Take One (Nov 1977)

et Dumont’s bosom-bank will finance orgies with the first fifty available dolls. At least fifty would be required if the plaintive dissatisfaction of every pliant girl is to be drowned in the apprehensive rapture of those waiting. The labelled kidding of comedy barely disguises a plan of unmitigated depravity. Groucho’s need for money is constitutional, not spendthrift. It has as little restraint as it sees use. Money is balm, shameless and undiscriminating—no wonder he took to game shows and their orgasmic bliss at winning. In slower, more intimate films—with the Brothers he is never alone, always a public Prometheus gnawed at by frustration and interference—he could quickly become a murderer. He is midway between Jarry’s Pere Ubu and Monsieur Verdoux, and he is capable of a cruelty to astonish Lugosi or Vincent Price. Imagine what a sinister ‘Concentration Camp Erhardt’ he might have made. That abandoning of warmth and humanity would permit any outrage. He is amoral, perverse and accurate; he would make candies out of nipples. Groucho’s lurid persona could have sustained gruesome exploitation pictures; chainsaws and thumbscrews could have performed his dreams without drooling or hesitation. A natural, innate sadism flowers from his pain, and Margaret Dumont is the placid sponge for outrage and acid, a bourgeoise who absorbs every abuse invented by her tortured son. He frets over filching her money so as not to admit that she would give it to him as part of herself. Not that Groucho would use or spend money. He abides only by man’s chronic hope for it. He is as faithful and instinctive an adherent of it as a Dostoyevksy gambler: thus the Brothers Marx, with patricide and spiritual quest reduced to slapstick and how many people can you cram into a cabin. We might even add that Julius Henry is a dutiful model for old Karl’s diagnosis of money as a drug that has overwhelmed all man’s ulterior or higher motives. The money imperative has made Groucho into a bigot, a bore, as soiled as faecal coins, but a visionary—the absurdity is so exactly pitched that we laugh without being wounded by the scathing comment on our own gentlemanly tact with money. Groucho would have made a fine Godfather, but no councillor could ever persuade him to give to charity as a trade-off with public hypocrisy. Whereas sex has already ravaged Groucho. What is that crouched walk but the result of massive rupture or the effort to nurse putrid social disease? Yet Groucho still submits formal application to be passionate, brimming and an ardent consumer of women—it is the actual absence of sensuality that makes his turning murderer all the more certain. But Groucho’s most crushing handicap is his sole asset: words, speech, the monotonous generating of quips, barbs and ripostes. He masturbates with sharp answers and his own hand comes away in bloody shreds. In Monkey Business, for instance, he contrives this goading back-chat with the ship’s captain: GROUCHO: | want to register a complaint. CAPTAIN: Why, what’s the matter? GROUCHO: Matter enough. Do you know who sneaked into my stateroom at three this morning? CAPTAIN: Who did? GROUCHO: Nobody, and that’s my complaint. I’m young, | want gaiety, laughter, ha-cha-cha. | want to dance. | want to dance till the cows come home. It is authentic Groucho, trapping others into feeding him lines, unable to converse, but an isolated master at inside-out word battles, computer Hal in overdrive. The high, harrowed voice that claims to have been left out of abandon and wildness is literary, donnish even, and as ignorant of life as the plummy Hitchcock. Its regret is a sham, for the shrivelled character is appalled and threatened by experience. In the event, Groucho is confounded by women, sex is only an idea, like money, that he is the obedient hound of. When he comes within reach of the quarry, he is perplexed and abashed. In Duck Soup, he falls in with one hot little number, evidently willing and ha-cha-cha, but his sexual voice is throttled by cliché-shuffling and self-sufficient verbal intercourse. Groucho will always make a pun before he does a woman; he is so tainted, it amounts to sterility: GROUCHO: | could dance with you till the cows come home. On second thoughts I’d rather dance with the cows till you come home. At moments of opportunity, Groucho’s smouldering prick backs off, piercing himself. In Monkey Business, he emerges from Thelma Todd's closet to find that she wants life, laughter and gaiety, and needs no wooing. Too much for Groucho. He withdraws into surrealist anonymity: GROUCHO: Madam, before | get through with you, you will have a clear case for divorce, and so will my wife. Now the 42 first thing to do is to arrange for a settlement. You take the children, your husband takes the house, Junior burns down the house, you take the insurance, and | take you. LUCILLE: But | haven’t any children. GROUCHO: That’s just the trouble with this country. You haven't any children, and as for me, |’m going back in the closet where men are empty overcoats. That is one of the saddest and most fatalistic conclusions to romance in. the cinema, and it shows us a travesty of a lover pursuing activity, sexual overture and monetary lust to subdue the certainty that all action is as illusory and pointless as that of phantom shapes on a screen. Groucho’s comedy is incidental to a screen presence of suppressed agony and melancholy that could lapse into inertia or destroy the rest of the world in retaliation. He was a formative screen personality, our most touching, sardonic and doomed anti-hero. He lingers in Bogart’s jaunty cynics, even if he is far more honest. He is there in Verdoux and Charles Foster Kane, aman quite as alarmed by reality and just as entranced by fantastic authority. He is Jerry Lewis’s ancestor, and he might be Norman Bates after thirty years in the asylum. And Groucho could have played nearly any protagonist from Bunuel—priapic thrust turning to rubber, mordant longing that hovers between rape and flowers, and booby traps dogging every act of assertion: Gaston Modot in L’‘Age d’Or, Archibaldo, El, Robinson Crusoe (with Chico as Friday), Nazarin, husband to Belle de Jour and Fernando Rey’s several respectable decadents. Groucho is the wreck of romance and achievement, spreadeagled in comedies, howling out jokes till _the films ceased. What a tidy, bitter horror that the real old man died hedged in by the tortuous contest of awoman and his money—‘Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.’ What a waste if we overlooked his being one of the few movie actors who surpassed photographic presence and gave us something so much more and less than a man that we discover more about ourselves. If Groucho is horrifying it is because he accelerates modern man to the point of self-destruct and ad nauseam, without ever pausing for or believing in satisfaction. Groucho is the romantic who has sadly survived the great orgy that extinguished desire and hope. Yet he wears both, still, in tatters, too proud and damaged to weep, driven instead into the contemptuous sneer of amusement. HURLOCK &. | CINE W@)ELD. 13 ARCADIA ROAD — OLD GREENWICH, CONN. 06870 From the Novel by JOHN WYNDHAM TRIFFIDS, INVADEY WORLD!‘ MU Ww, o. . 1% re P| Seer e y) 7 +e Sh wi, i ¢: aa va Hi \S& @ Pry fa Lae, 4 A SF ag 5 ee be i ’ \ UNwERSE TURNED INTO GARDEN OF TERROR! TRIFFIDS... HORRENDOUS PLANT-TYPE THINGS THAT KNow... GROW wnWALK... TALK... TALK AND KILL EVERYTHING IN THEIR PATH ! IN COLOR Starring Howard KEEL + Nicole MAUREY Janette SCOTT + Kieron MOORE Directed by STEVE SEKELY In Canada: INTERNATIONAL FILM DISTRIBUTORS, LTD., SALES AGENTS 175 BLOOR ST. EAST — TORONTO, ONTARIO M4W 1C8 TELEPHONE (416) 962-4061