Duck Soup: Take One

by Kevin Kusinitz

Aaron’s recent posting of the early Duck Soup advertisement is a necessary reminder that great works go through many phases before their completion. An even better example – if I may modestly say – is one I’ve had in my possession since purchasing it at auction for $25 many years ago: an original copy of Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby’s first treatment of Duck Soup. Running 27, double-spaced typed pages, it features the same framework of the movie we all know, while containing several wildly different details.

Let’s start with the cover. The typewritten title, in caps, reads FIRE CRACKERS. That’s been crossed out, replaced by the handwritten Cracked Ice. Above this, in turn, is its handwritten replacement Duck Soup, underlined in red. It seems Kalmar & Ruby themselves were unsure of the title while they were writing it, for Cracked Ice is typed inside on the first title page. But turn to the character page and we’re back to Firecrackers (now one word), which someone has crossed out and re-written as Cracked Ice. Turn to yet another title page and we see Fire Crackers (now two words again). They say when a movie goes through several title changes it’s in trouble. What if the title goes through different spellings as well?

And it’s not just the title that was different, either. Groucho was, as presented on the title page, Rufus T. Firestone; Harpo was Skippy; and Zeppo was Bob Firestone (son of Rufus). Only Chico’s Chicolini remained unchanged. Ambassador Trentino of Sylvania here is Ambassador Felix Frankenstein of Amnesia. And while Gloria Teasdale is the same, Vera Marcal was originally Gloria’s niece, June Parker. Throughout the treatment, the Marxes tend to be referred to by their “real” names rather than their characters (although, near the end, Zeppo’s suddenly becomes Bob Hemingway. I suspect by then Kalmar & Ruby were already deciding that the father/son relationship was going to change).

Speaking of Zeppo, his part appears to have been bigger than we see in the final release. His romance with June Parker plays a key part in this story, fueling Ambassador Frankenstein’s jealousy. In fact, the declaration of war hinges on June’s willingness to marry Frankenstein. Kalmar & Ruby write:

This develops into a burlesque melodramatic scene where Bob, in mock-heroics, says he will give up June for the love of his country. June refuses to be given up, and says she’d rather die than marry Frankenstein, and throws her arms around Bob.

It’s here – in the middle of the story, rather near the end – that the “Freedonia’s Going to War” number takes place. A brief dialogue exchange during the number:

ZEPPO: Father – if we win the war can I marry June Parker?

GROUCHO: Son – if we win the war we’ll all marry June Parker.

Another, greater loss was the elimination of yet another production number on the eve of war, honoring Groucho before he goes off to war:

This scene is done entirely to music from beginning to end, with dialogue in lyric form by Groucho and the guests.

In his book “Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo,” Joe Adamson featured the same lyrics provided in the treatment:

“Of course you’re all aware
A king must have an heir
A son who’ll pass the family name along
Will some one tell me where
I’ll ever get an heir
If the king can do no wrong…”

Like I said, Kalmar & Ruby were already forgetting the father/son business.

Chico’s still the peanut salesman-turned-secretary of war, although here he and Groucho decide to recruit women to spy on Amnesia. Harpo applies in drag, using balloons to pad his chest and rear. (Someone’s put an X next to the section where the balloons pop, perhaps to avoid incurring the wrath of the Hays office.) There’s no sign of Harpo’s battle with Edgar Kennedy’s lemonade salesman here, either. His running gag with Groucho involving the motorcycle is compressed into one early scene, with the twist coming several pages later. The tattoo with the barking dog here is an outhouse featuring an angry man:

His lips move, inaudibly swearing for being disturbed. (This is done in animated cartoons).

Groucho’s romance with Margaret Dumont contains different jokes:

They don’t come any better than you – well, they may come better they don’t come any bigger – and the bigger the better. The bigger the betta you got on a horse the more you lose. And speaking about horses, why don’t you marry me? Say yes and I’ll do everything within my power to get out of it. I’ll go away if it means your happiness.

Lines like that remind us that this was a first draft. (Pointing to cabinet members, Groucho tells Zeppo, “Get rid of these microbes, if you have to use violence.” You can almost hear the writers say to the production staff, “We’ll think of something else.”) An unfinished gag involves Harpo hanging a portrait of himself in June Parker’s bedroom. After he leaves,

June starts to remove her negligee, and is left in her silken undies. As she starts to remove those and her stockings – there is some trick business with the picture of Harpo. (This will have to be explained.)

I’ll say it does – like how did they expect to get away with this actress taking off her underwear?

The war climax is considerably longer here, involving gags that never made the final cut. (Groucho looking through binoculars and seeing a different sight each time – army warfare, navy warfare, a football game, soldiers in the time of King Arthur…) Harpo, riding in an enemy blimp, drops a hook onto Groucho’s headquarters and carries it away. This is followed by “an airplane stunt designed for comedy and thrills, with Groucho and Zeppo in one plane and Harpo and Chico in another.” When the planes crash, Groucho and Zeppo carry on a conversation as they fall to the ground: “Groucho wants to know what time the parachute is due to arrive, and complains that these things are never on time.” When they land at Mrs. Teasdale’s house, they discover that the war ended a month earlier.

Zeppo suggests a double wedding. Harpo and Chico land in the garden and the story will be concluded here among the four boys and the two women.

And that’s where it ends.

As I read the treatment, echoes of the Marxes earlier movies reverberated throughout. The father/son relationship from Horsefeathers. A Groucho/Zeppo letter dictation scene from Animal Crackers. Groucho/Chico double-talk from all their movies, probably going back to the dialogue cards from their silent movie Humor Risk. Groucho calling the fight scene like a radio announcer in Monkey Business is transferred here to Harpo racing his motorcycle around the palace. Even though many of these elements were dropped from the final draft, I have a feeling that audiences of the time still picked up on them by osmosis. And I believe it’s that sense of been-there done-that, rather than the political satire, that caused Duck Soup’s box-office loss. (One amateur Marx Bros. scholar figures that 40% of Duck Soup’s dialogue is lifted from Groucho and Chico’s radio show Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel. That would explain the “additional dialogue” credit to Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman. It would also explain a further sense of déjà vu on the audience’s part.)

I have no idea how the treatment – according to the notes, prepared for a staff meeting on Monday, December 5, 1932 – wound up at an auction at the Puck Building in New York over 60 years later. I’m just grateful that it did, and that the fellow bidding against me dropped out after I topped his $20 bid. Even without having it appraised, I think it’s the most valuable piece of memorabilia in my collection. I’m not necessarily referring to a dollar amount, but rather what it means to me as a Marx Brothers fan. The Fire Crackers/Firecrackers/Cracked Ice/Duck Soup treatment is akin to a complete master tape of the “Sgt. Pepper” demos. You can see how it evolved to greatness, but marvel at the work of everyone involved. Even Zeppo and Ringo.

Stuff and Nonsense, Part III

Many thanks to reader Billie T. for sending along these beautiful high-res scans!

"The Four Horsemen of Mirth". This advance ad for Duck Soup from Paramount's 1932 exhibitors' yearbook hints at what the early drafts of the screenplay might have looked like. Poor Zeppo's role as Bob Firefly, President of the International Beauty Conference, was whittled away to practically nothing by the time the film was actually shot. Harpo's "Snoopy" was apparently the story's only spy. Note that Paramount considered the film's breathless barrage of gags a selling point in that it required multiple viewings for a patron to catch all of the lines. Irving Thalberg certainly didn't feel the same way and therefore vast chasms of silence follow the Boys' gags in the MGM pictures, presumably meticulously timed with stopwatches. BAH! The Paramounts are better.. period.

French poster for A Day at the Races (1936). Um, excuse me, but what the HELL is going on here?? Something unspeakably horrible, I suspect.

Beautiful one-sheet for Hips Hips Hooray! (1934). Only problem is that all of the women's faces are completely indistinguishable from one another. Is that supposed to be Thelma Todd or Dorothy Lee between Bert and Bob?

".. wanna shake your tree." Poster for Harry Langdon's first Sennett comedy, Picking Peaches (1924). Sennett's confidence in Langdon was apparently absolute.

Los 4 hermanos Marx

Here's a bit of a mystery.. to me, at least. This is a poster for a South American Marx Brothers film festival, country unknown, dating from the late 60s-early 70s. A terrific line-up of the Marxes' finest work, and it's quite nice to see Zeppo taking his rightful place on the poster. I suppose the prints for this particular festival might have been fresh as Paramount was at that time cashing in on the Nostalgia Boom by re-releasing their Marx films to American theaters, but might these also have been new prints of the original foreign versions? Which begs the question, what was the nature of the foreign versions of the Marx Brothers' Paramount films? Were they subtitled? In the pre-dubbing world of 1929, I can't imagine the Marxes learning their lines phonetically for a foreign version of The Cocoanuts, so how were these produced? Moreover, if foreign versions of Horse Feathers were produced, might those prints provide the footage needed to renovate and complete the sadly mutilated American print we've been stuck with since the 1950s? You tell me.

2/27/07 addendum - Reader East Side writes: Furthering the mystery... I've attached what seems to be a poster for the original Spanish release of Monkey Business (which translates to Gunmen of the Open Seas). The re-release title on your site translates to Passengers without Tickets. Neither title particularly reeks of zany comedy.

Vaudeville Ends und Odds

A couple of free classic comedy finds for you this week. First, a stash of ancient Weber and Fields recordings on archive.org. Joe Weber (right) and Lew Fields (left) were THE American comedy team at the turn of the century, and the unprecedented fame they enjoyed probably remained unequalled until the arrival of Laurel and Hardy. Weber and Fields, who began performing together in the Bowery in 1877, established a standard for crosstalk routines that was very much alive through the 1950s, thanks to Abbott and Costello (whose con-man v. patsy dynamic directly reflects that of W&F) and the unsung comics of the fading burlesque scene. Their brand of broad "dutch" dialect comedy may not read as particularly funny today, but there are some good gags and razor-sharp timing to be found in these nearly century old tracks. Incidentally, Weber and Fields made most of these recordings in 1912 after they had reunited following a contentious and highly-publicized 1904 split. They were still active in semi-retirement through the early 1930s, mostly in radio.

