My Movie Challenge

Duck Soup (1933): This is up there with All About Eve as an early contender for Most Pleasant Surprise movie in the challenge list. Not sure how this one escaped me, but I didn't know it was a Marx Brothers film, so just seeing the name Duck Soup on the list was a little eye-rolling. We recently only had a short amount of time so we figured this would be a quick hour-long jaunt into something bizarre, but little did we know it would be a journey into sheer nonstop hilarity. This movie was one joke or sight gag crammed into each and every second of the movie. The only time a joke wasn't being cracked was when a line was being uttered by surprise guest appearer Martin Landau, who looks amazingly young in the film and yet the same age as in The X-Files flick at the same time. The film's premise is that Groucho gets made president of a nation on the brink of war. He spends the whole of the film insulting every man, woman and child he comes in contact with, and no one is spared and the jokes cut a wide swath of personal and physical. If you have an hour, this is a tremendous entry into the slapstick comedy genre and one of the gems of this list so far.