Firefly does not break bricks

Rating: 7/10 (12 May 2008)

That was a fateful year, 1933. The world was on the edge of a great fall, of a deep dive, of a high jump into the abyss and the Marx Brothers could not resist and make fun of that fateful war coming, of that hateful man who had just been elected, the man with the little mustache, and our dear Groucho, the man with the big mustache played the other and won of course because the situation is totally reversed and the man with the big mustache is the leader of Freedonia, and he puts the old revolutionary uniforms out of the closets where they had been kept since the American Revolution to fight against the Italian-named ambassador of Sylvania, is it Transylvania or is it Pennsylvania, a Sylvania anyway, people who live in the woods like animals, aren't they? The time of prohibition is finished. Other more important things are at stake, freedom and healthy finances, or is it healthy embezzling? All that is kind of small and limited. In other words they are, these Marx Brothers, like burying themselves, getting out of touch. "You want to be a public nuisance?" They can't resist the offer. "How much does the job pay?" And that triggers one of those famous puns that will live forever and ever through eternity. "I have got a good mind to join the club and beat you over the head with it." You must say that is great humor, even if slightly twisted, if not frankly warped, crooked and distorted. And they don't even hesitate to edge onto the racial front and invent one of these slightly racist jokes that will survive the next atom apocalypse I guess. "The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs and that's why d**kies were born." That's deep, profound, inspired, admirable, isn't it. And since we are on that line, the line of compassion, sympathy and empathy, meditate on this one. "The workers of Freedonia are demanding shorter hours." Isn't that social? But the answer of the newly appointed Roman tyrant is astounding. "We'll start by cutting their lunch hour to twenty minutes." Who said that the Marx Brothers were not social-minded? Where are the liars? To produce such humor in 1933 is quite prophetic, prophetic of a catastrophe coming up the road. When the creative intelligentsia of a country is able to bring together in one of their comedies both racist remarks and anti-labor slogans you can be sure this country is doomed to die a difficult death and definitely labor hard and painfully to give birth and deliver the next phase of its history. The next phase will require fifty millions of dead people, victims and bodies to find some regeneration. A lot worse than all the human sacrifices of the Aztecs or the Mayas. The western world, when they do things in the bloody line, they know how to inundate the earth and the soil and the fields with good warm human blood and fertilize the crops with hot human ashes. Ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt, mess to mess, trash to trash. You can always make it a joke. But that kind of regeneration and rejuvenation through and via blood, blood, and blood again, war, war and war again is unworthy of a human mind, particularly of four human minds, those of the Marx Siblings who are more underlings than siblings in that line of inspiration. That's not the best film of these comedians and clowns and the subtlety of the discourse is definitely too fine for me to understand it, I guess, not to say appreciate it. They might have been better inspired to wait for Charles Chaplin to come with his Dictator and let this other comedian use real humane humor to debunk the tyrant. But that was many light years ahead of their antics. That was the last time the four siblings were together on the same screen. Zeppo Marx was to get out of the band or gang after this duck soup that killed the ducks for sure but produced no delicatessen soup.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines