Four Cavorters

WHY A DUCK?

edited by RICHARD J. ANOBILE

288 pages. New York Graphic Society.

$7.95.

T.S. Eliot begged him for an autographed picture. Thornton Wilder found him sequestered in Finnegans Wake.* The first man on the moon mimicked his fluid slouch. Clearly, Groucho Marx is a man of parts, and eight of those parts are preserved in this collection of uncritical, oversized photographs and classic film routines.

Why A Duck? divides a genre into four cavorters: Zeppo, once charitably labeled the Good Looking One; Harpo, Rumpelstiltskin with mild satyriasis; Chico, the Italian Defamation League; and the great, nay immoral Groucho. Under his pun-fulfilled guidance the boys carom delightfully from the primitive surrealism of The Cocoanuts on beyond that neglected antiwar pageant Duck Soup, to the classic double bill, A Day At The Races and A Night At The Opera.

Yet nonsense and nostalgia are ultimately contradictions in terms. Even Groucho, whose verballistics remain formidable, was not meant to swing on the printed page. In A Night At The Opera an exchange occurs:

Chico: What'll I say?

Groucho: Tell 'em you're not here.

Chico: Suppose they don't believe me?

Groucho: They'll believe you when you start talking.

In a sense, that is what happens in Why A Duck? The illustrations are the still life of the party. But as the brothers deliver their lines, now entombed in comic-strip balloons, both timing and inflection--the soul of cinematic wit--vanish. Those unacquainted with the films cannot hope to comprehend the fond archaeology of Why A Duck? No, this is a trigger for memories, a bright souvenir for the ages--the ages well above 30. Plus those youthful Marxists who flyspeck television listings for sporadic, interrupted revivals. Other coffee tables need not apply.

qedStefan Kanfer

* "This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down in the living detch."

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