#65 - Duck Soup

The movie is jam-packed with some of my favorite lines of dialogue, but the best has to be Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, saying to some woman "I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows until you come home." Sometimes I can't get over how funny that is.

Like I said, the movie is filled with one-liners like that. But it also has some of the most iconic physical comedy ever preserved on film, most notably the mirror scene.

Perhaps the best quality of the film is that there is basically no drama, at all -- no real conflict. Just plain fun, laughs, and satire. Any plot discussion is unnecessary and would just waste our time. Suffice to say that Groucho plays Firefly, an inept man who becomes the leader of a fictitious nation and leads it blindly into war. This 1933 comedy is not a movie that is made up of plot points and storylines, but rather moments, lines, and small situations.

Many people see the canon of the Marx Brothers films as a large pie, with each movie just a piece of the whole. No one movie gives you an entire feels for the Marxes, and that's the way they like it. "Duck Soup" is arguably the most complete of their movies: the ultimate Marx Brothers movie. But it still seems like the viewer is left wanting more, which is probably exactly what the production company and stars wanted.

I'm finding it hard, for some reason, to write this review. Perhaps it is because I don't just want to quote the movie; I want to review it. This is more difficult than it would seem. The film can essentially be boiled down to a long string of funny lines. So I will say that this movie is great and will have you laughing out loud if you go into it with an open mind (i.e., remember that it's 77 years old). I don't think you'll be disappointed.