Duck Soup
Duck Soup was produced by the Marx Brothers in 1933, and is considered by many people to be their best film. It was also one of the only films produced between the wars which seemingly contains an overt satire of the events between 1914-18. However, the brothers always insisted this was not their intention and that the background plot was merely a vehicle for their comedy, much of which was lifted from their radio series “Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel”. The chaotic nature of all Marx Brothers films was stretched to it’s limits in Duck Soup, and for this reason it is very difficult to tell whether criticism of the war was intentionally implied. Critics at the time were also unconcerned with the war satire, and it was not until much later that this aspect of the film was identified in any great detail. However, two things define the film as historically important. The first is that this kind of portrayal of a war could be allowed, apparently without much dissent. The fact that the film was not subjected to censure shows how far the War Books had gone to changing attitudes about representing the war. The second aspect of the film is the ways that it uses familiar icons of the Great War. The imcompetence of generals, trenches and shelling are all themes used to denote the war. All of theses representations are mentioned without elaboration; again demonstrating how far the tropes of the Great War had come to represent destruction, mismanagement and futility.
These pages give extracts from Duck Soup, in an attempt to demonstrate the changing ways that comedy was being used to represent the war. There are several questions which the film raises…
Have the Marx Brothers made an Anti-War film?
If so, is this intentional or accidental?
Why was the film accepted with so little dissent?
Is this due to the nature of Marx Brothers films (in which the plot is usually incidental to the action), or simply because the anti-war elements of the film had become a standard joke?
Does it matter that the film is American, and therefore has a more removed view of the war?
The Posters and Screenshots,The Script, The Plot, the Edits, the Trivia, The Sounds, the Songs.
