Review of Duck Soup (1933) by Paul B — 01 Aug 2009

Wall-to-wall crazy brilliance from beginning to end. This film came at the perfect moment in the Marx brothers' careers. Having already made a few talking motion pictures, they had mastered the form and were free to do with it what they liked.

At the top of their game comedically, they didn't have to share the story with a boring drama, romance, or anything else sensible. The film is just over an hour long, which is the perfect length; laughter of this magnitude begins to hurt if it goes on too long.

This might be the funniest movie ever made. Innumerable priceless one-liners from Groucho, along with plenty of brilliant exchanges between Groucho and Chico, as well as the always wonderful silent comedy of Harpo--they never seem to hit a false note, no matter how far into left field they go with their ideas.

Just about everyone in the movie is insane, so it's important to have at least one "straight man" to provide a voice of reason and to remind the audience that there are still normal people in the world.

Zeppo fills this thankless role admirably; in fact, something I can't really define seems to be missing from the movies the other brothers made without him. He puts up with everything without losing his dignity, and gently reminds characters of where the plot is going, which they would never know on their own and probably don't care about anyway.

We do. Zeppo is onscreen just enough to give us a break from laughing and to move the story forward to its conclusion. The story itself is perhaps the ultimate anti-war statement in the movies, just because it goes for the jugular: war is insanity, and the politics that begin wars are often insane as well.

Anti-war movies are often angry, but this one mocks the nature of war with big-hearted slapstick. It also does so with a fantastic spoof of an early 30's Hollywood musical number. Making fun of musicals was a funny idea; making fun of war was brilliant.

The real genius was combining the two, so that on another level it works as a stab at Hollywood itself, which tends to reduce both war and music to pageantry. This is a comedy of bold strokes and little moments, a masterpiece that creates a movie world fit for all manner of hilarious possibilities.

Something like this cannot be duplicated.