Duck Soup (1933)

Director: Leo McCarey                          Writers: Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby
Film Score: John Leipold                       Cinematography: Henry Sharp
Starring: The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern and Edgar Kennedy

I have to start, first off, by saying that I am not a big fan of slapstick. I usually prefer something a little more cerebral from my comedy. Deadpan, from Buster Keaton to Albert Brooks, is more my preference. So, when it comes to reviewing the Marx Brothers I feel somewhat out of my element. But in the end I can only rely on what I believe about my purpose here. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that, to feel that what is in your heart is true for all men, that is genius. I do feel that there are universal truths about art, and so the critic’s function is, hopefully, to make those truths known to all. That’s probably a little deep for a comedy, but comedy is art too.

What struck me immediately about Duck Soup is wondering what might have been. The film appears to be butchered in the editing, though that could simply have been due to the impossibility of continuity given the anarchy of the Marx Brothers. But there was also the script itself. I’ve read where their best films came from material they had used on vaudeville and so a certain amount of going through the motions is in evidence by all of the brothers. There are obvious mistakes that apparently were never given another take, and I found myself feeling a strange dislike for Harpo’s destructiveness.

Duck Soup is, of course, the Marx Brothers’ classic story of Freedonia and its struggle for solvency. The longsuffering Margaret Dumont has loaned the government money on the condition that Groucho be put in charge. Vying for the affections of Dumont with Groucho is the great Louis Calhern playing the ambassador to Sylvania. Their conflict pulls the two countries into war by the end of the film, preceded by a full-blown musical number celebrating the glories of war. In fact, the entire film can be seen as an allegory of the inefficiency of government and the rigid diplomacy of monarchies that plunged the world into war in 1914.

My favorite moments, by far, are those with Groucho. Chico’s need to continuously point out his own jokes wears quickly, and the slapstick that he and Harpo perform together is tedious. Groucho’s wordplay, however, is marvelous and definitely the high points of the film, even though my favorite bit is the panning over the shoes by the bed in one of Harpo’s scenes. Which brings up an aspect of the film that is slightly eerie. As a child of the seventies, having grown up on sit-coms with laugh tracks, it’s quite an experience to hear the rapid-fire comedy in the film being delivered into a void of silence. Nevertheless, there is no denying the effectiveness of all the brothers in their individual comedic realms, and the exhilaration of the onscreen anarchy that the four of them created.

William Wolf’s essay in The A List puts the film in the historical perspective of the brothers’ career, the film’s lack of box office success ending their relationship with Paramount and heading them into more structured scripts at MGM under Irving Thalberg. He takes the reader though some of the great moments of the film without really explaining what makes them great, but that’s not a knock. The Marx Brothers really have to be experienced to be understood, and for sheer energy and zaniness, Duck Soup is a peak Marx Brothers experience.