"Duck Soup." At the Carlton
The Marx Brothers are the anarchists of the screen. Their technique, whatever its origin, is a weird blend of slapstick and surrealisnie; in Groucho and Harpo, particularly, the destructive impulses of the Freudian unconscious are given pictorial form and let loose among social conventions. But dramatic anarchy needs to be set off against a background of sobriety, and in their recent pictures the Brothers have allowed burlesque to run too freely through the whole story. Duck Soup starts as -a parody of the Ruritanian spy drama, but it develops gradually into a whirlwind farce, inter- spersed with moments of song and dance ; and it is fairly evident that the great difficulty of supplying enough of the right sort of dialogue has compelled the introduction of a good deal of music-hall by-play.
Harpo and Chico are deprived of their usual harp and piano solos, and, although I have never found these particularly entertaining, they do perhaps serve as useful points of rest from which the action can start again with fresh vigour. The Brothers seem to have aimed this time at a more popular audience, and their more devoted admirers will probably feel that a certain amount of subtlety has been lost. Still, Grouch° has some admirable wise-cracks, and the best episodes are as full as ever of unexpected satire and ingenious CHAR izs DAvr.
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