Maggie: A Girl of the Screen

The shade of Stephen Crane will perhaps forgive me for that, for I come in praise of Margaret Dumont. Arguably the greatest “straight-man” in the business. That paragon of public virtue who stood more abuse—verbal and physical—from Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo (not to mention the likes of W.C. Fields) than any one woman should ever have to shoulder alone.

Now, Groucho always maintained that she never understood any of the jokes or why their audiences laughed (an image even Dumont was happy to feed the press). But I challenge you to watch any scene in which she appears opposite the Bros. Marx and convince yourself that’s a true picture of her. It’s possible—just barely—for an actor to get by on that sort of thing maybe once, if the director is clever enough to elicit a performance out of confusion or wooden-headness. But try making a career of it.

No, she got the jokes and then some. No one who was that much of a thickie could have performed so knowingly and with such grace and comedic polish. Imagine building an entire performing life out of being the butt of the joke. (And a bigger butt there never was, so to speak; cf. the “stateroom scene” in A Night at the Opera.) Was anything meaner ever said of a dowager than Groucho’s “Remember, you're fighting for this woman’s honor, which is probably more than she ever did” in Duck Soup? Dumont’s reactions are models of comic timing. And if they’re a little broad, as though she was still playing to the back of house on Broadway, that doesn’t detract from her charm. After all, was Groucho subtle? Was Chico? How about Harpo?

I was trying to resist the urge to quote endlessly from the movies themselves, but I’ve had to succumb to temptation. After all, it's the only way to illustrate what that sainted woman had to bear from the lips of the Great Grouch.

In Duck Soup:
Groucho: Not that I care, but where is your husband?
Dumont: Why, he's dead.
Groucho: I bet he's just using that as an excuse.
Dumont: I was with him to the very end.
Groucho: No wonder he passed away.
Dumont: I held him in my arms and kissed him.
Groucho: Oh, I see, then it was murder.

Dumont: As chairwoman of the reception committee, I welcome you with open arms.
Groucho: Is that so? How late do you stay open?

Groucho: I suppose you would think me a sentimental old fluff, but, uh, would you mind giving me lock of your hair?
Dumont: A lock of my hair? Why, I had no idea—
Groucho: I'm letting you off easy: I was going to ask for the whole wig.


In A Night at the Opera:
Groucho: That woman? Do you know why I sat with her? Because she reminded me of you.
Dumont: Really?
Groucho: Of course, that's why I'm sitting here with you. Because you remind me of you. Your eyes, your throat, your lips! Everything about you reminds me of you. Except you. How do you account for that? (Aside to the audience) If she figures that one out, she's good.

And my personal favorite (a line I pull on my companions in restaurants to this day):
Groucho: Nine dollars and thirty cents? This is an outrage! If I were you, I wouldn’t pay it.

But she could take it—luckily for us. A Marx Bros. movie without her is a poor thing, indeed. (Well, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers had Thelma Todd, but that’s a wholly different animal, if you’ll pardon the expression. Todd, a spunky comedian in her own right, could more than hold her own, especially with Groucho; their demented tango on the balcony in Horse Feathers is a thing of beauty.) Maggie even has a fan club. And it may give you a measure of the affection and esteem with which Groucho regarded her that he hired her to do a dialogue sketch with him on a comedy show in the 1960s; she died a few days later. Happy, one hopes, in the knowledge that she still had it.

Even if she didn’t get the jokes, she was herself funny as hell. Groucho never had a better foil. That alone cements her place in movie history. If only for that, she will ever be immortal.

Say goodbye to Hollywood

Tinseltown is apparently about to quite happily slit its own throat.

Good riddance, you say? Ah, but...

According to a report on this evening’s Marketplace, audiences are telling the studios that for any number of reasons—paid advertising on the screen, cell-phone usage, obnoxious spectator behavior in general—they now opt to go out only to so-called “event movies,” preferring to wait for the smaller films to be released on DVD.

I’m not sure I understand the reasoning here, given that Hollywood has long since all but stopped making “small” movies (read: movies about human beings) in favor of big special-effects driven blockbusters. But the news gives studio execs the perfect excuse to jettison everything that can’t be summed up in a single hyperbolic sentence (“It’s King Kong Meets Harry Potter”) and marketed via Burger King.

The old canard “The audience is never wrong” has always been risible. But then, the suits running (ruining?) the studios since the 1960s are businessmen only. Long gone the days when the moguls made movies not merely for profit, but because they loved making movies. They were vulgar, despotic, unlettered and often foolish—but they were not MBAs.

Of course, the gradual debasing of American movies—which in turn degrade the culture of the rest of the globe—is largely due to the audience itself. American literacy’s decline has affected not only the bestseller lists but also the content of popular art. If the slobs go only to see Mission: Impossible and the studios (rightly) aim their product at adolescent boys, what hope does Spike Lee have in the marketplace? I’ll set you a scenario:

Imagine if you will that the current, self-immolating mind-set gripping the studios had taken hold in 1971 rather than now.

There would have been no Godfather. No McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

No Taxi Driver, Harry & Tonto, Godfather Part II.

No French Connection, Cabaret, Klute, Nashville, The Hospital, Mean Streets, Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti, Badlands, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Network, Paper Moon, Days of Heaven, Shampoo, Chinatown, Fiddler on the Roof, The Driver, “Save the Tiger,” Sugarland Express, Young Frankenstein, The Last Detail, The China Syndrome, The Sting, An Unmarried Woman, All That Jazz, A Little Romance, Thieves Like Us. Not even a Frenzy or a Family Plot.

In short, none of the movies that define the early-to-mid 1970s as the last great period of individualized—or at the very least, gutsy—American filmmaking. At best, they might have received two-week engagements or gone straight to video.

I’m not against fantasy—far from it. I love the Star Wars movies. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my five favorite movies. The best new flick I saw last year was Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But as a steady diet, even these superior movies would rot your teeth. They should be part of the feast—dessert, if you will. There should also be main courses, rich in character, dialogue, visual acuity, human conflict and emotional truth. Imagine a world in which the contenders for the Best Picture Oscar are the likes of Twister, Days of Thunder, Jurassic Park II and Independence Day.

I’ve all but given up going to the movies myself, which at one time was the most pleasurable activity in my life—not because there aren’t enough mind-numbing special effects spectaculars but because there are too many. Well, that and the paid advertising, the cell-phone usage, the obnoxious behavior of my fellow spectators...

The biggest unreported irony, to me, is that the aging Baby-Boom audience wants desperately to see itself reflected on the screen. If the kids turn the latest lame live comic book into a blockbuster, it will spawn two sequels and a half-dozen imitations. Yet every time a small, human-driven movie attains a wide audience, no one follows up on that success with anything like it. Instead, the studio execs call it “a non-recurring phenomenon,” shrug, and go back to the enthralling fun of cobbling up another Home Alone. The mature audience finally gets the message, and their movie-going habit dies.

In Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson has this to say to a screenwriter about the end of silent movies: “You’ve made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there’s a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongue.” With a few modifications, that speech could serve as the epitaph of the so-called New Hollywood.

If the new thinking prevails, I may never go to the movies again.

Congratulations, assholes. You’ve just killed off an entire segment of your audience. Now do us all a favor and commit hara-kiri for good.