Critics reviews

Beginning with a flash of NRA's eagle that progressively gets more ironic, Duck Soup's debauched satire of petty warfare and monied politics has a potent resonance equaling its vaudevillian absurdity.

McCarey consistently brought a communal approach to the construction of his films. He was known for playing a piano on set while thinking of where next to take plots, which inevitably developed from the bouncing energies shared among his lead actors' personalities. Few better examples could be concocted than the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup(1933).

You know that thing where you think you love a movie, one you've seen many times, one you first caught during your childhood, one which you then grew up with, one you owned on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray? And then it becomes one you watch again, primed to be smothered with a feeling of reflex adoration and… nothing?

...In order to be elevated beyond mere theatrical spectacle, comedy of such impeccable timing relies on direction that is sensitive to the movements of bodies... and the humor imbedded within certain cutting patterns. A joke can fall flat if... seen without a cut at the right moment. There's no better evidence of this fact than the film's riotous climactic sequence, a vision of indolent warfare in which the gradual implosion of the set becomes an integral part of the joke.

Many reasons could be cited why this is the best of all the Marx Brothers features, even though it was a commercial disappointment when it was first released in 1933.

The primary reason DUCK SOUP transcends the rest of the Marx's' output is its target—Groucho's Escher-like language contortions never found a better foil than governmental bureaucracy, and the hall-of-mirrors conversations dominating this war spoof rank alongside Heller and Vonnegut. For all their good intentions, contemporary antiwar filmmakers might do well to take a page from this, which, in its gleeful skewering, reminds us what about humanity might be worth saving.

Arguably the funniest movie ever made. The brothers claim that the film's story—about a leader (Groucho) who arbitrarily takes his country to war—was never intended as satire, but only Dr. Strangelove matches its audacity in sending up the follies of nationalism and conflict.

The film has its moments – its justifiably famous final sequence is a bitter satire on the absurdities of war – but the film at large suffers from the same drawbacks of the other Marx Brothers comedies. The humor largely revolves around one-liners, and often the surrounding cast does little but stand and listen as Groucho delivers punchline after punchline. This is uncharacteristic for McCarey's humanistic work, where it seems all his characters have something to do.

Indisputably the Marx Brothers' greatest film. It's the product of a fortunate collaboration with the masterful comedy director Leo McCarey who understood his performers' comic genius.

The Marx Brothers' best movie (1933) and, not coincidentally, the one with the strongest director—Leo McCarey, who had the flexibility to give the boys their head and the discipline to make some formal sense of it... The antiwar satire is dark, trenchant, and typical of Paramount's liberal orientation at the time.