‘After that first screening I had to admit to a slight nagging feeling of depression, although my sides ached from laughing.  The brothers’ last film, the abysmal Love Happy, had just been released, and one knew that they were washed-up old men.  To see them now at the apogee of their careers was somewhat too sharp a contrast.’

A few years later Halliwell would be running a cinema in Cambridge, and tapped into a growing revival of interest in the madcap brothers:

‘In answer to many requests Paramount had condescended to strike just one print of Duck Soup.  It must have cost all of forty quid.  It staggered around the art houses and film societies of Britain until it ran minutes short from splices, and it was an insult to ask money to see it.’

This was the last of the Paramount Marxes, before their move to Metro and bigger budgets:

‘…the pure undiluted essence of these primitive zanies, for whom nothing is sacred, is to be found in the earlier movies with their abhorrence of love interest, their loathing of establishment ethics, and their generally unswerving endorsements of corruption, incompetence and greed.’

Although the brothers themselves would have probably disagreed:

‘The Marx Brothers themselves always professed to prefer their MGM vehicles, with their high expensive gloss and contrasting romantic angles, to their earlier Paramount ‘menagerie’ romps.’

Groucho gets even more of the lion’s share of the quotes than usual:

‘…it is mainly Groucho’s field day, for of all their films this is most clearly built round his irresponsible, irrepressible character with its penchant for verbal insult and near-the-knuckle innuendo.’

LH describes his first encounter with the Marx Brothers’ finest hour:

‘It was at the Cambridge Film Society in 1950 that I first encountered Duck Soup.  This august body, over a thousand strong, used to meet in the Central Cinema on Sunday mornings, and to enter the wide and sweet-smelling circle at 10.25 was to be deafened by the rustle of six hundred copies of the Sunday Times and blinded by the whiteness of newsprint held in undergraduate fists.’

The film was especially poignant given the year he first saw it: