User reviews

Aside from two previous films(LUCKY DOG and 45 MINUTES FROM HOLLYWOOD),this film is the very first that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared together properly.For nearly 50 years a lost film,it was thought that the comedians hardly shared any scenes in DUCK SOUP,if at all.When a copy did turn up in the 1970's,all shallow theories and guesses were proved totally wrong.Laurel & Hardy are very much a team throughout the entire picture,although their appearances are decidedly unorthodox;"Stan and Ollie" are "Hives and Maltravers",and are dressed in tramp costuming;Stan however does wear a bowler hat.Ollie wears a hat too,but of the top variety,and sports an unshaven chin instead of a toothbrush moustache.The film itself isn't particularly funny,having much frantic chases and running about,instead of the more controlled,carefully-paced nuances that L & H perfected barely a year later in further films.But at least they are a team,which was not to be the case in their following couple of pictures,where they sometimes played bitter enemies.DUCK SOUP is a film of massive and important interest,though.6 out of 10.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in lengthy scenes together for the first time in March 1927's "Duck Soup" (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers' 1933 film of the same name). Even though they appear on a park bench and go about escaping from the forestry rangers conscripting the unemployed to fight nearby fires, Stan and Laurel dress like tramps, with Hardy unshaven and wearing a monocle and a top hat. This was the first movie, however, that McCarey saw the potential of the two as a comedy team. Despite finding themselves in the same locations and situations, the two act more as individuals then they do playing off one another in "Duck Soup"-lingo for "Easy as pie" and "As good as done."

After "Duck Soup," Laurel and Hardy appeared in their next seven movies together, but each playing different characters from the other, even though they did interact.

They had appeared together in the same films before. They both had a long career in silent comedies when they met. They were not initially considered as the perfect comic teaming that we see them as today. So when they were paired together for a story suggested by Stan's father, it seemed like just another film for Stan and Babe. Most of this film has the feel of early slapstick of the Mack Sennett tradition - big gestures, running and leaping and jumping. But there are also the beginnings of a more quiet, understated comedy. When The Boys have to entertain the couple who are inquiring about the house, we can see Laurel and Hardy become, by necessity, sneaky. Devious. The pace slows down, and we are allowed to laugh about the situation, not because of obvious over-the-top gagging. The film was long considered lost until 1974, when a print surfaced in Europe. Many books that credited the Laurel and Hardy genesis to later films are not in error - very little was known of this film until its rediscovery. Duck Soup is not the perfect Laurel and Hardy film - there is too much slapstick and not enough sly wit in it for my tastes. The casual viewer would be much better served by the remake, the three-reel talkie Another Fine Mess, which has much more sly wit and fantastic dialogue. However, Duck Soup is definitely an important entry in the Laurel and Hardy film pantheon, and is well worth a view if you're a fan.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were comedic geniuses, individually and together, and their partnership was deservedly iconic and one of the best there was. They left behind a large body of work, a vast majority of it being entertaining to classic comedy, at their best they were hilarious and their best efforts were great examples of how to do comedy without being juvenile or distasteful.

'Duck Soup' is the third short film of theirs after 'The Lucky Dog' and '45 Minutes from Hollywood', but to me it's the first one that uses their talents properly and where they fully work together as a partnership. It may not be among their best work, their later work was funnier, more focused and have more of a sly edge instead of being slapstick-heavy, and am another person who'd put 'Another Fine Mess' above it, but it's definitely well worth the look and the first outing of theirs that was above decent level.

Will agree that there could have been less of a slapstick approach and more of a wit and sly edge and the early stages to me felt on the rushed side.

Story is slight and at times a bit too busy, but 'Duck Soup' does far more right than it does wrong. A lot is right and there is actually not much wrong.

On the other hand, Laurel and Hardy are both solid and make a great double act. The iconic partnership was still fully forming but they do work well together and their comic timing is expertly, Laurel in particular is great. They are well served by the material, which is not hilarious as such but beautifully timed and often very funny.

Not once is 'Duck Soup' dull, it all goes at a snappy pace and is always engaging and charming. While not amazing visually, it still looks quite good and hardly the work of an amateur.

