Duck Soup (1933)

Nora's Nite

Michael Koller via Senses of Cinema:

Duck Soup is indisputably the Marx Brothers' greatest film. It is the last of the five films the Brothers made for Paramount Pictures during their most creative and anarchic period. The first two films, Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) were adaptations of their hit stage comedies and suffer from a theatrical inertia, while the next three, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup, were based on original screenplays. Duck Soup was the only one of these films that fully integrated and balanced all of the Marx Brothers' comic elements.

For the five Paramount films there were four brothers, a fifth, Gummo, left the line-up before they moved into the cinema. These brothers were so different to each other they seemed unrelated. Groucho was the leader, the slick greaser whose chief weapon was his mastery of the English language, yet he was as phoney as his moustache. Chico, with his fake Italian accent, represented the poor European immigrant who had arrived in America in search of a better future. Chico's strength, or weakness if you like, was his catalogue of bad puns.

During his trial as a spy in Duck Soup he is asked, "Isn't it true you tried to sell Freedonia's secret coded plans?" He replies, unembarrassed, "Sure I sold a code and 2 pair of plans." Curly, blonde-haired Harpo was mute, yet his lack of speech was never a hindrance, frequently being placed in a position were speech was mandatory and always coping. For example, in Monkey Business he attempts to get through the American customs by carrying a gramophone and pretending to be Maurice Chevalier. At one point in Duck Soup he answers the phone for Groucho. I wonder if his character really was mute!

Finally there was the much-maligned Zeppo. The ersatz WASP of the team, almost the comic straight-man and yet he was always in on the joke. He is generally regarded as the least talented of the four and yet he was in their best movies. Is this purely a coincidence or did he contribute significantly to their artistic success? Zeppo left the team to become a theatrical agent just after their Paramount contract was terminated.

The Marx Brothers are justifiably seen as the cinematic auteurs of their films partly because, apart from Duck Soup, the direction of their films is competent at best and frequently rudimentary. Nevertheless, Duck Soup is the product of a fortunate collaboration with the masterful comedy director Leo McCarey who understood his performers' comic genius. Duck Soup is definitely one of McCarey's better films even if it is not his best.

Duck Soup's trite B-grade drama operates in parallel and contrast to the Marx Brothers' absurdist comedy. This is beautifully illustrated in Margaret Dumont's first scene with Groucho. Dumont is serious, with a pompous dignity, her reactions to Groucho's misplaced humour are various, including outrage and moral indignation, yet she never acknowledges Groucho's 'wink'. She describes Firefly as "a progressive, fearless fighter" but Groucho never displays any responsibility and to the contrary undermines the notion in his opening song. "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait until I get through with it," he sings. Dumont perfectly demonstrates why she is one of the great 'straight men' of all time. Her performance alone is a joy to watch. And this demonstrates one of McCarey's strengths as a director.

He builds his film around actors, yet there is also an intuitive understanding of the technical power of filmmaking. McCarey allows his comedians to milk their humour without remaining subservient to narrative logic or character consistency. Chicolino (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) are two spies who, along with Firefly, display no real allegiance to either of the opposing factions. This helps to maintain the comic pace of the film and says much about nationalistic jingoism and patriotic hysteria.

French Connection II (1975)

Peter's Nite

Stephen B. Armstrong on French Connection II via CinemaRetro:

The original script for French Connection II was prepared by Robert Dillon, whose previous credits included, most notably, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Once production commenced in the summer of 1974, however, Frankenheimer decided that he needed to have his script re-worked. For the job, he recruited the novelist Pete Hamill, who’d actually known Eddie Egan, the New York City police detective upon whom Hackman’s character Popeye Doyle was based. In 2006, Hamill recalled his involvement in the project:

[When Frankenheimer] called me from Marseilles, asking me to help, I said I would try to get there within two days. "Why not one?" he said, and laughed nervously. I never asked why he called me. Someone hand-delivered a script to my place in New York and I read it on the plane.

John, at that time, had a major problem. He had already shot nine days of the existing script. He had developed a reputation for going over budget, so had no flexibility. He couldn't re-shoot what was already in the can.

That gave me a problem too, since I had to write around the existing pieces, which, as always, had been shot out of order. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The basic problem was that Hackman, a great movie actor, had nothing to act. And the reason for that was that Roy Scheider was not in the sequel, and Hackman had nobody to bounce his lines off. He would never talk to a French cop the way he talked to Scheider in the Billy Friedkin original.

….My first work was on the following day's pages, trying to make the character sound like Popeye Doyle….Within a day-and-a-half (with naps in between) I had written enough for them to keep shooting for six or seven days….Hackman was ecstatic. He had something to act!

Frankheimer interviewed by Gerald Pratley:

Another example of course are the races of Grand Prix seen in Ronin as high-speed chases through the streets of Paris. They are so brilliantly done and so exciting throughout that the director finds himself questioned by almost everyone asking "how did you do this?" Frankenheimer replies, "Well, I spent hours recently recording commentaries about this for the DVD disc giving viewers an almost complete account of how we worked out the car sequences. First we sent out the art director -- or production designer as they call them now -- with a group of experts to determine where we would stage all this. Everything was pre-planned. We sketched them, with Ted Boonthanakit, as story boards; we put cameras in crash boxes, on cars and in cars, took shots of actors in and out of cars, towed cut-up cars, we used right-hand versions of the cars from England for close-ups of the actors who appeared to be driving but the actual driver was out of the shot driving on the right-hand side of the cars. We drove at the speeds you see in the picture and there were no special effects. Every car coming and going, passing or swerving, was driven by an expert racing driver. We had 300 French drivers at the wheels of all other cars on the road and for help in all this I have to thank Jean Claude Lagniez. There were all manner of ways and techniques we used, cameras with different lenses, and every move for every car was worked out in advance. It was very exciting, it was terribly dangerous, lives were often in jeopardy and it took a great many weeks -- and then I did 28 days on second unit filming; all the roads were blocked off to traffic, we controlled everything we shot and the French police were extremely helpful. And it all came together in the editing process with Tony Gibbs, one of the best editors still working today."

The bars, cafes, houses, and other interiors have the look, and create the atmosphere, of classic French films from past eras. This, said Frankenheimer, was what he set out to achieve, adding with a laugh, "I think I now have 'my trilogy' (a reference to the works of other directors, among them Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kobayashi, Donski) with The Train, French Connection II and Ronin, which have several traits in common: a graphic French realism and characterization, pervaded with tragedy and humour." (The director has made two other films in France: Grand Prix (in part) and the little-known but memorable, Impossible Object.)

And what did all of this cost? For Frankenheimer, never known to be an "over-budget" filmmaker and who has achieved remarkable results on low budgets, Ronin was his most expensive film at $US54m. "Well," he said with a touch of humour, "I didn't waste money. We live in inflationary times, it's expensive shooting in France and the money is all there up on the screen. The studio got its moneysworth, car chases do not come cheap, and De Niro doesn't work for scale!

"I'm not lightning fast, but I'm not slow either. I tend to shoot a lot of set-ups. I was an editor and director in live television, that's what I did, and I watched every shot on the screen -- in rehearsal and in performance. I knew what was needed in editing and I still do. I shoot a lot of coverage, and making Ronin was an experience I enjoyed immensely."

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

Pamela's Nite

Point Blank (1967)

Stuart's Nite

The Great Santini (1979)

Nora's Nite