And I never thought I'd find this online. Courtesy These Records Are BenT!, the original 1970 cast recording of Minnie's Boys starring Shelley Winters. I don't mind telling you, this isn't quite my cup of thing. It's one thing to read a load of stale half-truths about the Marxes and quite another to hear them dramatized and set to music (produced by Enoch Light!). But I have to admit a fondness for Where Was I (When They Passed Out Luck), a song for the Marxes in which they enumerate their various personal strengths. You just know the actors are sitting on a fake curb while, behind them, some guy dressed as an Italian fruit merchant (with a huge black mustache) silently hawks his wares to passerby. At the end of the song, he probably shoos the Marxes away with a line like "Hey, you-a keeds! You getta way from-a my fruit stand! You-a scaring away my customers!" Chico steals an apple from the cart as the curtain falls.

Who's Faultin' Maltin?

by Geoff Collins

Marxian Madness: "a treat for their fans" - which is a much-used euphemism for "everyone else, including us, thinks it stinks". I just treated myself (because nobody else would) to the six-volume DVD set "The Marx Brothers Collection" which includes all of the Brothers' MGM movies plus A Night in Casablanca, along with numerous "special features" including - and this is what attracted me to the set - a whole bunch of MGM shorts from the same period. No Healys, alas, but there's an Our Gang, a couple of Pete "Annoying Wise Guy Narration" Smith Specialties, Robert Benchley in How To Sleep and A Night At the Movies, and a Warner Bros. Joe McDoakes. There's also James FitzPatrick droning on about the delights of San Francisco. His stodgy travelogues must have discouraged travel of any sort; they bored audiences for years but you need to sit through at least one of them to appreciate the Peter Sellers parody version Balham - Gateway to the South.

So what else could I do? I had to buy it; it was irresistible [and speaking of irresistible, who's the actress playing Benchley's wife in A Night At the Movies? She's the most alluring woman I've seen in my whole life.]

Only A Night At the Opera and A Day At the Races have commentaries, which isn't surprising: how could anyone be enthusiastic about At the Circus for an hour and a half? The funniest thing in the film is Groucho's toupee; and perversely it's also the saddest thing (apart from the lack of comedy and the fact that it's so obvious that nobody cared any more by this time). Why did they make him wear it? Why didn't he resist? How does it stay on his head when he hangs upside-down with Eve Arden? Why doesn't it fall off when he hangs upside-down with Eve Arden? (At least he'd get one laugh) why is he hanging upside-down with Eve Arden? So many questions....

Glenn Mitchell does the commentary for A Day At the Races and it's pleasant for me, as an Englishman, to listen to his restful tones as he expounds on many fascinating points from this flawed, overlong, troubled yet ultimately very funny movie. The commentary on A Night At the Opera is by Leonard "One of the Team's Best" Maltin, and again it's a model of entertaining and informative.... whoaaa! Just a minute there, boy! I really hate to do this, Lenny old son, but it's all in the cause of accuracy.

Maltin says that the Father of All Marxes, Sam "Frenchie" Marx, is an extra in the dockside scene of A Night At the Opera, apparently causing a continuity error by appearing on the ship and the dock in consecutive shots. I hate to say this, Len old chap, but there's no way Sam could appear in A Night At the Opera except in a box. He died on May 11, 1933 and thus missed this particular boat by more than two years.

The good news is: he's in Monkey Business. This time the Marxes, as stowaways, are trying to get off the boat. Sam appears at about 48:01 into the movie and he's clearly visible until 48:22 (based on the DVD timing which includes the new Universal logo at the beginning) as the brothers are taken off the ship on a big stretcher. Initially he's seen in a long shot, waving his handkerchief, then in a medium shot sitting on (apparently) a trunk with a couple of young women. He looks very dapper: white hat, dark jacket, white pants and two-tone shoes. He resembles an off-duty Harpo. A freeze-frame at about 48:20 will give you a lovely shot of all four Marx Brothers and their Dad. A priceless moment.

Leonard Maltin probably realizes his mistake by now and he's kicking himself. Why didn't he ask Glenn Mitchell? It's all in The Marx Brothers Encyclopaedia.

Amongst the special features on the Marx Collection DVD set is a terminally useless MGM two-reeler, Sunday Night At the Trocadero, which has the benefit of idiotic and pointlessly brief guest appearances by a number of movie people who happened to be nearby at the time. Its relevance to this collection is the sight of a non-mustached Groucho on a rare night out with his wife Ruth (although the whole thing looks as if it was shot in the studio); all of which brings us back to Monkey Business. As Groucho performs his Chevalier impression we can see, in the background, a young woman and two boys. I suggest that this is Ruth Marx and that one of the boys is their son Arthur, no doubt dreaming of that time in the far future when he would work with some of the greatest comedians in America and vilify them in sloppily-researched biographies. Has this been suggested before? Ruth certainly visited the set of Animal Crackers; she was photographed with Groucho at the Art Deco table used in the Groucho-Chico "left-handed moths ate the painting" routine. Come on, Third Banana readers: let's argue!