Concluding, good. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Besides being very funny, the silent film 'Duck Soup' is a vitally important link in the evolution of Laurel and Hardy as a comedy team. This movie was based on a music-hall sketch written by Stan Laurel's father, Arthur Jefferson, a successful theatre manager in northern England who resented his son's attempts to become a stage comedian. Laurel and Hardy made 'Duck Soup' at a point when they were already established as a team but were still developing the 'Stan' and 'Oliie' characters that would soon become so popular and beloved. By this time, Oliver Hardy had already got his fastidious little moustache, but in 'Duck Soup' he also has a considerable amount of beard stubble which makes him look quite jowly. 'Duck Soup' was remade only three years later as 'Another Fine Mess'.

'Duck Soup' was a lost film for more than 50 years: in the early 1980s, a print turned up in Belgium. The original silent-film intertitles had been cut out and replaced with French titles. Also, one insert shot of a newspaper article had been cut out and a French translation spliced in. The prints which are currently available feature English-language titles which are blatantly translations of the French titles, and this brings a jarring touch: Laurel keeps addressing Hardy as 'sir', which doesn't really fit the relationship between their characters.

The missing shot of the newspaper article has been replaced (in 1982) with a modern mock-up, and this provides an unintentional laugh. While Hardy reads the newspaper article in 1927, we can see the article directly underneath it... which is all about John DeLorean getting arrested for financial misdeeds in 1982! Oo-er!

In 'Duck Soup', Laurel and Hardy are tramps who discover that a local forest fire has made things hot for them: forest rangers are conscripting all the local indigent men for firefighting duty. Fleeing from the rangers, the two pals end up sharing a bicycle at the top of a steep hill, with disastrously funny results.

Still hiding from the rangers, they end up inside the swank house of Colonel Blood, who is currently away ... but Lord and Lady Plumtree have arrived to rent the house in the colonel's absence. Hardy disguises himself as the colonel, pressing Laurel into service to masquerade as the maid! Stan Laurel was a gifted female impersonator: one of the very few male performers who could convincingly portray a woman and be funny at the same time. His drag turn as the maid here is astonishing and funny.

The ending of this movie is quite different from the ending of the remake 'Another Fine Mess'. Laurel and Hardy would occasionally end a film with an impossible gag, and they use one here.

Is Laurel and Hardy's "Duck Soup" any relation to the Marx Brothers' movie "Duck Soup:"? Yes, indeed! Leo McCarey was an assistant director on this movie. Six years later, when he directed the Marxes in what would become their greatest and funniest film, McCarey decided to recycle the title from this earlier film. The talkie revolution had changed Hollywood so utterly that silent movies made only a few years earlier were regarded as obsolete and unfit for re-release ... so McCarey figured he had a free hand to re-use the title, and this silent movie vanished into oblivion for more than half a century. Fortunately, 'Duck Soup' is now available again, and it's very funny. I'll rate this movie 8 points out of 10.

DUCK SOUP

Aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Sound format: Silent

(Black and white - Short film)

A couple of vagrants (Laurel and Hardy) take refuge inside a fancy mansion whose owner has left for the weekend, but they're forced to play master and maid when prospective tenants William Austin and Madeline Hurlock) arrive on the doorstep.

Based on a stage-skit written by Stan Laurel's father, this fast-paced farce opens with L&H fleeing from Californian forest rangers who are rounding up various lowlifes to help tackle a series of dangerous bush fires. The premise is sound (and was expanded into the L&H classic ANOTHER FINE MESS, produced only three years later), but the pratfalls and slapstick are only mildly amusing, and Fred Guiol's routine direction lacks much of the inspiration that would ignite Stan 'n' Ollie's sound-era productions.

This is not the funniest Laurel & Hardy comedy short but still it's a great movie due to the way the movie is constructed.

This was not the first movie with starring both Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in it (they both appeared before in the movies " 45 Minutes from Hollywood" and " A Lucky dog".) but it was the first movie of the two appearing as a comical duo. Therefor this movie already is a bit of a must-see. It's an historical significant movie, that marked one of the very first step of silent-movie history.

No, it certainly ain't an hilarious movie but it rather is a very well constructed movie, with an excellent story and extremely good timing and pace. The editing was truly superb and kept the pace high, as well as the movie itself consistent. It all helps to make "Duck Soup" a very pleasant and amusing movie to watch.

Stan Laurel is already great in his role but Oliver Hardy still obviously had to grown into his role. The beginning is there but he's not quite perfect yet. The subtle little things that made his character so great are still missing in this movie. Luckily the boys already have some great chemistry together in this movie.

Not an hilarious movie but a very well constructed and amusing one, with Laurel & Hardy for the very first time together as a comical duo.

10/10

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While it's not one of the funniest Laurel & Hardy comedies, "Duck Soup" is still worth seeing. It is at least fairly amusing, and at times quite funny, besides its greater historical significance. The story and some of the gags both allow you to see the beginnings of the "Stan and Ollie" personas that the comic duo would later refine and perfect.

In this short, the humor mostly comes from the ways that they work together, and from the silly predicaments in which the boys find themselves, rather than from any of the specific gags. Most of the gags do work all right, but they are not as imaginative or as creative as the kinds of routines that Laurel and Hardy did in later features. The basic situation is funny, and it creates some good possibilities, some of which are used well. After they had a little more experience with each other, they learned how to take this kind of setup and make it even funnier.

Overall, this movie is probably going to be of interest mostly to those who are already Laurel & Hardy fans, who will certainly find this an interesting look at their early days together. In itself it has some good moments of comedy as well.

Laurel and Hardy's 1927 short film Duck Soup was originally thought to be lost by film scholars, critics, and the industry. The only pieces of the short that were rumored or assumed to exist were stills or very short clips, but miraculously, the film was found in a Belgium archive in 1974. However, not before the short was remade into Another Free Ride in 1930 and ideas salvaged for Pack Up Your Troubles in 1931, both Laurel and Hardy shorts.

Watching Duck Soup is nothing shy of a privilege, as it was almost never meant to be. Yet, like with all lost films, I quietly hope most of the famous lost films will not be lost forever and that we will eventually get to see the famous works as they were originally intended.

Duck Soup concerns Laurel and Hardy as two impoverished men, who are about to be recruited by forest rangers as volunteer firefighters. In a sublime chase, in true silent movie fashion, the two manage to escape them on a bike and take refuge in a mansion, while the owner and his servants have go away on business. Hardy impersonates the owner and offers to rent the home to an older English couple, with Laurel posing as the mansion's maid. This can only go on for so long, as they are the targets of two very temperamental groups of people.

Aside from the hilarious chase scene, Duck Soup wins one over mainly because of its simplicity and the fact that it begins and conducts itself by following the building blocks of comedy, which usually starts from the lead character(s) doing something they don't want to do. In this case, Laurel and Hardy don't want to fight wildfires, so they stumble into a decidedly more lavish option of taking refuge in a mansion to only disastrous results. To add to that, the film is consistently active, bearing the fantastic physical comedy and rabble-rousing entertainment necessary for a short like this to work, only proving why Laurel and Hardy became two enormous comedic names.

Starring: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Directed by: Fred L. Guiol.

This is the first short in which Laurel and Hardy worked together as a team. They were not called 'Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy' but have fictitious names. And Hardy has a two day growth of stubble. Nevertheless, this one is loaded with some very funny sight gags (this being the silent era) and ranks among their funniest films.

Forest Rangers are recruiting volunteers and have been given permission to press into service vagrants found in the LA area. Our heroes fall into that category in this short and do all they can to avoid the Rangers. They come upon an unoccupied mansion and hide inside - until a couple who rented it show up at the front door. Things begin to unravel for the boys in predictable fashion, making it one of their best. It played at Capitolfest, Rome NY, 8/14/21.

******** 8/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

Stan and Ollie are bums who don't want to have to join the volunteer fire department; they run away into a mansion whose owner is going on a hunting expedition and pretend to own the place.

Who doesn't like Laurel and Hardy? I know cross-dressing has become a taboo comedy plot, but it still makes me laugh. Some Laurel and Hardy scholars identify this as the first identifiable film where they were a team.

Duck Soup (1927)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Laurel and Hardy, trying to get away from firemen wanting to recruit them, run and hide in a house but when someone shows up to rent it they must pretend to be the owner and maid. L&H went onto remake this with better results in Another Fine Mess but this short has a few funny moments but not enough to make it work throughout.

45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A country boy goes to Hollywood to pay a bill and gets caught up in what he thinks is a movie being made. What he doesn't know is that he's caught up in a real robbery. There are a few good gags here but the real highlight is Oliver Hardy playing the Hotel Detective. Stan Laurel has a brief role as well. This was the first Hal Roach film where the two were in the same movie, although they don't share any scenes here.