The Seventh Wave, Episode 22, sneak peek
They got off to a bad start when they were young. Before they met for the first time they got into wrangles. In those days they were critics just beginning to be directors; they argued about movies as well as making them. Francis wrote in American Film magazine that Palermo’s debut feature film The Layabouts owed too much to the great Federico Fellini, but was a much inferior version of I Vitelloni, “not so much carnivalesque as circus slapstick.” Paolo wrote in the British magazine Sight & Sound that Arkine’s first film Monsieur Canard “was so bourgeois that it made François Truffaut look like a radical.” And Arkady published an essay in Cahiers du Cinéma accusing Francis’s Carmen, a reimagining of the opera set in an imaginary, magic-realist American city, of being “too didactically allegorical… more overblown politics than operatic art.”
By an extraordinary coincidence the three articles came out almost simultaneously, and were all named after movies starring the immortal Groucho, Chico and Harpo. The Cahiers editors gave Arkady’s critique of Francis the title Une Nuit à l’Opéra, while Francis’s piece on Palermo was titled At the Circus, and Paolo’s attack on Arkady’s Canard was headlined Duck Soup. Soon afterwards, at a film festival in Deauville, France, the three young directors met, got on extraordinary well, and became inseparable pals. After that, their admirers nicknamed them the Marx Brothers. And once there was a magazine cover photo of the three of them, captioned The Axis of Evil. They all immediately loved that.