"Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Rating: 9/10 (6 June 2011)

Talking pictures may have scored a total victory over their silent predecessors, but in the field of comedy the silent style died hard, and slapstick remained a staple of comic cinema well into the 30s. The Marx Brothers in a way rescued the more anarchic form of comedy for the talkies with their wild and nonsensical verbal humour, but they also had enough physicality that they went a great way to preserving slapstick for the sound era. Duck Soup is their most perfect movie, and incidentally also the one which features the most visual humour.
The Marx Brothers, even when they were not doing slapstick, had a style that very much harked back to the silent comics. If you look at Chaplin's short pictures, he would normally choose a familiar setting, people it with "straight" but somewhat preposterous characters, then bring on his little tramp to wreak havoc. And this is pretty much what Groucho and Co. do in their first five features at Paramount. Duck Soup begins with an extremely pompous and formal set-up, into which Groucho and Chico come blabbering their disrespectful turns-of-phrase, and Harpo gleefully wrecks all and sundry, to the complete consternation of the overblown figures around them. Regular co-star Margaret Dumont is perfect for this, because she is not a funny character in her own right, but she is a slightly exaggerated version of a stock dramatic figure, and this is enough for the brothers to bounce their comedy off her. Louis Calhern is just right here too, because he is a straight man, but one with prickable pomposity as opposed to dramatic intensity. I am at present undecided as to the importance of Zeppo Marx as the straight foil, but in any case his role in this his last film appearance is fairly negligible, and the picture doesn't suffer for that fact.
Duck Soup is directed by Leo McCarey, himself a veteran of silent comedy and a student of the Hal Roach studios. McCarey was not a writer for Duck Soup, but nonetheless some of the physical comedy routines and the general bent towards slapstick do bear his stamp. An especially good example is the hat-swapping routine with Harpo, Chico and Edgar Kennedy, a very simple piece that becomes increasingly funny simply because it is stretched out a ridiculous tit-for-tat conflict. Remember it was McCarey who first suggested Laurel and Hardy team up as a permanent duo, and for Duck Soup Harpo and Chico form a distinctly Laurel and Hardy-flavoured dynamic, with Harpo as the chirpy fool and Chico his long-suffering (but no less incompetent) superior. Unlike the talkie scenes, for which McCarey emphasises the snappy pace with frequent angle changes, the physical comedy is mostly shot in long, unbroken takes, allowing the routines to build up undisturbed and proving really just how good the brothers were at it.
But there is something else which makes Duck Soup very brilliant. In an age where satire was not common currency at the pictures, this is a surprisingly bold indictment of war. The setting is a fictional Ruritanian kingdom (a fact that in itself makes this feel like a take-off on all those urbane European comedies that Ernst Lubitsch was making in the same studio), complete with grand halls, aristocratic titles and lots of silly uniforms, and Rufus T. Firefly's militaristic takeover nods towards the fascist governments that were springing up all over Europe at the time. And yet there are hints too at the follies of American militarism, with various patriotic marches woven into the musical score. Of course, the satire is never exactly biting and it certainly doesn't have that poignant quality that is present in even the wildest of wartime comedies (such as Dr Strangelove or Life is Beautiful), but it works on the level of being a big raspberry to the seriousness with which war takes itself.
Duck Soup is the absolute pinnacle of the Marx Brothers canon. Their subsequent pictures at MGM were rather more serious and plot driven affairs, which would basically detract from what the brothers were really all about. But despite their previous successes, Duck Soup was not quite as popular with audiences as had been the likes of Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. It does lack the variety show format of the earlier movies, and much as I love it I do find myself missing Harpo's harping and Chico's piano. The 1930s were the era of the formula franchise movie, and the consternation of waiting for things you've come to expect can make a good picture seem tedious. However, enjoyed purely for what it is, Duck Soup sees those wonderful Marx Brothers at their funniest, tightest and most intelligent, and in retrospect can be seen as cinema's first really effective blending of slapstick with spoken-word humour.