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Duck Soup

Director: Leo McCarey
Year: 1933
Run-time: 1 hr 8 min
Source: Amazon Video

- This is the first Marx Brothers film on the list, and the most famous.  I'd never seen a Marx Brothers film before, and at first my wife and I found it a little offputting in its kitchen-sink approach to comedy.  Duck Soup is exactly the sum of its parts, and some of those parts aren't going to land as well.  Some of the physical gags are still timeless, and there's no denying the simple perfection of the mirror scene, but most of Groucho's rat-a-tat gags go by too quickly to really register in my book.

- The satire of nationalism and war is fascinating and undoubtedly pretty bold - according to Wikipedia, it probably hurt the film's box office coming as it did during the Depression - but like most of the movie, it's too frenetic to carry anything like a coherent message.  Of course, the same criticism was leveled at South Park in its heyday.

- Harpo Marx is a comedic genius.
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