NFR Project: 'Duck Soup' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Duck Soup’

Dir: Leo McCarey

Scr: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin

Pho: Henry Sharp

Ed: LeRoy Stone

Premiere: Nov. 17, 1933

68 min.

If you think the Marx Brothers are the funniest comedians on film, you are right. If you think this was the funniest film they made, you are right. Therefore, this is the funniest film ever made.

The Marx Brothers had the funniest act in vaudeville, an anarchic explosion of comic energy that was so potent, W.C. Fields would not follow them on stage. Groucho (Julius) was quick with quips, and donned a greasepaint moustache and eyebrows, specializing in playing shysters and conmen. Chico (Leonard) played a comic Italian caricature, and Harpo (Adolph) worked silently, in a bushy wig, with only a horn and a harp to communicate with. (Zeppo stuck around through the five Paramount pictures they made, but he was a straight man.)

Together they rose in the business, disrespecting their material and constantly straying away from it, improvising and addressing the audience. Fortunately, when they did it, undisciplined as they were, they killed. Their aggressively transgressive approach meant that everything normally taken for granted was questioned, mocked, turned inside out. They took reality and made beautiful nonsense out of it.

Their initial movies were adaptations of stage shows (which allowed to perfect their material in front of a live audience), and included musical interludes, a nominal couple of ingenue and juvenile, and a semblance of a plot. Duck Soup was different, made from the whole cloth by a set of gifted comedy writers. It casts aspersions on patriotism, government, the justice system, society, marriage, and common sense.

Groucho is Rufus T. Firefly, who for some reason is chosen to be the head of Freedonia by the obtuse Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont, a potent comic foil). Before long, he’s in a running battle with the ambassador from neighboring Sylvania (Louis Calhern, in an excellent supporting role), leading both countries to the brink of war. Meanwhile, Chicolini (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo), spies for Sylvania, attempt to steal Freedonia’s defense plans. (Their musical interludes are excised here.)

This all culminates in Chicolini’s trial for treason, which soon goes off the rails. (“Look at Chicolini, an abject figure.” “I abject.”) during the middle of the proceedings, Sylvania declares war. Everyone springs into a minstrel-show production number, shouting in jubilation that Freedonia is going to war.

At this point, the movie rips free of reality and flies off into the stratosphere. Groucho commands his army, changing uniform in every take. Harpo puts on a sandwich board and goes out to recruit volunteers. Enemies are pelted with fruit. Even Mrs. Teasdale gets showered with foodstuffs. And the film just ends.

The Marx Brothers were blessed to have Leo McCarey as director. McCarey had honed his comedy skills making Laurel and Hardy shorts, and he knew how to stage a gag and get every laugh possible out of it. Harpo’s battles with Edgar Kennedy, the famous mirror scene, Groucho’s opening number, all use the same crisp, precise timing McCarey was renowned for. McCarey also knew how absurd he could get without losing the audience. All these traits magnified the Brothers’ natural humorousness and raise the film to the status of a surreal masterpiece.

After this film, the Marx Brothers would move to MGM, where producer Irving Thalberg thought their movies would sell better if they had musical numbers to punctuate them, and tasking the Brothers with helping a young couple achieve a happy ending. This set of changes to their anarchic style made them safer, more palatable, although many sequences from these later films can also be termed classic.

In Duck Soup, for the last time the comedians would work at full power, making fun of anything that came their way.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Emperor Jones.

NFR Project: 'Baby Face' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Baby Face’

Dir: Alfred E. Green

Scr: Gene Markey, Kathryn Scola, Daryl Zanuck

Pho: James Van Trees

Ed: Howard Bretherton

Premiere: July 1, 1933

76 min.

Here’s another pre-Code film that got audiences all hot and bothered.

Technically, it was produced under the auspices of the censorious Code, but the Code was not strictly enforced until 1934, so it squeaked in under the wire. In it, a lack of sexual modesty leads to . . . not to doom and damnation, but to great things.

The movie stars a young Barbara Stanwyck as the ravishing and streetwise Lily. She’s a kid working in her father’s speakeasy in Erie, Pennsylvania. She’s routinely manhandled by the miners and factory workers that frequent the joint, and we soon find out that her dad’s been pimping her out since she was 14.

