Review : 'Duck Soup' (1933)

Yes that's right, I don't just watch new films, sometimes I watch old films. Really old films. In black and white. And not Clerks or Raging Bull black and white, proper black and white, like, when it was the norm and stuff!

Duck Soup is widely regarded as the Marx Brothers at their best [citation needed waaaaaaah] and I agree. As a kid my favourite was A Day At The Races because it had horses in it (and I am a racist), but as an adult I can see how Duck Soup is one of the greatest comedies of all time and is more than a little biting (something I missed aged 8).

The loose plot gives the brothers many excuses to be generally hilarious and anarchic, but basically Groucho is the leader of a land and for no particularly good reason (is there ever one? Oo, political) goes to war with another land. The war scenes in particular are stunning in their satire. It is often thrown around that an elderly film or play has "barely dated", but much of Duck Soup could genuinely have been made yesterday. Its most famous sequence (the classic mirror scene) strangely enough is one of the only scenes where you remember the film is pushing 80 years old. Bizarre moments where Groucho, without any character referring to it, is wearing a different costume in every shot while war rages and random stock footage of dolphins, bison etc are inserted could be straight out of The Mighty Boosh.

The fact that this is one of the only Marx Brothers films not to feature a piano solo from Chico (always a highlight of their films for me) or a harp solo from Harpo does nothing to dampen its appeal. The pace is frenetic, the comedy managing to be both intelligent and completely accessible. Released to a lukewarm reception originally (at the height of the Great Depression), there's good reason why Duck Soup is now heralded as one of the greatest comedy films of all time. Released several years before Chaplin's The Great Dictator and several decades before Dr Strangelove (a film that up until 2002 I was calling Dr Strangeglove out of ignorance), it truly is one of the first great satires.

I don't need to quote the film in this review, you just need to go out and see it. If there's a better American comedy film in the future I'll eat my Groucho disguise.