Profile- Duck Soup (The Marx Brothers, 1933)

The first successful comedies of the sound era were the dialogue-driven situational comedies of Ernst Lubitsch and George Cukor, most notably Trouble In Paradise (Lubitsch 1932), Design For Living (Lubitsch 1933), and Dinner At Eight (Cukor 1933).  The films depicted taboo social situations and most always featured wealthy protagonists of the upper class.  While the films were popular at the time and are still critically recognized, the films have become quite dated and seem dull when compared to the later Screwball comedies, which drew their foundations from the situations and banter of these films.  In a sense, these almost purely verbal pre-Screwball Comedies were eclipsed by the Screwball comedies not much later in the decade.


At the same time, other comic performers were developing a completely different style of comedy from Lubitsch and Cukor.  The Marx Brothers—one of the most influential comedy teams of all time—practically defined the subgenre known today as Anarchic Comedy.

The Marx Brothers

Starting as performers on Vaudeville stages and on Broadway, the Marx Brothers (active as a group, 1912-1949) recognized quickly how film would broaden their audience.  In fact, they would often try out their material in front of a live audience before shooting began, this preview giving them live feedback.  Unlike Chaplin before them, the Marx Brothers were solely performers, not filmmakers. Many film historians credit the Marx Brothers for being the first comic performers to realize that true sound comedy was a hybrid between verbal banter and physical gags. Whereas, Harpo’s comic manner could have worked quite well in silent comedy, Groucho’s comic manner could not have existed in motion pictures until the advent of sound technology.  The Marx Brothers were the first film comedians to realize the synergistic possibilities of combining the physical and visual humor previously mastered by the silent film stars with the new verbal possibilities of the sound film.  Groucho’s verbal style acts as a foil to Harpo’s physical style and vice versa.  One could call Harpo’s persona the successor to Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Like Chaplin, the Marx Brothers spent weeks rehearsing gags to get them just right. In order to get the most complete picture of the Marx Brothers’ genius, one needs to consider the contrast between their earlier Paramount films, which ended with Duck Soup, and their later MGM films.  The MGM films were their greatest successes commercially, but not necessarily critically.

Today, the Brothers’ gags are just as effective as they were when their films premiered. The films continue to entertain audiences and engage film reviewers. So much of the Marx Brothers antics follow the Id drives theorized by Freud—the same drives that society dictates are to be restrained by the individual.  The Brothers’ total disregard of social constraints makes them so appealing, because each one of us has, at one point or another, wished for the courage to break outside social boundaries.  

Reception

Not only was Duck Soup released in the midst of the Great Depression, but also audiences still remembered World War I while the threat of a Second World War was on the horizon. The critics’ reactions were not much better than the public’s.

As a political satire, the political leanings of the publications that review it can partly explain the starkly contrasted views of the film and some reviewers chose not to address the political humor at all.  Most critics at the time considered it a fair to poor effort, but many reviewers also indicate that they would not expect much better from the Marx Brothers—although it is unclear if the critics’ low expectations were for the Marx Brothers specifically or for film comedy as a whole, since we have already learned that film critics have difficulty approaching comedy.  Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times described it as “extremely noisy without being nearly as mirthful as their other films”.  Joe Bigelow of Variety gave the film a rather positive review, praising the way that the Brothers were able to combine physical and verbal gags, “Radio has killed all the good gags”.  He adds that “Practically everybody wants a good laugh right now and Duck Soup should make practically everybody laugh”.  Harold W. Cohen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also presented a favorable review, saying “It’s good to see the madcap Marxes back”. Some might argue that Duck Soup’s message was a success internationally, since Mussolini saw it as a threat.  Tim Dirks of The American Movie Classics Filmsite adds that it was “devoid of any Academy Award nominations”, which is not a surprise considering the relatively poor reviews that it received.  Mussolini seems to be the only one who addressed the politics of the film, for the remaining reviews all address the comic structure of the film, using terms like “noisy”, “not mirthful”, and “laugh”.  Just as the reviewers of City Lights' approached it as part of a larger Chaplin canon, these reviewers approach Duck Soup in the context of all the Marx Brothers pictures.  Also, in the same way critics praised City Light’s balance of comedy and pathos, these critics praise the film’s balance of physical and verbal humor. In a few years, Duck Soup became virtually forgotten, and the Marx Brothers’ career declined in the 1940s.  


Renewed interest came to Duck Soup and the Marx Brothers beginning in the 1950s, mostly due to their presence on television, with further reviews appearing over the years.  In these later reviews, many critics addressed the political humor of the film, not only aided by the perspective of a different political landscape, but also influenced by later anti-war sentiments, particularly during the Vietnam era.  In 1976, Roger Rosenblatt of The New Republic praised the film and the Smithsonian Institution for presenting it once again.  In 1978, John J. Puccio of Movie Metropolis also praised the film, “It’s all quite zany and delightful, a mixture of clever wit, low humor, and outright anarchy” regretting that “the world appears to have outgrown [it] or maybe just lost sight of somewhere along the road to high-tech sophistication”—echoing the contemporary reviewers’ praise of the mixture of many different types of comedy, and describing the genre of Anarchic Comedy.  He uses the terms “zany”, “delightful”, “clever”, “wit”, “low humor”, and “anarchy” to describe the comedy of the film.  Notice how close these terms are to the ones used by reviewers in 1933.


