I don’t care for this film as much as I had expected to. It’s true that the humor is impressive, unpredictable and nonstop. The dialog is barrage of puns and non sequiturs, the verbal equivalent of Monty Python’s visuals. There’s an unrestrained, anarchic element to the brilliance that the Marx Brothers use in attacking language and its masters. Oh, your Excellency! says Teasdale. Firefly replies, You're not so bad yourself. Much of the humor in Duck Soup comes from cascades of such verbal virtuosity.
There’s similar wit and spirit in many of the visuals. Harpo
cuts things with scissors whenever he isn’t being watched in Ambassador
Trentino’s office, and there are ongoing gags like Groucho trying to get a ride
in a motorcycle side car and his constant changing of battlefield uniforms in
the war scenes at the end. The mirror
scene in this film is justly famous for its cleverness.
But for all the moment-to-moment pleasure here, Duck Soup
doesn’t leave you with much at the end.
The film doesn’t fix its sights on a main, satirical target, and the
personages here aren’t characters. It’s
hard to be invested in the film because all its energy and sparkle impresses us
and makes us laugh but fails to engage us in a story with stakes. Sound was reasonably new when Duck Soup came
out, and the Marx Brothers rush to exploit it here with their verbal humor. As a result, it’s easy to chuckle in thinking
back on the dense dialog in the film, but the brothers ultimately fail
to touch us the way the silent Buster Keaton or Little Tramp do.
