From Duck Soup to Duck Rock: On Malcolm McLaren and the Marx Brothers

From Duck Soup to Duck Rock 

(SA/2024)

 

 

I.

 

Although Malcolm McLaren's album Duck Rock [1] was dedicated to his hero Haywire Mac [2], the title is actually a reference to the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup (1933) and it's no coincidence that McLaren is pictured on the record sleeve wearing a high-cut, double-breasted corduroy jacket based on the one famously worn by Chico [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Duck Soup is a musical black comedy with a satirical edge, directed by Leo McCarey and written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin). Released by Paramount Pictures in November 1933, it stars the four Marx Brothers; Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo (the latter making his final film appearance). 

 

At the time, the film was not particularly well received; neither by audiences nor critics [4]. However, it's now regarded - along with A Night at the Opera (1935) - as the Marx Brothers' finest achievement, although, personally, I must confess I still don't find it funny even if I have come to appreciate the film's cultural and political significance [5].   

 

Apparently, it was McCarey who suggested the film be called Duck Soup, after earlier working titles - including Firecrackers, Grasshoppers, and Oo La La - had all been abandoned. Amusingly, McCarey had previously used Duck Soup for a silent film starring Laurel and Hardy [6]. 

 

A popular slang expression in the US at that time, duck soup referred to something easy to do (just as, conversely, to duck out of something meant to avoid doing it altogether). 

 

 

III.

 

Paul Gorman mentions that McLaren enjoyed watching Marx Brothers' films at a flea-pit cinema in northwest London during his student days [7], so there's a good chance he saw Duck Soup at this time. 

 

And, interestingly, due to the fact that the film ridicules war and nationalism and also pokes fun at censorship, it was popular with many others on the radical left (or associated with the so-called counterculture) in the 1960s [8].

 

But who knows what Malcolm found so appealing about this movie? 

 

If it wasn't the anarchic, anti-authoritarian, and irreverent elements, then perhaps it was simply the ducks swimming in a kettle and quacking away quite happily that most struck a chord with him; one thinks, for example, of the refrain used in 'Buffalo Gals': Duck! Duck! Duck!   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Duck Rock was released in 1983 on Charisma Records. I have previously published posts inspired by several of the tracks on the album, including 'Buffalo Gals' and 'Double Dutch' - click here and here.

[2] Harry K. McClintock (1884 - 1957), aka Haywire Mac, was (among other things) an American singer-songwriter in the hobo-punk tradition. He is arguably best known for his song "The Big Rock Candy Mountains", about which I have written here. 

[3] The Chico Jacket was part of the McLaren/Westwood collection 'Nostalgia of Mud' (A/W 1983): click here, for a post on this if interested. Unlike Chico Marx, McLaren chose to match the jacket with an Appalachian mountain hat, rather than Tyrolean style headgear.  

 

[4] Duck Soup was not a box office failure - in fact, it was the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1933 - but it didn't go down as well as the producers hoped, possibly because audiences found the anarchic buffoonery and cynicism of the Marx Brothers inappropriate at a time of economic and political crisis.

 

[5] Wishing to play down the political nature of the film, Groucho Marx insisted it had no real significance and was simply four Jewish comics trying to get a laugh. Nevertheless, the Brothers were delighted to hear that Mussolini banned the film in Fascist Italy, having found it personally insulting.

 

[6] The Laurel and Hardy silent short comedy Duck Soup (1927), was directed by Fred Guiol, with Leo McCarey acting as a supervising director. The film was considered lost until a print was discovered in 1974. It was remade as Another Fine Mess in 1930 (dir. James Parrott). 

 

[7] See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), pp. 499-500. 

      The cinema attended by McLaren was the Tolmer, situated just a short walk from Euston Station. It was known as the cheapest cinema in London and attracted what might be described as a mixed audience, including cinephiles, prostitutes, and pensioners. It closed in 1972.

 

[8] Whether that includes Woody Allen and The Beatles is debatable, but both the director of Bananas (1971) and the stars of Help! (dir. Richard Lester, 1965) have admitted they drew insparation from Duck Soup.  

 

 

Bonus: to watch the official Duck Soup (1933) trailer on YouTube, please click here.

Notes on Charlie Chaplin's Closing Speech to 'The Great Dictator'

Charlie Chaplin as the Jewish Barber and 

Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator (1941)

 

 

I. 

 

There's probably only one thing worse in the modern political imaginary than a great dictator and that's an evil tyrant. But even the former is bad enough in the eyes of those for whom power should belong to the people and not held by a single individual who, it is believed, will be invariably (and absolutely) corrupted by its possession. 

