Duck Soup movie review & film summary (1933)
My father loved the Marx Brothers above all other comedians or, indeed, all other movie stars. The first movie he ever took me to was "A Day at the Races."
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Roger Ebert
My father loved the Marx Brothers above all other comedians or,

indeed, all other movie stars. The first movie he ever took me to was “A

Day at the Races.” All I remember about that experience was the fact of my

father’s laughter. But there was something else, too, that I understood only

much later: The sound of his voice as he described the brothers. He used the

tone that people employ when they are talking about how someone got away with

something.

That

is the same tone I have heard, and used, in discussing such subjects as

“Some Like It Hot,” “The Producers,” “Blazing

Saddles,” “Airplane!,” Monty Python, Andy Kaufman, Saturday

Night Live, “South Park,” Howard Stern, “There’s Something About

Mary” and “Being John Malkovich” – -and even movies that are

only indirectly comedies, like “Pulp Fiction.” There is a kind of

admiration for material that dares something against the rules and yet is

obvious, irresistibly, funny. How much more anarchic the Marx Brothers must

have seemed in their time than we can understand today. They were among the

first to evoke that tone; you can see who the Marx Brothers inspired, but not

who they were inspired by, except indirectly by the rich traditions of music

hall, vaudeville and Yiddish comedy that nurtured them.

Movies

gave them a mass audience, and they were the instrument that translated what

was once essentially a Jewish style of humor into the dominant note of American

comedy. Although they were not taken as seriously, they were as surrealist as

Dali, as shocking as Stravinsky, as verbally outrageous as Gertrude Stein, as

alienated as Kafka. Because they worked the genres of slapstick and screwball,

they did not get the same kind of attention, but their effect on the popular

mind was probably more influential. “As an absurdist essay on politics and

warfare,” wrote the British critic Patrick McCray, ” `Duck Soup’ can

stand alongside (or even above) the works of Beckett and Ionesco.”

The

Marx Brothers created a body of work in which individual films are like slices

from the whole, but “Duck Soup” (1933) is probably the best. It

represents a turning point in their movie work; it was their last film for

Paramount, and the last in which all of the scenes directly involved the

brothers. When it was a box office disappointment, they moved over to MGM,

where production chief Irving Thalberg ordered their plots to find room for

conventional romantic couples, as if audiences could only take so much Marx

before they demanded the mediocre (Buster Keaton’s sound comedies for MGM

suffered from the same meddling and dilution).

“A

Night at the Opera” (1935) their first MGM film, contains some of their

best work, yes, but in watching it I fast-forward over the sappy interludes

involving Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones. In “Duck Soup” there are no

sequences I can skip; the movie is funny from beginning to end.

To

describe the plot would be an exercise in futility, since a Marx Brothers movie

exists in moments, bits, sequences, business and dialogue, not in

comprehensible stories. Very briefly, “Duck Soup” stars Groucho as

Rufus T. Firefly, who becomes dictator of Fredonia under the sponsorship of the

rich Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont, the brothers’ tireless and irreplaceable

foil). Neighboring Sylvania and its Ambassador Trintino (Louis Calhern) have

designs on the country, and Trintino hires Harpo and Chico as spies. This

flimsy premise provides a clothesline for one inspired sequence after another,

including sustained examples of Groucho’s puns and sneaky double entendres. But

it also supports a couple of wordless physical sequences that probably have

their roots in the vaudeville acts the brothers performed and saw years

earlier.

One

is the three-hat routine involving Chico and Harpo and the straight man Edgar

Kennedy (who started with Mack Sennett and Chaplin). Chico, as a spy,

inexplicably adopts the cover of a peanut vendor, and Harpo is a passerby.

Kennedy has the lemonade cart next to Chico’s peanut cart, and the brothers

make his life miserable in a routine that involves their three hats changing

position as quickly as the cards in a monte game.

The

other sequence is one of the gems of the first century of film. Harpo disguises

himself as Groucho, and for reasons much too complicated to explain, sneaks

into Mrs. Teasdale’s, tries to break into a safe and shatters a mirror. Groucho

himself comes downstairs to investigate. Harpo is standing inside the frame of

the broken mirror, and tries to avoid detection by pretending to be Groucho’s

reflection. This leads to a sustained pantomime involving flawless timing, as

Groucho tries to catch the reflection in an error, and Harpo matches every

move. Finally, in a perfect escalation of zaniness, Chico blunders into the

frame, also dressed as Groucho.

It

is impossible to discuss Groucho’s dialogue without quoting it, and pointless

to quote it since Groucho’s delivery is essential to the effect. He played an

utterly irreverent character whose speech was at the mercy of puns, insults and

bawdy insinuations that tiptoed just this side of the censors (as when Rufus T.

Firefly tantalizes Mrs. Teasdale with visions of marriage and then confesses,

“All I can offer you is a Rufus over your head”). Many gifted comedy

writers, including S.J. Perelman, labored over the Marx Brothers movie scripts,

but all their dialogue had its origins in Groucho’s own speaking style,

perfected over the years.

In

1972 I was able to spend some time with Groucho, for a profile for Esquire. He

was then 81, and still unmistakably occupying the persona he had made famous.

(Who he was in private remains a mystery to me; in public he was always

onstage.) His first words to me could have been said in more or less the same

way by Rufus T. Firefly: “Esquire isn’t my favorite magazine, you know.

Interviews are really murder. They keep asking you questions. I could be

brought up on a rape charge. I don’t mind a hatchet job, if it’s truthful.Couldyou pin a rape charge on me? Could

you try? I’d appreciate it. You don’t do any dental work, do you? I have to go

to the dentist before I go to France.”

In

two sessions separated by a couple of weeks, I heard him talk for hours at a

time, always in the same way, circling his material looking for loopholes. I

began to think of him as a soloist, and speech as his instrument. Like a good musician,

he no longer had to think of the notes; he worked in terms of timing and the

through-line, and questions did not inspire answers but improvisations.

Groucho

as a comedian would have been impossible in the silent era, just as Chaplin and

Keaton adapted only uncertainly to sound. And yet in appearance the three

essential brothers (Zeppo seemed superfluous) were like caricatures from the

silent era. Harpo of course was always silent anyway. Chico had the Italian

persona, with the curly hair and Pinocchio hat. And Groucho was such an

artificial creation, with his bold slash of a greasepaint mustache, his

eyebrows and his cigar. His look was so bizarre it wasn’t makeup so much as a

mask; there are times during the mirror sequence in “Duck Soup” when

we have to ask ourselves which one is the real Groucho.

Dated

as “Duck Soup” inevitably is in some respects, it has moments that

seem startlingly modern, as when Groucho calls for help during the closing

battle sequence, and the response is stock footage edited together out of

newsreel shots of fire engines, elephants, motorcycles, you name it. There is

an odd moment when Harpo shows Groucho a doghouse tattooed on his stomach, and

in a special effect a real dog emerges and barks at him. The brothers broke the

classical structure of movie comedy and glued it back again haphazardly, and

nothing was ever the same.

Note:

Why the title? The critic Tim Dirks explains: “It is claimed that Groucho

provided the following recipe: `Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but

no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you’ll duck soup the rest of

your life.’ “