Roy Blount Jr.: An expert Marx man

Roy Blount Jr., a prolific author and panelist on NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” deconstructs the Marx Brothers’ magic in his latest book, “Hail, Hail Euphoria: Presenting the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the Greatest War Movie Ever Made.”

Why another book about the Marx Brothers?

It’s a book about “Duck Soup”; I don’t think there is a book about just “Duck Soup.” People generally think it’s the best Marx Brothers movie. This guy, Bob Miller [Hyperion’s founding publisher], started a line of books, which was going to be about one writer writing about one thing, and he asked me what I wanted to write about, and I said I wanted to write about “Duck Soup” off the top of my head. So I did. I’ve always been interested in [director] Leo McCarey. He worked with just about every comic actor of his time. He got Laurel and Hardy together, and he worked with W.C. Fields and Mae West and Harold Lloyd and made a wide variety of movies, and I always thought he never got enough attention.

Why do you think McCarey hasn’t gotten as much attention as his peers?

In his day, everybody appreciated him; other directors did. He made one of the best screwball comedies — “The Awful Truth” — and he made a wonderful movie, “Ruggles of Red Gap” with Charles Laughton. They’re all different, so it’s hard to say what his signature style was. His use of the camera and other director stuff was not his strong suit. He was good with comic actors. Also he testified for the House Un-American Activities Committee. He didn’t name names, but that probably contributed to the lack of enthusiasm for him. You know what a Capra movie is or the Lubitsch touch, but the McCarey touch is a little harder to put your finger on. What he did do was draw out the talents of a lot of comic actors.

Your book illuminates how many people’s talents actually went into making the Marx Brothers.

Lots of different writers. Clearly a lot of it was worked up ahead of time at McCarey’s beach house. We’re not even sure who was involved in it. A lot of the good lines come from [Bert] Kalmar and [Harry] Ruby’s scripts, but the best part — the mirror scene [in which Harpo pretends to be Groucho’s mirror image] — wasn’t written. I’m sure McCarey worked it out. It may have been based on an old vaudeville routine. It was McCarey setting something up for Harpo and Groucho and turning them loose to do as well as they could.

Your subtitle that this was the greatest war movie ever made — was that ironic?

I wanted them to insert “27^th greatest war movie,” but there wasn’t room on the cover. It was actually picked by Military History magazine as the 27^th greatest war movie, and [François] Truffaut said the war movies that have an antiwar effect are the few that made war farcical — [ Charlie Chaplin’s] “Shoulder Arms” and “Duck Soup” being two of the four he mentioned. I think there’s something about “Duck Soup” that doesn’t draw an obvious moral. They like fighting the war, they get off on it, and they win it. So it seems to me to get at the spirit in which people get entrapped in war better than some of the serious war movies. Also there’s the joke where Groucho says, “I can’t stop the war — I’ve paid a month’s rent on the battlefield,” which could be applied to the Iraq war.

So is this your favorite Marx Brothers film? How come?

Yeah, definitely. Partly because of the lack of a sappy romantic subplot. It’s just sheer comedy. It doesn’t make a point. They’re not trying to save somebody’s circus for them or save somebody’s opera career; they’re just kidding around in a wild sort of way, they’re just like kids playing war. And there’s something bracing and scary about that, but it also makes me smile every time I turn that movie back on. It’s hard to get back into the spirit of child’s play, and that’s what this movie does, without it being cute, without it being sweet. It’s child’s play without any kind of softening.

You write a column for a Southern lifestyle magazine called Garden & Gun. I’m having a hard time grokking that. Why Garden & Gun?

There was a gay bar in Charleston, S.C., called Garden & Gun that everybody — gay and straight — used to go to at midnight, as I understand it. So it’s kind of a joke name for a magazine, but then they have lots of gardening stuff and lots of gun stuff. I tend to do the gardening stuff. I just wrote a column about weeds.

Were you for them or against them?

Well, I enjoy pulling them up. I heard on public radio recently, there’s a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It’s in Vermont. I don’t think I’d be very good at Weed Dating.

When I weed, I like to get off into my own head. For one thing, my wife plants and I have trouble telling which plants are weeds and which are my favorite plants. So I tend to hop around and grab the weeds that I know are weeds. So I don’t weed all that linearly. I tend to weed haphazardly.

I would think that having a wife would also make you not such a good Weed Dater.

Exactly. I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.

More Zen.

Yes. What is the sound of one hand weeding?

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