After all this, I hear you saying: "you've written all this stuff - who's the Third Banana?"

Well, it's Chico. He's always been regarded as the least important Marx (has everyone forgotten Zeppo?) yet his wily not-as-stupid-as-he-appears fake Italian frequently matches Groucho in timing and verbal dexterity; and he can out-scam anyone, especially Groucho. Often considered as just a straightman for his zanier siblings, of course he's much more than this, providing a bedrock of audience sympathy because we all recognize and love this cheeky con-artist. Despite his obvious phoniness he's nonetheless the most real, and the most lovable, and it's all done with the minimum of effort; an "Italian" Sid James. Hancock and Kenneth Williams were jealous of Sid; Groucho was jealous of Chico. It all has to do with charm, sex appeal and charisma. Chico must never be underestimated or overlooked, as he so often is. He was to the Marxes what Secombe was to the Goons.

Atsa some joke, eh, boss?

Well, that's about enough of that. Time for another look at A Night At the Movies. Benchley's brilliant but (surprise surprise) I won't be watching him. Goodnight everybody. Who is that lovely woman - and where's my time machine?

Will Hay and the Comedy Divide: an Ugly American's Perspective

Thanks to the endless wonder that is the Electromatic Interweb, I've now seen the (near) entirety of Will Hay's film oeuvre (an early short was missing from the DVD set and may be missing in general). We've mentioned Hay at least a few times here but haven't yet truly given the man his due, partly because poor old Will Hay exists in some shadowy netherworld between proper comedy stardom and true Third Banana status. In Britain, he remains the home-grown icon of 30s film comedy. On this side of the Atlantic, Will Hay remains an obscurity.. a bit surprising given not only his accessibility as a comedian, but the decidedly "American" tone of his best work. As an official Hawaiian shirt-wearing Ugly American, I must bestow upon poor Will Hay the Third Banana tag. Who da heck is dis Will Hay, anyway??

If there's any term I would use to describe the bulk of British film comedy of the 1930s, it would be "self-conscious". A deep-rooted sense of tradition is one of the hallmarks of the British music halls, and I believe that this awareness of purpose may have been a factor behind the rather perfunctory air that so much British comedy of the 30s and 40s suffers from. This is not always a refection on the comedians themselves. Arthur Askey is a wonderful, sprightly ultra-comic who makes a huge, obscene joke out of the very act of cracking jokes. The team of Flanagan and Allen, the "Oi!" comedians, engage in mindbending doubletalk routines that sound like Abbott and Costello on speed and then turn around and sing lilting songs that gush sincerity. But for every Bud Flanagan, you have a Charlie Naughton.. maybe two.. maybe more. Comedians who had been called upon to repeat the same routines for so long that they can no longer feel it. They're no longer comedians at that stage. They're performers playing comedians. And, most unfortunately, this self-consciouness seeps into the films, no matter how good the starring comedians may be, manifesting as a kind of tightly-controlled zaniness. Even the best British comics, such as the wonderful George Formby, fought an uphill battle against the rote nature of their film vehicles to no avail. To American eyes and ears, all this self-consciousness violates one of our key expectations from comedy. In America, then as today, entertainers were seen as largely inseparable from the individual. If comics wore a mask when they entertained, it was a slightly caricatured one that revealed some basic truths about the very real person who wore it (Eddie Cantor went one step further by blurring the line between the entertainer's private life and his performances). There was little room for tradition in a world of self-defined iconoclasts. And if the entertainer was seen as inseparable from the entertainer, the entertainer was to be inseparable from the films they appeared in. After the Marx Brothers moved to Hollywood, the scripts for their films became, for a time, free-for-all workshops for some of the nation's finest humorists. The end results bore little resemblance to anything preceding them; they are, undeniably Marx Brothers Movies to the core (and is it any wonder that their least successful comedies, Love Happy and Room Service, weren't originally written as "Marx Brothers Movies"?). The upshoot of this comedy divide was that, in the 30s, American comedies exported to the UK with more ease than vice versa. British audiences simply embraced the artistry of those American acts they liked. As many successful American acts in the UK discovered, this appreciation for skill translated into an overwhelming preference for repetition of that skill. Burns and Allen, for instance, were called upon to repeat the same material endlessly by doting audiences. In America, however, it was as though British comedy did not exist. There wasn't a blanket ban on British imports, but there might as well have been. Most American studios had affiliates, if not wholly-owned subsidiaries, in the UK churning out product tailored to native tastes so it would have been a simple matter to import those films. One must imagine that the studios at least test-screened some of these comedies for select audiences. After all, it would have been within the studios' interests to turn as much of a profit as possible on films that, in many cases, they owned outright. But, ultimately, the studios must have realized the problems posed by the comedy divide. Even when not hopelessly self-aware, the rather gentle nature of most British comedies would have held little appeal to audiences with a taste for the extreme, and those British comedies that aspired to the extreme were the most self-conscious of all, bordering on neurotic. And so it was that Joe E. Brown was a household name in the UK, while George Formby was about as well-known in the US as the guy who cleaned the toilets at the Conoco station down the street.

