If you run out of gas, get ethyl. If Ethyl runs out, get Mabel. Now, step on it! When Harpo next appears, he is with Chico. But the mask itself is then unmasked: Chico turns Harpo round; his real face is on the other side of his head. The pair are double agents, or human puns.
And so it goes on, order overturned, conformity unravelling, idiocy at the gates. Under the pressure of the courtroom, the puns bubble over, particularly when Chico turns turtle on the prosecutor:. Chico: Now, I ask you one. What is it has a trunk, but no key, weight 2,lb and lives in a circus? Chico: A relevant! He really is an idiot. One pun leads to another: they bounce with the speed and precision of a polished stone skimmed across a lake.
Minister of Finance: Something must be done! War would mean a prohibitive increase in our taxes! It is the rat-a-tat-tat speed of their delivery that distinguishes the Marx Brothers from their contemporaries, and stops them growing old.
Other comedies from that era now seem sluggish and laborious: Duck Soup is alive and kicking. Harpo, was, of course, the silent one, but the scenes in which he appears are generally far louder, and more perilous, than any of the others.
He is a bundle of anarchic energy, targeting the pompous and the self-regarding, like all the vengeful characters in Struwwelpeter rolled into one. Instead of speaking, Harpo grins like a madman and honks his horn. Having broken into a house, he tries to open the safe, but he twists the volume dial of a radio by mistake. It starts to blare, so he has to smash it. Whenever he is on screen, even the most inanimate of objects cannot be trusted to stay quiet. At one point, he shows Groucho a tattoo on his stomach of a house.
The most celebrated scene, and the most sublime, revolves around another visual pun: a mirror that is not a mirror, a reflection that is not a reflection. Harpo, disguised as Groucho, tries to fool Groucho into believing that he is looking at himself in a mirror. Groucho, suspicious, executes a random series of increasingly ludicrous movements in the hope of catching him out.
But whatever movement he makes, however daft, Harpo anticipates him and does just the same. Even when Groucho walks into what should be the mirror, and out the other side, Harpo does the same, but in reverse. Eighty years on, that visual gag is still going strong: in an episode of the gloriously perverse American cartoon series Family Guy , the baby-man antihero Stewie is transported back to s Berlin, where he disguises himself as Adolf Hitler. Then Hitler himself comes into the room, and Stewie has to convince him that he is looking into a mirror.
The world in was becoming increasingly overpopulated with tin-pot dictators. Is Duck Soup a political satire? Many intellectuals and academics have argued as much, though they tend to belong to the school of criticism that likes to stamp all the jokes out of comedy so that they can praise its high seriousness without fear of contradiction.
As is so often the case with New Yorker cartoons, it veers from reality only by a couple of degrees. War seems inevitable.
War Is Swell They'll be out of the trenches by Christmas Not Rated. Did you know Edit. Trivia Italian dictator Benito Mussolini banned the film from Italy because he thought it was a direct attack on him.
When news of this reached The Marx Brothers , they were reportedly ecstatic. Goofs Vera goes from wearing a dress that shows the top of her breasts, to her breasts being fully covered during the party scene. Quotes Rufus T. Connections Edited into World War Brown User reviews Review. Top review. Worthy of several viewings. Very likely their best film. This is pure surrealism from start to finish, with some of their best-executed routines, and a welcome absence of serious musical numbers.
Whether it has Harpo answering the phone, Groucho explaining his tax policy or Chico giving a detailed report of his weekly surveillance tactics "On Wednesday we fool him: We no show up" , this is the epitome of the Marx Brothers movies.
And here's one of the funniest lines that nobody else has mentioned: "Ok, I give up. How about your glass of water? FAQ 5. Is this movie based on a book? What does "Duck Soup" mean? What was the hand game that Chico was playing?
Details Edit. Release date November 17, United States. United States. Cracked Ice. Paramount Pictures. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 9 minutes. The original allusion has been lost. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for duck soup on Thesaurus. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.
Origin of duck soup An Americanism dating back to —
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