Hail, Hail, Euphoria!: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made by Blount Roy Jr

Author:Blount, Roy, Jr. [Blount, Roy, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-09-28T07:00:00+00:00

Whenever the teacher left the room, the Irish boys, according to Harpo, would throw him out the window. One day he just stayed out, for good.

We know that Harpo, as a performer, was McCarey’s favorite Marx brother. Maybe it didn’t occur to McCarey that giving Harpo a large Irishman to push around would be sweet. Maybe McCarey thought having a large Irishman to push around would keep the Marxes from trying to push him around. At any rate, McCarey brought in Edgar Kennedy, whom he’d worked with in the Laurel and Hardy days, to play a lemonade seller.

McCarey and Kennedy were old masters of the slow burn and the tit-for-tat. One of McCarey’s contributions to silent comedy had been to slow down the pace. For one thing, he shot at a speed of fifteen or sixteen frames per second, instead of the previously standard twelve, so that gags weren’t jerky and frenetic. For another thing, he got his actors to pause more, to engage in deliberative slapstick. This would give them time to fume, to steam, to plot and scheme, and for the audience to savor the last bit and to anticipate the next bit of tit-for-tat. In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, McCarey recalled a scene in one of his Laurel and Hardy shorts, From Soup to Nuts: Hardy, carrying a cake, steps through a doorway and

falls and finds himself on the floor, his head buried in the cake. I shouted to him, “Don’t move! Above all, don’t move! Stay like that, the cake should burn your face!” And for a minute and a half, the public couldn’t stop laughing. Hardy remained immobile, his head in the cake! He remained stretched out, furious, and you could only see his back.

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