But Will Hay was a different matter.. or he should have been. One of his films, Hey, Hey, USA! (1938) co-stars Edgar "Slow Burn" Kennedy and was certainly made with the American market in mind. Another, Where's That Fire? (1940) was produced by 20th Century Fox (the only surviving print was found in that studio's film vault in the 1970s). There's also evidence that a few of Hay's films received limited US distribution. What set Hay apart from all those acts that had no hope of entering the US market? To start with, Hay's comedy skills were so great as to override the self-consciousness that make acts like Nervo and Knox, talented as they were, seem so packaged. His natural comic's sensibilities are apparent in his impeccable sense of timing and pantomime, but unlike American comics such as Ted Healy, whose screen characters are reflections of their true personalities (frighteningly enough), Hay's doddering, shifty persona is pure performance. In this regard, Hay's methods are much like those of fellow Karno alumnus Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin whose instantly recognizable characters are similarly a matter of skillful performance rather than channeled behavioral tendencies. Thus there is no more self-consciousness about Hay's comic performances than there is about, say, Jimmy Stewart's dramatic ones. Hay performances "read" as sincere. Just as importantly, Hay's finest movies are wild and, atypically for British comedies of the 30s (but not for American ones), rather ruthless. Although Hay began his film career often playing mild characters in equally mild (to say nothing of mechanical) farces, he soon found his footing as an hilariously amoral opportunist in comedies that rivaled the Marxes in pure anarchic abandon. Hay, who bears a resemblance to Boris Karloff, is all bluff, cringing from those with more power and bullying those with less. He's a fount of ignorance, willing to talk at length about things of which he has absolutely no understanding, and if you call him on it, he'll simply shout you down or give you the Dreaded Glare. He's a tin-pot schemer, wheedling his way into places he has no business being and reaping the whirlwind as a result. Sounds awful, doesn't he? Beware! Hay makes you like and sympathize with the crusty old sod, and not by exposing his character's "wounded inner-child" or whatever, either. You want to see Hay come out on top because, dammit, he's a real person; more real than the plastic nobodies or summer stock villains who own and operate the terribly capricious world he lives in. He represents flawed humanity's inalienable right to be flawed.

Furthering the American similarities, in his best comedies Hay is aided and abetted by two stooges, Graham Moffatt and Moore Marriott. The Crazy Gang has often been described as the UK's answer to the Marx Brothers, but that's a pack of dirty lies! LIES! Hay, Moffatt, and Marriott are the UK's answer to the Marx Brothers, and they have the dignity to go about their business as though the question were never asked. Graham Moffatt had been playing comic choir boys, page boys, and office boys in films from the tender age of 14 and, in Hay's comedies, he blossomed into a rotund, lazy, squeaky-voiced conniver, on a mission from Hell to make misery for his elders. There was no elder more elder than his unlikely partner Moore Marriott, a toothless, foolish old fossil played to the hilt by a man in his early fifties (who was, admittedly, toothless). The trio, with Hay as ringleader, were vehicles for a brand of slapstick anarchy that Hay seemed incapable of as a solo. As policemen, firemen, sailors, or railway station porters, Hay, Moffatt and Marriott are models of dimwitted graft and inefficiency, engaged in an eternal corruption competition, but pulling together in times of crisis. Unfortunately, the temperamental Hay began to fear that he was simply becoming one third of a comedy team. He made a concerted effort to shake off Moffatt and Marriott in 1938 before finally succeeding by switching studios from Gainsborough to Ealing in 1941. But new stooges like Charles Hawtry and Claude Hulbert did little to compliment Hay's style, and, as far as I'm concerned, neither did Ealing where he spent the brief remainder of his career. Moffatt and Marriott remained at Gainsborough, stooging for such comedians as Arthur Askey.

That Will Hay remains an obscurity in the US remains a mystery, and it seems he's overdue for discovery here. Granted, the entire purpose of The Third Banana is to bring to light comedians who we feel have been unjustly forgotten, but we also understand the limited appeal of many comics no matter how much we may love them. But Will Hay represents a rather extreme case of Third Banana-itis. There was certainly little chance for success for Hay's films in the US during the 30s when there was scarce opportunity for Hay to engage in the kind of promotion that would have brought him to the American public's attention. As an unknown quantity, it would have taken a leap of faith on the part of any studio to build up Hay as a comedy star in the first place, no matter the quality of his films. But today, in our ever dwindling world, one would think that some enterprising soul would give Hay's films an official stateside release, or at least a little airplay on TCM. Who knows? It may happen yet.

