Still image from Duck Soup in Movie Makers, Dec. 1952, 322.
English
750 ft
16mm
Kodachrome
Silent
With sound on tape.
"Here, in Duck Soup, is the true life blood of amateur movie making — the family film. Since the hobby's very beginning in 1923, and consistently through the years since that time, more persons have bought more amateur movie cameras to take family films than for all other reasons put together. And yet look at the results! Or better still, don't look at them — for they are on the average an incoherent hodgepodge of over and underexposure, unsteady camera handling and wild panning on disconnected mementos of familiar milestones. Duck Soup, for those filmers who are lucky enough to see it, should change all that. For here is a well planned and crisply executed family film which has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has also precise camera work, fluid sequencing, and lighting on the children which will delight the heart of all home filmers. Do not, however, let these disciplined excellencies mislead you. For, above all else, Duck Soup is no stodgy exercise in family record keeping. These people had fun! Look . . . Duck Soup is a rollicking, rambunctious saga of what happens in a household when Pop, charging recklessly that the trials of homekeeping are "duck soup," is deserted for a few days by his deserving wife. What happens, as Pop gets the works from a quintet of utterly engaging youngsters, shouldn't happen (as they say) to a dog. There is stolid, well-meaning Tim, who, returning from the corner store, mangles a loaf of bread beyond all human use; there is demure and lovely Ellen, who plays the bride with Mom's best lace tablecloth; there are Greg and Kevin, impish and angelic twins, who roughhouse their way through the afternoon nap, bathing, haircuts and countless other high-spirited adventures. And there is, finally, Gary, the baby, who bawls like a foghorn and is Pop's particular problem-of-the-day. Duck Soup, in recounting these hilarious misadventures, is not a "great" film in the majestic sense of the word. (Majesty would be impossible in the face of that Lawler brood!) But it is family filming of the finest sort. It is warm, winning and alive with good spirits. Duck Soup is the best of the Ten Best for 1952 — and it richly deserves the Maxim Memorial Award which it has won." Movie Makers, 1952, 323-324.
Discussed by Timothy Lawler in "From Review to Reward" (Movie Makers, Jan. 1953, 14-15, 20-22). The article details the production of the film, and describes the Lawlers' attempts to improve on their previous approach to family filmmaking. Film stills are shown.
Discussed under "Family Chronicle Films" in Charles Tepperman's Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960, University of California Press, 2014, 171-177.
The film was a winner in a Kenosha Movie & Slide Club film contest in 1952 (Movie Makers, July 1952, 184-185). It also won second award in the family film class at the PSA convention of 1953 (Home Movies, Sept. 1953, 376).
The film was included in a screening package titled: The ACL Presents "The Top of the Ten Best," made available through the ACL Club Film Library in 1953 (Movie Makers, Feb. 1953, 30). The premiere screening of this program is chronicled in "World Premiere in Washington!" (Movie Makers, May 1953, 125). Screenings of this program include a "TTB" note in the "Screenings" field below.
Amateur Cinema