Our fun run of thematically grouped entries in this series has been broken. Oh well, nothing lasts forever, tempus fugit, blah blah blah.
First of all, sorry for the weird proportions of this movie's poster—turns out that studios in 1925 hadn't standardized the size of promotional material. Second of all, let's forget about the poster and focus on how completely amazing this movie is! If you know anything about Charlie Chaplin, chances are the bits you know are from The Gold Rush. The bear, the boot-eating, the teetering cabin, and like half a dozen (at least) other great sequences are all here. In fact, of all the Chaplin films I've seen, The Gold Rush might be the one most built on comic setpieces like those I just named (give or take Modern Times, which is just full of great setpieces), and whose success is most dependent on those moments rather than the connective tissue wrapping them together into a film. And boy, is it successful on that metric. Though it lacks the virtuosic timing of something like Modern Times and the soaring pathos of City Lights or The Kid, I'd argue that The Gold Rush is the most purely fun entry in Chaplin's filmography. It's less the sort of movie where the laughter sticks in your throat, which is definitely true of both Chaplin's more satirical and his more sentimental works, and it's more the kind that gives you permission to belt out the deepest, giddiest guffaws at any given moment during the action. This playfully inviting spirit—a sort of camaraderie with the viewer—gives the film much of Chaplin's typical warmth even though it lacks some of the more saccharine elements usually present in his work, and I'd probably rank it as my favorite of his. There's stiff competition, to be sure, but The Gold Rush is just that good.
Well, this was unexpectedly devastating. I'd always heard Nashville described as either a comedy or a satire, sometimes both, and although I guess I should have known better than to expect a straightforward barrel of laughs from the director of M*A*S*H, I naively took those descriptions at face value. A barrel of laughs Nashville is not. That's not to say that it isn't funny (albeit usually funny in a sort of understated, observational way), and if we want to define a comedy as "a good time," then I suppose Nashville fits the bill, at least for about 95 percent of its duration. The film's characters are dim-witted and self-involved enough to be entertaining and often hilarious subjects to follow around; Altman and the actors (who actually wrote a lot of the movie's songs!) have also done a great job of capturing the feeling of live music, and the movie evokes a lively, if Looney-Tunesian, version of the old Nashville country scene that's a fun place to inhabit for 2.5-ish hours. But all those good times are really just window dressing for what is, at heart, an enormously cynical, bleak indictment of the state of America at its bicentennial. That dark heart wasn't clear to me until maybe fifteen minutes from the film's end, when the assassination attempt at the Parthenon concert pushes the violence and unrest percolating in the movie's subtext into the foreground. The truly damning moment is when the authorities shoo this violence to the periphery of the concert, and the audience all but ignores the events as new performers strike up a rousing, optimistic song, a giant American flag fluttering in the background. America isn't just ignorant about the problems that are ripping it apart; America doesn't care about the problems, so long as someone's there giving them a good time, telling them "don't worry." I mean, holy cow, that's just brutal. Once the ending hands you that thread, it's all too easy to pull at it until the fun of the whole movie unravels into the desperate state of the union address that it is at its core, a furious scream—"Wake up, America!" This is protest cinema at its most caustic, and it's also the kind of movie I wouldn't have been terribly receptive to even a couple years ago. But this is now, and at this specific moment in my life, even nearly forty years after its release, it hit me in the gut and made me want to cry. Does that mean I've gotten even more cynical than people told me I was a few years ago? Gosh. Hope not.
And now for something completely different (thankfully—I don't want to bum y'all out). The thing about Marx brothers movies (and this is no original insight on my part) is that they pretty much live and die by their smallest distinct parts, e.g. the jokes. And I'm not just talking about the quality of the jokes either (though that's obviously important); no, the success of these movies is as much dependent on the quantity of jokes as it is on the quality. It's the theory of comic density: shove enough jokes into a short enough space of time, and the humor builds a sort of momentum wherein it becomes less important that each individual is funny and more important that the frenetic pace is maintained. In any scene (like, for instance, this one), the film rushes through so many jokes so quickly that it stops mattering that a good portion of them are howlingly unfunny because it takes only a few seconds to hit a hilarious one again. Moreover, the jokes spring forward with such relentless disregard for continuity or logic that the structure of the joke flow itself becomes a sort of joke; the separate jokes are funny enough, but what's really funny is the zigging and zagging of the script as it dashes from one moment of anarchy to the next. Look, I know I haven't talked very specifically about Duck Soup, but the thing is, there's not much distinguishing Duck Soup from the rest of the Marx brothers pack except that, of all their movies, its jokes probably have the highest funny-to-unfunny ratio. The Marx brothers' emphasis on individual jokes at the expense of pretty much everything else means that none of their films really work as distinct films so much as highlight reels. In Duck Soup specifically, I suppose that the political setting allows for a few unique bits of parody and satire, but no more so than, say, the opera at A Night at the Opera. The film has the same sort of bland-but-successful cinematography as all the other films, too, the primary strategy of which is to just set up a camera and let the Marxes just do their thing with as little editing and camera flair as possible. None of this is a criticism; Duck Soup is a hilarious, madcap film that's well worth the watch. I guess I just don't have that much else to say besides, "Yeah, it's hilarious."
We've hit the 60 percent mark in this project. Woot woot! I'll be posting the next entry sometime next week, but until then, don't be shy if you have something to say. Or not. That's cool, too. Until next time!
You can read the previous entry in this series, #s 55-57, here.
Update: The next post, #s 61-63, is up! You can read it here.
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