And what about the Great Comedy Divide? World War Two caused seismic shifts in British comedy tastes. The horror of war on the homefront was followed by years of rationing and going without. The love of the predictable was soon supplanted by a growing preference for the unexpected. They received it in the form of the Goons who, molded and inspired by their war experiences, established a new trend in British comedy with their anarchistic and original BBC radio series. The iconoclasts had finally taken over, ultimately giving birth to such institutions as Monty Python and The Beatles. Air-conditioned and freshly mowed post-War America, meanwhile, discovered a taste for the domestic and learned to eschew innovation in favor of focus groups.

Anyway, for those who care, here are my top Will Hay picks:

Windbag the Sailor (1936): Directed by the infamous William Beaudine, who even gets an additional dialogue credit (for which lines?)! Hay is a former canal barge skipper whose tall tales of the sea secure him an unwanted job as captain on a boat, the owner of which intends to scuttle. Hay is teamed for the first time with both Moffatt and Marriott, whose regular screen characters haven't yet quite gelled (Marriott, in particular, plays Harbottle as rather sharp-tongued here, a trait that would be quickly dropped). Features a very funny scene in which all three try to chart the ship's location using some decidedly twisted logic.

Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937): Considered by most to be Will Hay's masterpiece, and it may well be, although I find Ask a Policeman and Where's That Fire? funnier. Oh, Mr. Porter! is beyond doubt the best-looking and best-directed of Hay's features. Hay plays a ne'er-do-well railway "wheel-tapper" who is promoted to stationmaster of the tiny Irish town of Buggleskelly. Moffatt and Marriott are the station's wildly unprincipled regular staff, living off the food they steal from deliveries, and are not at all keen on Hay's attempts to make the station respectable. Hay and co. foil a gang of gun runners using a local ghost story as a cover for their activities.

Ask a Policeman (1939): A great anti-establishment film that features Hay, Moffatt and Marriott as thoroughly corrupt policemen in the tiny town of Turnbotham Round. Sergeant Dudfoot (Hay) hasn't bothered to make an arrest in years, giving the town an extremely false reputation as one of the most law-abiding in the nation. In fact, he's made his job, and those of officers Albert and Harbottle (Moffatt and Marriott) superfluous, and they find they must invent crimes and create false evidence in order to save their careers. Eventually Hay and co. foil a gang of smugglers using a local ghost story as a cover for their activities. Hmm. More wonderfully twisted logic in the sequence in which they set up a speed trap and try to deduce how fast a driver was traveling.

Where's That Fire? (1940): My personal favorite. Hay, Moffatt and Marriott are incompetent firemen in the town of Bishops Wallop who are ordered by the city to improve their antiquated station after they accidentally permit the Town Hall to burn to the ground. After visiting a modern London fire station for inspiration (and pocketing a few loose items, such as an alarm and a fire axe), the boys decide to install a pole. The Great Fire Pole Sequence features Hay, Moffatt, and Marriott blocking traffic and smashing up a china shop across the street as they attempt to maneuver the pole into place, giving scant regard to the chaos they're causing. Probably the greatest sustained comedy sequence of Hay's film career. The film concludes with Hay and co. foiling a gang of crooks who are using their station's antique engine, a duplicate of the one at the Tower of London, to steal the Crown Jewels.

Notable misfires:

Hey, Hey, USA! (1938): Will Hay attempts to enter the American market and replace Moffatt and Marriott in one go and fails on both counts. After a series of misadventures, Hay, a ship's porter, ends up posing as a noted professor on a voyage to the US and is quickly employed by a rich American passenger as a tutor for his bratty son. Meanwhile, stowaway Edgar Kennedy is a member of a gang who intends to kidnap the boy for ransom. Grating farce follows. Kennedy reacts to Hay's mildly dotty malapropisms and misunderstandings as though Hay were Harpo Marx or Bert Wheeler. His extreme overreactions can be extremely funny, but Hay is far too mild here to warrant them making Kennedy seem more than a little unbalanced. In fact, at the close out, he literally goes mad and is carted away! Ironically, Hay would have had a much better chance at entering the US market with Oh, Mr. Porter!.

The Ghost of St. Michaels (1941): Hay's first film for Ealing features him in his famous music hall schoolmaster role, but Charles Hawtry and Claude Hulbert, as a pupil and fellow teacher respectively, are no substitutes for Moffatt and Marriott. Moreover, the screenplay is pure B-movie hash, spending far more time on the inanities of the thin "mystery" plot than on comic set pieces. What comedy sequences we do get are strangely off-putting. Hay's victimization at the hands of his pupils comes across as more cruel than funny, especially as Hay is here at his most innocuous. Hay's breaking of the "fourth wall" at the end when he addresses the audience is charming, though.

Keep It Going Till we Get There

by Geoff Collins

The Marx Brothers are on a fire engine, racing through the city streets. As they pass a genuine fire, Groucho yells "Keep it going till we get back!"

It's a wonderful gag, and writer Joe Adamson has expressed quite valid regret that it never made it into the final version of the much-rewritten A Day At the Races. But thanks to the gently repetitive nature of classic comedy, wherein gags are often half-remembered and re-cycled, we've managed to locate three earlier variations. Maybe, dear readers, you can provide some more.