Just like with City Lights, Duck Soup’s reputation has only grown and it is now more accessible than ever in the Twenty First Century because of home video technology.  Many critics focus on the film’s longevity and continued relevancy, especially in its exploration of politics and war.  In 2000, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times commented on the innovative nature of its comedy, “Dated as Duck Soup inevitably is in some respects, it has moments that seem startlingly modern…. The Brothers broke the classical structure of movie comedy and glued it back again haphazardly, and nothing was ever the same”.  Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid, echoed Ebert’s sentiments, “The ridiculous reasons for going to war and the awkward, hysterical war itself are especially relevant today”, as does M.P. Bartley of eFilmCritic.com, “Duck Soup still has an edge today, because it’s the best film to remind us just how dangerous the Marx Brothers were”.  Like earlier critics, many critics still speak of the film within the context of the Marx Brothers’ overall style.  Michael Koller of Senses of Cinema called Duck Soup, “indisputably the Marx Brothers’ greatest film…. their most creative and anarchic”.  John Sinnott of DVD Talk called it “Not only… the best Marx Brothers film, but… also one of the best comedies ever made”.  In 2005, Dennis Schwartz of Ozus’ World Movie Reviews gave the film an A+, dubbing it “The Marx Brothers high water mark in film; their one true claim to a masterpiece”.  Ian Nathan of Empire magazine called it, “The Marx brothers on top form”.  These reviewers focus on the innovative combination of visual and auditory comedy in the film as well.  In 2004, Jamie Russell of the BBC praised it for its “delirious verbal banter… and a total lack of respect for the rules”. Most Twenty First Century critics that review the film inevitably compare it to the later MGM pictures, and prefer Duck Soup because it does not include musical interludes or a romantic subplot.


As for its detractors, Christopher Null of Filmcritic.com, complained that the plot was too simple, “Take the comedy, leave the story”.  Total Film Magazine echoed this when it said, “the plot is just a flimsy backdrop” and that the “political nose-thumbing now seems a little dated”.  Obviously, both reviewers do not know how to approach the narrative/gag balance of comedy.  David Nusair of Reelfilm provided one of the harshest criticisms in 2006, when he said:
“the majority of this just isn’t funny (something that’s particularly true of an excruciatingly prolonged sequence involving Harpo and Chico’s harassment of a blustering street vendor). The conclusion, which is action-packed and mind-numbing, does the movie absolutely no favors, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to understand why this is generally regarded as some kind of a comedy classic”. In Nusairs’ review, we can see that he does not know how to approach the Principle of Comic Logic nor the way in which the film borrows conventions from the war subgenre.  The fact that more reviews have been written about Duck Soup in the past ten years than in its first ten years of existence is a testament to the power of the film and to its longevity.

Critics at Turner Classic Movies call Duck Soup, the Brothers’ “last opportunity… to be at their most outrageous. But more than them running amok in front of the camera (and they had plenty of experience being let loose in front of an audience in vaudeville and Broadway), the Marx Brothers made a comedy that was cinematic…. The Duck Soup plot was absurd, but it was not so ridiculous that you didn’t care what was going to happen to the characters. This was one aspect that Irving Thalberg did not abandon when he produced their next picture, A Night at the Opera (1935), at MGM.


The Brothers’ films at MGM became their most commercially successful.  Thalberg had determined that the reason why the Brothers’ earlier films had not fared well commercially was because there were never any characters to which the viewer could relate.  The Brothers themselves were too wacky to be relatable and Margaret Dumont was almost too proper, so Thalberg incorporated romantic leads and more mainstream narratives into the Brother’s MGM films.  Even so, Zeppo, who sometimes played a romantic foil to the other three Brothers in their earlier pictures, decided after Duck Soup to move on to a career on the business side of the motion picture industry.  Perhaps Thalberg had thought that the addition of romance to the Marx Brothers pictures would have made them more approachable to audiences that were now accustomed to Screwball comedies.  Most film historians today agree, however, that the romantic stories often detracted from the overall pictures, considering them to be inferior to Duck Soup, the poster child of the Anarchic Comedy. Later examples of this subgenre, including Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1964) and M*A*S*H (Robert Altman 1970), were greatly influenced by it, sharing many of the same themes, devices, and character types.


In the decades since the Brothers’ last film, most critics and scholars acknowledge that Duck Soup was in many ways superior to the later MGM pictures. In 1990, the National Registry of Historic Films decided to preserve the film.  In 2006, Premiere Magazine named Duck Soup one of The 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time. The film is thoroughly enjoyable and I highly recommend it.