Duck Soup

This 70-minute movie is the most startling, breakneck comedy of the Marx Brothers' career... Next to Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", this is the purest satire of dictatorship on film. [20 Jan 1996]

A classic of aggressive nonsense. Also, there is something tighter about Duck Soup as compared with their later efforts. It isn't just the absence of an extraneous love story, or the fact that Harpo doesn't play the harp and Chico doesn't "shoot the keys." Nor is it that much of the comedy crosses the magic line from parody into satire. It's a glistening patina of whimsy that rushes through the work, a heightened effervescence. In addition, the film is only 68 minutes long. [16 Dec 2001, p.16]

A masterpiece...DUCK SOUP is perhaps the best, and funniest, depiction of the absurdities of war ever committed to celluloid.

The sheer silliness is inspired.

The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie.

The Marx Brothers at their purest and funniest - no romantic subplot, no musical interludes with Harpo, no distractions from the fun of watching Groucho deflate Margaret Dumont as he becomes dictator of Fredonia and frivolously declares war. Cleverly directed by Leo McCarey, it was the team's least popular 1930s film, perhaps because the tone of non-stop anarchy proved too unsettling to Depression audiences. [10 May 1991, p.65]

A production in which the bludgeon is employed more often than the gimlet. The result is that this production is, for the most part, extremely noisy without being nearly as mirthful as their other films.

No entiendo este tipo de humor, y si bien el trasfondo, por lo menos de esta película, es muy, muy interesante, es decir, hacer una crítica de cómo los gobiernos eligen como gobernante al más inepto de sus ciudadanos y cómo este, por obvias razones, destruye al país, al punto de llegar a una guerra por razones absurdas, y cómo hacen creer a los ciudadanos que hay que defender el territorio y que su heroísmo no será olvidado, sin duda, es algo que en otro contexto sería mucho más potente, y no es que en el género de comedia no se pueda hacer, sino más bien porque el fin último de este estilo es la risa y solo después de eso viene la reflexión, cuando no te ríes, la reflexión es que es una mala película por más crítica quiera hacer.

Не кино, а дебильная клоунада. Если это лучший фильм братьев Маркс, то страшно представить какие у них шутки в других фильмах. Теперь понятно, почему этих братьев Маркс постигло забвение.