In the 1935 Vitaphone short His First Flame, fire chief Donald MacBride has forbidden any fires to take place because the fire station is being used for Shemp and Daphne's wedding. A weedy Skelton-like fireman (Fred Harper??) answers the phone. There's a fire. He informs the chief but is bawled out. Back on the phone to the distraught caller, he says ""Well, keep it burning a little while longer. Yeah, yeah....I tried to tell him but he wouldn't listen...." Naturally it's the chief's house that's on fire.

Several years earlier, another barely-competent fire chief, Robb Wilton, has his opening monologue interrupted by a frantic woman (Florence Palmer) whose house is burning down. After some attempts at helpful pleasantries ("Turned out nice again, hasn't it?") Robb endeavours to summon his lads via his archaic speaking-tube. He sends Flo back to the fire: "Don't wait now, lady, just slip along - ask 'em to keep it goin' a bit, will yer?"

Robb filmed his fire station sketch for Pathe in 1934, recorded it on a Sterno 78 on September 24, 1931 (see www.pavilionrecords.com) and was performing it for several years before this. But we have an earlierversion... much earlier.

It's a tricky business, writing about the great comedians of yesteryear. There's usually somebody still living who remembers your subject, and they can say "No - you're wrong! He wasn't like that at all!" In the case of Dan Leno, no such problem arises. Dan was born on December 20, 1860 and died on October 31, 1904. He's been dead over a hundred years. Yet in a curious way it seems as if he's still around, haunting us. He's certainly supposed to haunt the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (he was the Phantom of the Operetta). Stanley Lupino, who was into spiritualism, always maintained that he saw Dan's ghost. And Dan himself, in his photographs, has a haunting, haunted look, quite unsettling. You know that this man was no run-of-the-mill comic.

Dan Leno was considered to be the greatest music-hall comedian of the late nineteenth century, the Funniest Man on Earth. He was a quirky little London-Irish sprite, crumpled and sometimes mournful but always eager, alert and resilient. A tiny Milligan, forty years ahead of his time, his material often wandered off into completely unexpected areas which must have baffled the more prosaic members of his audience. He was praised by contemporary writers such as W. MacQueen Pope whose florid, anecdotal excess makes him the most appropriately named writer in the history of literature. But where's our hard evidence? Where's the living Dan?

The good news is: Dan made some films. The bad news is: none of them exist. Dan was around at the very beginning of the film industry, long before "preservation" was even considered. The early films were ephemeral and disposable; any survivals from this early date are purely accidental. A brief sequence was recently unearthed, showing Dan and his wife Lydia having fun at a garden fete. It's in the form of a portable Kinora "what the butler saw" paper flip book: a miraculous discovery - but not really representative.

So here's some more good news: Dan made nearly thirty recordings. But the bad news is: they're over a hundred years old, very scratchy and recorded at bewilderingly inconsistent speeds. Before 78 rpm was recognised as the most effective speed, it was every man for himself. Dan's record of "Going To the Races" (Gramophone and Typewriter GC2-2808) was made at about 65 rpm, as I discovered when I first played my battered old copy at 78 and got an incomprehensible high-pitched chirping. I had to hold my finger on the turntable to find out what it was all about.

More bad news: Dan wasn't happy with the primitive recording process, specifically the lack of an audience ("How can I be funny into a funnel?") so there's always a slight self-consciousness. Good news: when a record's a hundred years old, this hardly matters. We're lucky to have anything by Dan Leno; and as the record industry was in its infancy, there are few retakes and all the little fluffs are left in. For example : Dan usually starts and finishes with something resembling a brisk little song, as a framework for his character patter. Here's the first line of the published chorus of "The Beefeater":

"It's a splendid place to spend a happy day..."

On Dan's record "The Tower of London" (matrix 1129) this is what he sings :

"For it's a splendid time to see the happy hour..."

... so the next line doesn't rhyme. Annoyed at being caught off guard, right at the end of the record Dan says "No!"

Dan's very first record was "Who Does the House Belong To?", made at the Maiden Lane offices of Gramophone and Typewriter in November 1901. After a quick piano-accompanied chorus of the song, he launches into a monologue about some wonderful property he's just bought; it gradually becomes apparent that the place is a total wreck. Unfortunately the record runs out before he's finished, and clearly he's not pleased when the engineer points this out.

Dan: .... there's a little bit of garden at the bottom, you know, and I think a bit of garden looks lovely. It runs from the house...down to the river. The river's at the bottom of the garden... one month out of the year. The rest of the time, the garden's at the bottom of the river. Because the river...like, er... flows. It's, er, really the gasworks, the overflow from the gasworks, that's what it is. But it looks pretty when the sun shines on it, with all the pretty colours. But it's , er, through the wife that I bought this other house, that I haven't paid for. She came home one day, and she said, er..."why pay rent?" "Well" I said, "darling, I don't know that we have been very guilty up to the present." She said, er..."Read that", and I read it. And it said "Money advanced...without security." I said "well, that'll suit me down to the ground." [pause] [to engineer] Is that it?