 

Any positive associations that the term may have had were lost once and for all during the 20th-century. Thanks to figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao [1], dictators are now viewed by those within the liberal-democratic world as violent megalomaniacs who oppress their peoples and bring death and chaos in their wake [2]. 

Having said that, it seems they can also inspire laughter as well as moral hand-wringing and hypocrisy, as illustrated by the 2012 film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, The Dictator (dir. Larry Charles) and, seventy years prior, the equally unfunny work of satirical slapstick that many regard as Chaplin's masterpiece, The Great Dictator (1940) ...

 

 

II.  

I don't know why, but I've never liked Charlie Chaplin: this despite the fact that, according to Lawrence, "there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin's odd face, than there ever was in Valentino's" [3]. For even if this gleam of something pure makes beautiful, that doesn't mean it makes good and true; and it certainly doesn't guarantee to make humorous. 

 

Chaplin is mostly remembered for playing an anonymous tramp figure - a character whom I regard as the antithesis of the bum as hobo-punk given us in the songs of Haywire Mac; for whereas the latter celebrates his life on the road and railways, the former is keen to improve his lot and dreams of one day living a comfortable middle-class existence.

 

But in the feature-length anti-fascist film of 1941 - which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, and starred in - he plays both the nameless Jewish Barber and the Great Dictator of Tomainia, Adenoid Hynkel (a parody of Adolf Hitler that some find hilarious and uncannily accurate, others, like me, a bit lazy in that it perpetuates the idea that the latter was just a buffoon and an imposter).

 

Probably the most famous scene is the five-minute speech that Chaplin delivers at the end of the film [4]. Dropping his comic mask and appearing to speak directly to his global audience, he makes an earnest plea for human decency and human progress, encouraging people to rise up against dictators and unite in peace and brotherhood, whatever their race or religion. 

The thing with such romantic moralism is that it flies in the face of history and relies heavily on emotion and rhetoric for its effect, rather than argument - ironically, in much the same manner as fascist propaganda. 

 

"We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery We don't want to hate and despise one another." 

 

Is there any evidence for this ultra-optimistic belief that the "hate of men will pass"? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

I would dispute also that our cleverness has made us "hard and unkind" and what we need is to think less and feel more; again, such irrationalism and anti-intellectualism is ironically central to fascism.

 

Perhaps most interestingly, Chaplin echoes Oliver Mellors with his diatribe against "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts". But even Mellors knew that such people now make up the vast bulk of humanity, not just those who govern; that it is the fate of mankind to become-cyborg with rubber tubing for guts and legs made from tin; motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes sucking the vitality out of us all [5]. 

 

Chaplin rightly foresaw that the age of the great dictators would soon pass - in Western Europe at least - but has the triumph of liberal democracy resulted in a life that is free and beautiful and where science and progress "lead to all men's happiness" ...? 

 

Again, I don't think so. 

 

And, like Mellors, I increasingly find comfort not in the dream of a new human future, but in a post-human world: 

 

"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species, and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else." [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post on these three great dictators (and one mad poet), click here. 

 

[2] Unless they happen to be allies, in which case they are said to be strong leaders providing stability in their region of the world, but we won't get into that here.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.

 

[4] Click here to play this scene (I would suggest having a sick bag at the ready). Even some fans of Chaplin's concede that this spoils the film as a work of art. 

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 218. 

      This is similar to how Rupert Birkin felt in Women in Love; see pp. 127-128 of the Cambridge Edition (1987), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Penetration, 'Don't Dictate', (Virgin Records, 1977): click here for the studio version and here for a fantastic live performance of the song at the Electric Circus, Manchester (August 1977). 

 

   

Loony Tunes

Clockwise from top left: 

Haywire Mac / Napoleon XIV / Jaz Coleman / Siouxsie Sioux

 

 

There are almost as many songs about being mad or going insane as there are about falling in love; so many in fact, that attempting to compile a full and definitive list of such would probably drive you crazy. This, therefore, is simply a short post in which I discuss a few of my favourite songs on the subject. 

 

I'm not saying they're the best four songs ever recorded to do with madness, but they are the ones that have most struck a chord with me. Note that they're arranged by release date and not in order of preference.

 

 

'Aint We Crazy?' by Harry McClintock (aka Haywire Mac) (Victor, 1928): click here to play.

 

"Ain't we crazy, ain't we crazy / This is the way we pass the time away  

Ain't we crazy, ain't we crazy / We're going to sing this song all night today."

