Duck Soup (1933)

(On VHS, September 2000) In humor, there’s a tendency to assume that everything relevant was invented recently, but this Marx Brothers film shows that most comedy tactics were used well before our birth. Duck Soup isn’t a film to see for a strong plot (there isn’t one beyond stringing together a few vignettes), original characters (the Marx brothers basically play their specialties; Groucho with his verbal deftness, Guido with his pantomime and Chico somewhere in between) or cinematic qualities (though there are a few surprisingly modern sequences). But is it funny? Definitely. Enough to track down the film and see it as a group. You’ll be quoting from it for days after.

(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, January 2021) I was a bit worried about watching Duck Soup again—I first saw it twenty years ago, before I got interested in classic Hollywood or most other Marx Brothers movies, and I didn’t want another, much better-informed look to bring down my opinion of the film. I shouldn’t have been worried: despite being far more familiar with Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo than I was back then, Duck Soup remains one of their finest achievements.   Groucho defies convention at every opportunity as Rufus T. Firefly, dropping quips without a care in the world and indulging in still-amazing wordplay. The world of the Marx Brothers seems even more fantastic in Duck Soup than in other films, as they go for nationwide satire depicting how the nations of Freedonia and Sylvania are brought to the brink of war. Political satire and a wild war sequence combine in the last of the Brothers’ Paramount films—perhaps the slickest expression of their anarchic brand of comedy before MGM put them under contract and inside a more rigorous formula. While I think that some Marx Brothers had better individual showcases in other films (Harpo, in particular, seems ill served by this episode), Duck Soup is perhaps better at seeing them work with each other—the terrific “mirror” scene being the anthology-worthy illustration of that. Plenty of comic set-pieces pepper the film, but it’s the somewhat more mature tone—with a big helping of disregard for patriotic values—that makes Duck Soup just a bit more endearing to contemporary audiences. I loved it in 2000; I still love it in 2021.