Review by New York Times Review
NO Marx Brothers movie exemplifies the divine anarchy of Julius, Leonard, Arthur and Herbert Marx as purely as the 1933 Paramount comedy "Duck Soup." It was the last film in which all four brothers - stage-named Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo - appeared together onscreen. Unlike their earlier Paramount films (or those that would come after their move to MGM the following year), "Duck Soup" is devoid of romantic subplots or, for that matter, of any real plotline at all, save for the foundering of the bankrupt kingdom of Freedonia in a senseless, and quite conceivably endless, Groucho-led war. Yet "Duck Soup" is the film Harold Bloom, in an essay on "the 20th-century American sublime," called one of the great works of art of the past century. It's one of the movies T.S. Eliot wanted to discuss when he met with Groucho in 1964 (Groucho had hoped to chat about "Murder in the Cathedral"), and the one that inspired Woody Allen's character in "Hannah and Her Sisters" not to go home and shoot himself. In HAIL, HAIL, EUPHORIA! Presenting the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup," the Greatest War Movie Ever Made (It Books/HarperCollins, $19.99), the humorist Roy Blount Jr. takes on "Duck Soup," not as a film critic or as a culture pundit or even as a comedy writer, but as a passionate amateur fan. To call this 144-page essay informal would be a Groucho-esque understatement. Blount, by his own admission, opens up the movie in a window on his computer and, in essence, "live blogs" it, free-associating in the raggedly discursive style proper to that form. Blount is no more bothered by the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action than were the brothers themselves. An eagle-shaped logo that appears on screen for a few seconds before the movie begins - the symbol of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration - gets four pages, while whole scenes from the film rush by in a quick sentence or two. Folksy, warm and up on his Marx lore - he seems not only to have seen every one of the brothers' movies, but to have read early drafts of every script - Blount makes for swell company. But his single biggest insight - that "Duck Soup" is at heart "a family drama, a true bromance," a movie not so much about how nations go to war as about "the way brothers fight, compulsively, appetitively, because they can't help it" - never quite rises to the level of a theory. Rather than explore the idea of "Duck Soup" as a comedy of fraternal aggression, Blount tosses it into the fracas and rushes on, seeming to forget it altogether. (A related, and equally tantalizing, notion - that the omnipresent straight woman Margaret Dumont functioned as a more compliant, fictional version of the boys' formidable mother, Minnie - remains similarly underdeveloped.) The extreme casualness of Blount's approach leaves room for some sloppiness to sneak in. Recalling that scene of circumvented suicide in "Hannah and Her Sisters," Blount repeatedly refers to the Woody Allen character as Alvy Singer, which was in fact the name of his character in "Annie Hall." But it's hard to gainsay the profound joy Blount takes in the brothers' inspired clowning, especially during his delightfully erudite exegesis of the justly famous "mirror scene." In this nearly three-minute-long sight gag, Harpo and Groucho enact a classic vaudeville routine, mirroring each other's gestures from either side of a threshold, to a soundtrack of absolute, music-free silence. Blount's joke-by-joke analysis of the mirror scene brings in - and makes fruitful use of - analogous moments in Charlie Chaplin, George Méliès, "Hamlet" and Bugs Bunny. But best of all is his stage-selling invitation for the reader to view the scene with him in silence: "A hush falls. Two brothers, in nightgowns, dance, as one. It is absurd. It can't be happening. It is a beautiful thing. Let's watch it now, and talk about it after." -DANA STEVENS The Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 5, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Fifty years after first seeing Duck Soup, humorist Blount watched it again, worried that a new generation of viewers would walk all over my heaven and disrespect the experience. Instead, he found that parents and children alike appreciated the wacky humor and subversive sensibilities of the movie that debuted in 1933. The Depression-era film didn't catch on until the 1960s, when the idea of reveling in a silly, completely unnecessary war was somehow construed as an antiwar message. Blount takes the reader through the more famous scenes of the movie, as Groucho Marx, playing Rufus Firefly, the leader of Freedonia, pushes the nation into bankruptcy and war with the occasional assistance and resistance of his brothers (Harpo as Pinky, Chico as Chicolini, and Zeppo as Lieutenant Bob Roland). Blount includes commentary on the Marx Brothers' personalities and careers: Groucho's acerbic wit, Chico's gambling and womanizing, Harpo's few speaking occasions. Zeppo, the straight man and former car thief, was reluctantly drafted into the act to replace brother Gummo, the least known of the brothers. Their mother, Minnie, was a stage mother to top all others, with a master plan for her sons that included capitalizing on shtick from vaudeville and memories of growing up Jewish in ethnic New York. Readers will enjoy the stories behind this iconic film and the careers of the Marx Brothers, director Leo McCarey, and frequent costar Margaret Dumont.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Blount (Robert E. Lee: A Life; Alphabet Juice), the renowned humorist and NPR contributor (Wait Wait.Don't Tell Me!), offers a fully entertaining part biography, part film review, and part sociocultural exploration. He readily admits that he has long been a convert to the cult of the Marx Brothers and that Duck Soup is one of the greatest films ever made. More than just a compendium of reasons the film and the Marxes are still influential nearly 80 years after its release, the narrative jumps among the film-which Blount was watching on YouTube as he was writing-the script, and the historical background of some of the film's most obscure references. VERDICT An essential read for Marx Brothers fans, those curious about the melding of war and humor in film, and browsers looking for a good read.-Teri Shiel, Westfield State Coll. Lib., MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
