Linder belongs to a comic tradition in which performers played either ‘themselves’ or a consistent character from film to film. As with Viva’s passing of the paper to Lucie in Duelle, the gesture Firefly makes to help Pinky maintain his fiction is precisely the gesture which reveals Firefly has not been duped.ĭuck Soup’s mirror routine actually originates in Max Linder’s Seven Years Bad Luck (1921), but the effect there is quite different, Linder’s version missing that element of play which distinguishes McCarey’s. At one point, both men remove their hats and bow when Pinky accidentally drops his hat, Firefly picks it up and hands it back to him, something Pinky acknowledges with a friendly nod. As the scene progresses, it becomes clear that Firefly, far from being fooled by this ploy, regards the whole thing as a game.
Since Pinky is disguised as Firefly, he attempts to convince the latter that what he’s seeing is actually a mirror reflection. Firefly ( Groucho Marx) confronts Pinky ( Harpo Marx) across a space which had, until a few seconds ago, contained a mirror. In perhaps the film’s most famous scene, Rufus T. This gesture irresistibly reminded me of one in Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933). But before Lucie can produce the required object, Viva casually reaches into her own pocket, pulls out a few scraps of blank paper, and hands them to Lucie, who acknowledges the gift with a nod of her head.
Flourishing a pen, she reaches into her jacket pocket and attempts to locate that indispensable accessory for any self-respecting journalist, a notebook.
Night porter turned amateur detective Lucie ( Hermine Karagheuz) has followed the mysterious Viva ( Bulle Ogier) into a gambling den, and approached her claiming to be researching an article about casinos. While watching Jacques Rivette’s Duelle (1975) a few days after the director passed away, I found myself laughing out loud at a moment which hadn’t struck me as particularly funny during either of my previous viewings.
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