Engineer: [distant undecipherable mutterings]

Dan: Chorus ?

Engineer: [more muttering]

Dan: Suit me down to the ground.

Engineer: [mutter mutter]

Piano accompanist: [starts to play the chorus again, then stops. More muttering as the record runs out]

How rare is this? A fragment of an Edwardian argument, captured forever.

Still more good news: nineteen of Dan's recordings, oddly including the sequel to "Going to the Races" (02001) but not the original, are available on CD from www.musichallcds.com. The sound quality is excellent. Every word is audible and they all seem to have been transferred at about the correct speed, which is not always the case in reissues of ancient material; so we can experience the pleasure of Dan's ramblings as "The May Day Fireman", in which Dan's voluntary fire brigade appears to be run with just as much efficiency as Robb Wilton's. Watch out for a line we discussed earlier!

You know, when you start a thing like this, there's a lot of trouble occurs. You know, I told the four boys with me...we've been out of work for over a twelvemonth, because they pulled the house down where we used to stand at the corner...but I told them, I said, we can make a lot of money by being a small fire brigade. I said, I'll pop up and see the superintendent. So I went up, and I said to 'im, er...he was in his office, I said, er....my idea was that we could be of some assistance. I said, erm...course, er, there was only one fire brigade in the village, that was his. And if a fire broke out at both ends of the village, it'd be impossible for him to squirt from one end to the other. So I...I told him, it was my idea, I said, we could be of some service, I said, a sort of little aide-de-camp brigade, I said, and if you had any little fires which you didn't want to attend to, I said, we can pop round and keep 'em going until you come up, you see. Course, he could see me idea, a very nice man he was, he never answered me. And I waited for about a half an hour outside. And, er...you see, my idea was this: not so much the fires...as the salvage. I said, we can, I told the boys, I said, we could pop round, while the fire's on, and look...look for salvage, er, see? Or, I said, we could go before there's a fire and find a bit of salvage somewhere. Or I said, perhaps in the middle of the night we could go... into houses and look round and make ourselves acquainted so that if there's a fire we, er, don't come up as strangers. So Butterworth turned round and said "Why not be burglars?" Now, you know, Butterworth's got no brains....

The justification of petty dishonesty is reminiscent of Will Hay and his equipment-stealing crew in Where's That Fire? But Dan's record was made forty years earlier; and there are no obvious "music-hall jokes". He performs the whole thing conversationally, in character, in his crisp "London with a dash of Dublin" voice. It's still funny today. Well, I think so, anyway.

In 1899 there appeared "Dan Leno - His Booke", a semi-autobiographical fantasy apparently written by the man himself, and full of the same off-at-a-weird-tangent material as the records. When a truncated, inaccurate reprint appeared in 1968, a 99-year-old hack called Tom C. Elder came out of the woodwork and claimed authorship for himself. To me this is just as disappointing as the occasion when the radio actor Norman Shelley (memorably described by Kenneth Williams as "that bogus old crapmound") declared that he'd recorded all of Churchill's wartime speeches. In my opinion, Dan's book is pure Dan. It sounds like him, and I doubt if any mundane ghost writer (we're into "hauntings" again) could have come up with such a flow of free-form surrealism. The photographs were supplied by Dan, some of the cartoons are by Dan, and I'd dearly love to think that the whole thing is his. It's possible, of course, that it's a collaboration, or an "as told to". Did Elder just write it all down ? Or was he an unheralded scriptwriter? Let's argue! Incidentally, one of my most treasured books is a copy of the 1904 paperback edition, found in a car boot sale in Northampton in 1995. Miracles can still happen.

But here's the ultimate bad news. By 1904 Dan's health had collapsed. The strain of thirty-five years of continual hard work caught up with him. A major breakdown was followed by brief periods of partial recovery, but he was just worn out, and he died at the age of forty-three.

Dan died at Halloween; he haunts Drury Lane. Roy Hudd moved into Dan's house without knowing it had belonged to Dan; and Dan's leprechaun-like face, deep-eyed, sad and yet mischievious, still gazes at us out of the old photographs. A face like no other. We know, just to look at him, that he was the great comedian they all said he was.

Yet the films continue to elude us. That would be the final treat.

But wait...let's take a look at The Big Swallow, a short film made by James Williamson in about 1901. Just over a minute long, this was an incredibly original effort for its time. A small, dapper man is annoyed with a cameraman (offscreen) who is intent on taking his photograph. Thrashing about with his cane and insisting "I won't! I won't!" the man advances towards the screen into a terrifying close-up, and "swallows" the cameraman who is seen disappearing into the huge abyss of his cake-hole; then the film reverts slowly back to the medium-shot as the man is seen licking his lips contentedly. He gives us a big grin. Then the film ends.

But who's the star of this little movie? He wears a hat so we can't see his hairline. Initially he looks like Derek Jacobi; and that smile at the end is strikingly similar to a publicity picture of the comedian Charles Austin. But my immediate impression on first seeing the film was: "That's Dan Leno!"

All I ask, film historians amongst you, is one thing: don't prove me wrong.