Duck Soup

We suspect a surprisingly small number of people under the age of fifty have actually seen any Marx Brothers films, so the experience of doing so is certainly an exciting novelty, wrapped up in forever images of their representations and parodies across the media landscape where the source material itself is often neglected...
The film is certainly anarchic, profoundly so, far more than any film we have seen in our entire lives. It is almost Beckettian in the sheer pointless flipping and non sequiters and bizarre wordplay and changes and complete lack of narrative structure. The jokes in themselves aren't always, perhaps ever, particularly funny in themselves. Perhaps this is the aspect that has dated the most. It is rather the build up of joke on joke, the endless (non) structuring of chaos across the short landscape of the picture, that builds up its humour. Saying that, we never found ourselves laughing for any moment of the duration; it was more a kind of sick curiousity, a slight feeling of uncomfortableness at the complete lack of structure.
Physically, no performer seems to stand out as particularly talented, the acting is uncertain, Groucho delivers his lines pacily as though not saying anything at all. None is particularly graceful. Some of the tomfoolery undoubtedly required talent, though it is never quite note perfect. I suppose we have been spoilt. Though how they made the horse corresspond to their wishes remains beyond our ken...
Duck Soup surprisied in how much more profound, accidently or not, it is. Beckett is the obvious parallel to draw, the snapping chaos of dialogue becoming twisted and rendering the viewer never quite settled in their own skin. The final scenes are bizarre rather than funny; it so lacks in any kind of thrust, while travelling at such a pace, it attains a sort of spectral poignancy. Truly inexplicable.
Not the most fun to watch, and not a comedy to have one breaking out in laughter. A curiousity though, and one to confound expectations.