But 70 minutes of sustained hilarity all in a row like this here? No, sadly, never again. The Marx Brothers had many great moments ahead of them, as a team and as individuals. The recurring gag of Harpo’s motorcycle taking off and leaving Groucho in the sidecar, with the inevitable topper of Harpo on the sidecar leaving Groucho on the motorcycle. Harpo’s most surreal gag ever, when a barking dog comes out of the tattoo of a dog house on his arm. The hilarious battle sequence, which outdoes the football game climax of Horse Feathers for sheer insanity.
#The marx brothers duck soup trial
The spy trial of Chicolini, possibly the funniest Chico routine in the team’s cinematic record. Groucho’s dialogue, ranking with Animal Crackers as his best. Many people found it funny, but no one found it new or fresh. It’s to explain why, if you were sitting in a theatre in November, 1933, you might have a different perspective on it than we do. This isn’t to disparage this brilliant film. Granted, the team executes these bits expertly and put their own spin on them, but it’s not like it’s new material. The hat business with Chico, Harpo and Edgar Kennedy is old Laurel and Hardy stuff, they did it in half a dozen films. The “mirror routine”, had been done countless times before, by Chaplin, Max Linder, Raymond Dandy, etc. Many of the bits that fans cherish are not Marx specific. The title of the film had already been used for a Laurel and Hardy film. And furthermore, the elements that McCarey contributes are not just the least Marxian elements, but themselves rehashes.
#The marx brothers duck soup movie
The latter movie had even featured Louis Calhern as a scheming diplomat!Īnd there are ways in which the Marxes seemed to be repeating themselves in Duck Soup, repeating elements from their previous movies, and even cannibalizing dialogue from their recent radio show Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel(written by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin). Fields ( Million Dollar Legs, 1932), Jolson, Langdon et al ( Hallelujah I’m a Bum, 1933), Jack Pearl ( Meet the Baron, 1933) and Wheeler and Woolsey ( Diplomaniacs, 1933). So what?” Plus, the zany political satire thing had been done recently at the time, not just the previously mentioned Of Thee I Sing (which the Marxes had considered adapting) but also in movies starring fellow comedians like W.C. Thus, the reaction of a lot of critics at the time was essentially “Meh. Mussolini and Hitler had been in the headlines for years, and they hadn’t yet committed their greatest atrocities. With the benefit of hindsight we are able to look at Duck Soup as a great satire on the arbitrary authority and senseless absurdity of Fascism. “This world doesn’t deserve to live!” With a much wider exposure to the times now I can better see it. When I was a kid I could not for the life of me fathom why 1933 audiences might be less enthusiastic about Duck Soup than their previous and subsequent films. In many of their later movies, the Marx Brothers would sometimes seem to be playing second fiddle to this inferior element, making fans pine for the glory days of Duck Soup. Gone completely is ANY semblance of a romantic sub-plot with two lovers, no doubt one reason the film is so much cherished by comedy fans. Unfortunately, the fact that Duck Soup didn’t do as well at the box office as the smash hit Horse Feathers would later be used as an argument that the team needed to restore those boring romances to their films. Zeppo is busted back down to a secretary role as in the team’s first two features. His confederates are Chicolini, a peanut vendor ( Chico), and Pinky ( Harpo). Mostly, he just likes to make crazy shit happen. But if Firefly knows it, it is only at the level of instinct. It just so happens that Trentino is a spy with malevolent intentions. He seems determined to have a war, using tiny slights by Ambassador Trentino ( Louis Calhern) of nearby Sylvania as the pretext. She agrees to lend a large sum of money to her struggling government, but only if they name Rufus T. Teasdale, a wealthy philanthropist in the fictional European nation of Freedonia. The film also reunites the team with Margaret Dumont, magical foil from their first two films.ĭumont plays Mrs. It seems like the climax of the best phase of their movie career, their early years at Paramount, with the zaniest script and songs (by Kalmar and Ruby), the biggest pretensions toward satirical meaning, and a director at the helm who himself was a comic auteur Leo McCarey, shaper of the early cinematic work of Laurel and Hardy, and then later director of a long list of classics. Duck Soup (1933) is the movie most die-hard Marx Brothers fans will name as their favorite Marx Brothers movie.
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