Duck Soup

Duck Soup (1933) is the Marx Brothers comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Leo McCarey directs, and Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo all show up to burn the whole house down.

Tiny Freedonia is broke. Wealthy widow Mrs Teasdale will hand over twenty million to save it, but only if the loudmouth Rufus T. Firefly — Groucho in peak form — takes charge. He promptly insults the ambassador of neighboring Sylvania and stumbles the two nations into war over almost nothing. Meanwhile a pair of hopeless spies, Chicolini and Pinky, tangle everything further, from swapped hats to the legendary mirror routine where Harpo mimics Groucho's every move.

Sixty-eight minutes of pure anarchy and razor-edged satire of politicians and war, with no dead air anywhere. It flopped on release in 1933, then grew into a classic and landed in the National Film Registry. It's the perfect doorway into the Marx Brothers if you want to see where half of last century's verbal slapstick was born. Stream Duck Soup (1933) online on iFILM.