My Favorite Movies: Duck Soup (1933)

It can be hard to describe the humor of the Marx brothers to the uninitiated. Anarchic is probably the best adjective to use. There is a story about the brothers having an appointment to meet a studio executive, who did not arrive on time. While waiting, they proceeded to set up a blazing fire in his office, stripped naked and cooked hot dogs. At least, that’s what Groucho has said, but we may not always be able to trust him. When they made their movie A Night in Casablanca, Warner Brothers complained that they couldn’t use the word Casablanca because of its association with their classic film. Groucho claims the brothers were left alone after he told Warners that they shouldn’t use the word Night because of its association with the Marx Brothers film.

Once again, this may not actually be true, but it sounds like something Groucho Marx would do. Then again, it really sounds like something that Rufus T. Firefly would do. Groucho, and for that matter, Chico and Harpo, as well, always played pretty much the same character in all their movies. The difference is that Chico and Harpo dropped the characters once they returned to the real world. Groucho never really did. He didn’t actually go about in that strange crouched walk of his or wear that phony greasepaint moustache, but he never stopped using that lightning-fast double talk, especially when he got his own TV game show, You Bet Your Life, which was pretty much only worth watching for Groucho.

Duck Soup was the last of five movies the Marx Brothers made for Paramount and it was the last to feature the fourth brother Zeppo. He had been with the team since their early days on Broadway, but never received any memorable parts in the films. Even though most of the greatest of their films were made at Paramount, nobody remembers Zeppo. I can’t really blame them. In Duck Soup, for example, he only appears briefly a couple of times as Groucho’s secretary and then does not reappear until the end. Not only that, but he didn’t get any jokes, not even one. It only made sense that he would decide to leave the team and leave the three to their funny business. And they are very funny.

Some of the best skits they ever did, for every scene in a Marx brothers movie is basically a Vaudeville skit mostly separate from the rest of the film, are in Duck Soup. Most famous of these is the mirror scene, in which Harpo, while disguised as Groucho (don’t ask), accidentally breaks a mirror and must pretend to be Groucho while he is standing in front of it. Groucho gets suspicious and begins to perform all manner of crazy stunts to try and trick his reflection. It’s a moment that has been borrowed by many other comedy films, shorts, and shows, which has made it the most well-remembered of the Marx brothers gags. My favorite individual moment in Duck Soup is the scene of expertly timed silent comedy featuring Chico and Harpo, as they infuriate a fellow street vendor by doing obnoxious things with his hat.

The film does have a plot, as all the Marx brothers pictures were forced to have. They worked better when they had as little story as possible to have to work their jokes around. In their worst movies, the brothers would be forgotten for long stretches while other, more boring characters get too much screen time to support the story. In Duck Soup, this never happens and the jokes are used to wonderful effect to support the story, rather than the jokes being weighed down by their forced connection to the plot. Groucho is Rufus T. Firefly, the dictator of Freedonia, a fictional country that inspired the term Freedonian to describe many of our foreign enemies during the second war. Duck Soup is generally about war, though the war doesn’t really strike until the end of the picture. This results in many wonderful jokes.

Harpo rides his horse into a woman’s house and we then see two pairs of shoes and a pair of horseshoes lined up beneath a bed. Chico, who had previously been appointed Secretary of War appears mid-battle and announces that he has transferred to the enemy, but “this side has better food.” Groucho makes an emergency phone call, saying that there are three men and a woman trapped in a house: “Send help and two more women.” He looks over at Margaret Dumont and adds, “Make that three more women.”

Dumont regularly appears in the Marx Brothers films, usually as Groucho’s romantic counterpart, and usually against his will. In this film, he is trying to marry her for her fortune. That doesn’t stop him from being his usual insulting self: “I can see you right now in the kitchen, bending over a hot stove, but I can’t see the stove.” Despite being the only person in the movie who isn’t being silly, Dumont makes an impression mostly by being such a good sport against all of Groucho’s verbal abuse.

Some of the gags in Duck Soup startle us by bending reality. The brothers are rescued at the end of the film by stock footage of firemen, policemen, monkeys and elephants running to their aide. There is also a bizarre scene in which Harpo reveals a tattoo on his stomach of a doghouse and a real dog leaps out and barks. On the whole, though, the jokes revolve around two things: silent, visual gags and fast talk. The former is usually helmed by Chico and Harpo, especially Harpo, who never utters a sound and has a penchant for cutting people’s hats and coattails with a pair of scissors he produces from nowhere. The latter is used primarily by Groucho to fantastic effect.

Seconds after he first appears in the movie, he runs over to Margaret Dumont and rattles off the following speech: “Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You better beat it. I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” Yes, that seems to have happened to Groucho, but combined with Chico and Harpo, what a great record they make.