Why are they the way they are?

More from Paramount:

The films of Josef von Sternberg (at least the ones with Marlene Dietrich)

Morocco (1930)

The Blue Angel (1930)

Blonde Venus (1932)

Dishonored (1931)

Shanghai Express (1932)

Scarlet Empress (1934)

The Devil is a Woman (1935)

Paramount is the artsy studio with a European flavour from directors von Sternberg and Lubitsch. The studio also boasted Cecille B. DeMille. The von Sternberg films are noteworthy for their rather melodramatic plots, usually about a fallen woman with the proverbial heart of gold, hackneyed scripts, and stilted acting. These films are noteworthy for these things precisely because under von Sternberg’s direction, they overcome such liabilities by their acute sense of form – especially in lighting, mise en scene, costumes (mostly from Travis Banton), and framing. In form, these films represent something of a decadent flavour, a sense of a world rich and crowded and filled with passion. The passion is reflected in the camera work itself, its set-ups and the lighting used to set off human faces and forms. The Blue Angel is perhaps not the best example of the fullness of von Sternberg’s filmic vision, but it is the first collaboration between him and Dietrich. In the street leading to the music hall, and in the music hall interiors, especially the stage and seating area, we can see the influence of Caligari and German Expressionism. In this film what is expressed is human passion and the network of filaments that this passion produces. The story is simple enough: a stuffy and obsessively orderly teacher, Professor Rath (rath = rat; unrath = garbage) discovers that some of his students are fascinated with a local music hall performer, Lola Lola. He goes to the music hall intending to catch his students and bring them out from their life of degeneration. Instead, he becomes fascinated by the same Lola Lola. She too becomes curious about the Professor, seeing him as someone who can bring paternal protection to her. The Professor’s fate is clear. He descends as Lola ascends. He becomes broken, fragmented, split, as the images of the mirror shows us more than once in the film. He becomes the clown, the cuckold, the rooster who is unable to perform as cock of the walk. Meanwhile Dietrich becomes more sexually assured than she ever was, prepared to indulge what she is – a woman of passion who lives for love. Her song, “Falling in Love Again,” tells us all we need to know. She lives only for sensual pleasures.

The film thrives on moving into the interior. It lives in rooms, smoke filled spaces. The spiral staircase leading to Lola’s bedroom is as good a filmic sign as we can look for, in a film filled with signs. First the stair leads up and down, the two directions the main characters take. Second, it leads round and round to remind us of just how stationary things really are. Life revolves around the passions. The stairway serves a deeply psychoanalytic function, reminding us of the mind and its various aspects, conscious and unconscious connected by a stairway. In other words, this film concentrates on the inner workings of the mind, rather than on the mind as that which allows us to function socially. Obviously we have areas of social life in the film through the school, its bureaucracy, and the implicit connection of music hall managers with governors and chairmen and such. But Professor Rath moves away from the social and into the personal realm of desire. Lola Lola has no life beyond the personal realm of desire.

Lola Lola is the quintessential femme fatale using her body and her siren’s song to lure men. She is la belle dame sans merci. She represents male fantasy at its most attractive and repulsive. She is desire itself. Her clothing, her cigarettes, her posture, her facial movements and looks of the eye are redolent of a threatening and dangerous sexuality. Something queer resonates in this sexuality, and it is this that makes here so dangerously alluring. And yet she is also, at least at the beginning, somewhat passive and even vulnerable. She is the child in need of protection. Later she becomes the dominatrix who demands performance from her man. And finally, she is the fickle woman who gives her love indiscriminately.