 

Malcolm McLaren dedicated his 1983 album Duck Rock to Haywire Mac and insisted that I get hold of Hallelujah! I'm a Bum, (Rounder Records, 1981), a remastered compilation of some of McClintock's greatest songs - including 'Ain't We Crazy?' and 'The Big Rock Candy Mountain', for which he is probably best remembered today [1].

 

'Ain't We Crazy?' is a type of nonsense song, in which the singer is the kind of anti-Socratic hero whom Roland Barthes celebrates; i.e., a figure who abolishes within himself all fear of being branded a madman via an amusing disregard for that old spectre: logical contradiction [2]:

 

It was midnight on the ocean, not a streetcar was in sight 

And the sun was shining brightly, for it rained all day that night 

'Twas a summer night in winter, and the rain was snowing fast

And a barefoot boy with shoes on stood a-sitting in the grass.

 

Such a man, as Barthes says, would be the mockery of our society, which subscribes to a psychology of consistency and says firmly that you can't have your cake and eat it. 

 

 

'They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!', single by Napoleon XIV (Warner Bros. Records, 1966): click here to play.

 

"They're coming to take me away, ha-ha! / They're coming to take me away, ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha! 

To the funny farm / Where life is beautiful all the time ..."

 

Written and performed by Jerry Samuels (aka Napoleon XIV), this curious record was an instant smash in the US and UK and I loved to sing it to amuse myself and entertain friends as a child [3].

 

However, I very much doubt it would be made, released, or played today, living as we are in an era that is far more sensitive to issues surrounding mental health. Indeed, even at the time several radio stations stopped playing the song in response to complaints about its content. Predictably, the BBC also refused to play the record.  

The joke reveal at the end of the song is that it is not a departed lover who has caused the song's narrator to lose his mind, but a runaway dog ... 

 

 

'Happy House', by Siouxsie and the Banshees, single release from the album Kaleidoscope (Polydor, 1980): click here to play.

 

"This is the happy house / We're happy here in the happy house [...] 

It's safe and calm if you sing along ..." 

 

I was never a big Banshees fan, but I used to love to hear this song on the radio back in the day and as it was a Top 20 hit - peaking at number 17 in the UK Singles Chart - one heard it fairly often.    

 

I assumed at the time that the title was a synonym for an insane asylum - like funny farm, or loony bin - but later read in an interview with Siouxsie - who wrote the song with Steve Severin [4] - that, actually, it refers to a conventional family setting; to home, sweet home and the madness that unfolds therein beneath the veneer of normality and domestic bliss. 

 

It's interesting to note that the follow-up single, 'Christine' (released in May 1980 and also taken from Kaleidoscope), again dealt with the theme of madness; the lyrics being inspired by the story of a woman who reportedly had 22 different (often conflicting) personalities [5] - which explains why she is referred to in the song as a banana split lady (i.e., it has nothing to do with her having a sweet tooth).

 

 

'Madness', by Killing Joke, track 6 on the album What's THIS For ...! (E. G. / Polydor Records, 1981): click here to play the 2005 digitally remastered version.  

 

"This is madness / This is madness / This is madness / This is madness / This is madness ..." 

 

This track, despite the title, isn't actually about madness in general, but, rather, about Christianity as a very specific form of religious mania; the product of sick minds in which there is a need to believe in a dead God and life itself is interpreted as a sin. 

 

It is, if I'm honest, quite a challenging listen and will appeal only to a few. But then, as Nietzsche might say, to appreciate this track, the listener must be honest to the point of hardness so as to be able to endure the seriousness and intensity of Jaz Coleman's passion [6].

 

Th-th-th-th-that's all folks! [7]

Notes

 

[1] One of the very earliest posts on Torpedo the Ark - 5 May 2013 - was on Haywire Mac and his hobo vision of an earthly paradise (i.e., the Big Rock Candy Mountain): click here. 

 

[2] See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 3.

 

[3] The song was re-released in 1973, when I was ten-years-old, and that's probably when I remember it from - not 1966, when I was still singing nursery rhymes. However, I was a fan of at least one pop song released in that year; 'Yellow Submarine' by the Beatles.

 

[4] Guitarist John McGeoch (previously of Magazine) and drummer Budgie (previously of the Slits) also play no small part in creating the distinctive and atmospheric (post-punk) sound that makes this track so unforgettable.

 

[5] Christine Sizemore (née Costner) was an American woman who, in the 1950s, was diagnosed with what was then termed multiple personality disorder, but which is now known as dissociative identity disorder. Her case was depicted in the book The Three Faces of Eve (1957), written by her psychiatrists, Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley. The film of the that name, directed by Nunally Johnson and starring Joanne Woodward, was based on this work. Readers interested in hearing the track 'Christine', by Siouxsie and the Banshees, can click here. 

 

[6] I'm paraphrasing from Nietzsche's Preface to The Anti-Christ (1888).

 

[7] I have borrowed this closing phrase and title for the post from the animated short film series produced by Warner Bros. between the years 1930 and 1969, starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, et al. 

      Readers might be interested to know that the famous Loony Tunes theme was actually based on a crazy-sounding love song written in 1937 by Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin entitled 'The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down': click here for the version by the American jazz pianist and bandleader Eddy Duchin, with Lew Sherwood on vocals. And for an additional treat, courtesy of Larry David, click here.

 

From the Land of Cockaigne to the Big Rock Candy Mountains

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Land of Cockaigne (1567) 

Oil on panel (52 x 78 cm) 

First conceived in the imagination of medieval peasants and poets, Cockaigne is an immanent utopia wherein all desires are realised, sensual pleasures of every description readily available, and the daily restrictions placed upon one's freedom by priests and feudal masters are abolished - whilst they get their comeuppance at last.

Heaven might await the virtuous in some posthumous future, but Cockaigne was the collective dream of an earthly paradise - now/here, rather than nowhere - that encouraged the cardinal sins of lust, gluttony and idleness, thereby challenging the teaching that the good life had to involve constant toil on the one hand and abstinence on the other.       

At it's most carnivalesque, Cockaigne was said to be a topsy-turvy place in which the weather was always mild and even when it did rain, it rained custard; there were rivers of the finest wine flowing freely and ready-roasted pigs wandered about with carving knives conveniently placed in their back. According to some accounts, there was even a fountain of youth. Nobody works and yet nobody ever goes hungry.   

This idea of Cockaigne spread throughout Europe, with some interesting national variations; central to the Italian version, for example, which can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron (1353), is a mountain made of Parmesan cheese - which was handy for the people who lived there and spent the entire day preparing and eating pasta dishes.  

Of course, as with the appropriation of anarchic and amoral folk tales and their literary reworking as so-called fairy tales, eventually the myth of Cockaigne was taken up by the prigs and pedagogues of the emerging bourgeoisie and they turned it a fable condemning gluttony and sloth. Bruegel's depiction of Luilekkerland and its hedonistic inhabitants seen above, is intended as a warning against the spiritual emptiness that follows when we fall into a life of sin; whilst comic, it certainly isn't intended as a celebration of Cockaigne.

However, every now and again the idea resurfaces. In Haywire Mac's hobo-punk classic The Big Rock Candy Mountains (1928), for example, which beautifully sets out an American bum's vision of Cockaigne:

A far away land that's fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you can sleep out every night; a land where the cops all have wooden legs, the bulldogs have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs; a land where you never need change your socks and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks; there's a lake of stew, and of whiskey too - you can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe - a land where there ain't no short-handled shovels, axes, saws or picks and they hung the jerk who invented work. 

One might ask if a dream of a better life in a land of plenty isn't the primary factor at work within the ongoing migrant crisis; they cross the seas in little boats having mistaken Europe for Cockaigne ...

See: Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne, trans. Diane Webb, (Columbia University Press, 2001). 

For an earlier post on The Big Rock Candy Mountains, click here. 

The Big Rock Candy Mountains

 

I have always been strongly attracted to what we might refer to as the hobo ethic, most beautifully set out in the songs of Harry McClintock or, as he was popularly known, Haywire Mac.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1928) is primarily a bum's vision of an earthly paradise, but its appeal is wide and extensive. For what it offers is not simply a glimpse of a far away and imaginary land full of wonders, but what Deleuze terms an immanent utopia. That is to say, one that exists now/here, rather than nowhere; constituted in the bonds of love and laughter that tie us to other people.

The song thus affirms a radically fraternal politics that Whitman also sings of in his Leaves of Grass and which Lawrence calls a 'democracy of touch'. Such a model exists beyond liberalism, tied as it is to capital and the ownership of property, and it involves more than a sugar-topped apple pie humanism - even if it does have something distinctly American about it. 

It is also very much a queer model of democracy: one that is not, as I have indicated, anticipated as some kind of future historical development won through revolutionary struggle or social reform. The democracy of touch is, rather, fucked into existence between comrades and lovers - just as the flower is fucked into being between earth and sky; born, that is to say, of a new economy of bodies and their pleasures.

Anyway, I'll see you all this coming fall in the Big Rock Candy Mountains ...