When her dad dies in an accident, despairing as to how to advance, she is counseled by an older man to follow the doctrine of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” She can’t get through his books, but she gets the message, and soon begins sleeping her way to the top.

She leaves for New York, stowing away on a freight train with her African American friend Chico. When they’re busted by a railroad guard, Lily trades a roll in the hay for the free trip to the big city. Her body is negotiable tender. In the big city, she sleeps her way into an entry-level position at a big corporation. Then she sleeps with a young executive, played by John Wayne who recommends her to his boss. Whom she sleeps with.

As she rises in the company, so the camera rises up the side of an enormous skyscraper to show her new location in the hierarchy. (Up and up the phallic symbol she goes, finally coming out on top.) Another executive and his father-in-law fall for her, leading to a murder/suicide. Seemingly above the scandal, she then hooks up with the playboy bank president. She marries him.

Is their no comeuppance for this sinful young woman. No, not really. The bank folds due to mismanagement, and her husband is blamed. He asks her for financial help (she’s saved up half a million dollars in cash and jewelry), but she refuses. He shoots himself.

Badly wounded, he is transported to the hospital, and she goes with him, because she loves him, by golly. Her money and gems scatter across the ambulance floor, and she states that none of it matters. Curtain.

So there is redemption of a sort, but it’s half-hearted. Her acquisition of money and power are much more interesting than her sudden change of heart. This subversive film is basically a blueprint for getting to Easy Street by being easy.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Duck Soup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NFR Project: Backstage drama in '42nd Street' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘42^nd Street’

Dir: Lloyd Bacon

Scr: Rian James, James Seymour, Whitney Bolton

Pho: Sol Polito

Ed: Thomas Pratt, Frank Ware

Premiere: March 11, 1933

89 min.

 

 “I don’t want to go to Philadelphia!”

“Who does?”

 

This is the grandaddy of movie musicals, so full of cliches you don’t realize that this was the film that invented them. (It's been spoofed on stage in Dames at Sea, and in film in Stanley Donen's Movie Movie.)

Nobody loves a show-biz story more than Hollywood, and this adaptation of a 1932 novel by Bradford Ropes gives us a backstage look at the trials and triumphs of those plucky hoofers and singers who come out of nowhere to make it big on Broadway.

We are given several characters to root for. The show’s director, Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) is dangerously ill, and broke. He needs one more hit to retire on. Thus the mounting of the production of the new Broadway musical Pretty Lady. He’s a demanding, despairing, chain-smoking maniac, but evidently he’s a genius at this sort of thing, so he is given his own head.

To the show comes the wide-eyed rookie, Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler), who gets a chance thanks to the machinations of a couple of wisecracking chorus girls played by Una Merkel and a very young Ginger Rogers. Soon she is time-stepping and falling in love along with the juvenile lead, played by Dick Powell, then at the beginning of his career.

Then – the day of the opening – the leading lady breaks her ankle! What are they going to do? Simple, says the juvenile lead. Put Peggy Sawyer in the lead role. Do it! The director smokes some more. Then he acquiesces. For hours, March and Peggy train. Finally, it is time for the curtain. The director grabs her and gives her the classic speech:

“Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!”

No pressure. 

And what a triumph Peggy is! Everyone loves her. In fact, after the show, the audience credits her and not Marsh with the show’s success. To which Marsh merely tosses disconsolately his cigarette butt.

The most important innovation took place in the staging of the musical numbers. The songs – lyrics by Al Dubin and music by Harry Warren – are top-notch, and include the title number, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” and “Young and Healthy.” What’s unique is that, as soon as the musical numbers take flight, the camera moves freely through, around, and over the performers – all thanks to the genius of choreographer Busby Berkeley.

Dollies through sets of legs. Overhead shots of flashing limbs, shifting and curling into geometric patterns. The stage space evaporates, and we move fully into a filmic space, where only things that can be done with a camera can happen. Inventive cinematography takes over. It must have been like a roller-coaster ride for audiences of the day.

At the end, the show’s a smash, the lovers are united. Who could ask for anything more?

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Baby Face.