Preceded by an anti-war comedy short. "They got guns; we got guns; all God's chillun got guns."/ "You're a brave man...And remember, while you're out there, risking life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here, thinking what a sucker you are!" --Duck Soup Even the Surrealist poets could not "denature" rational communication as the Marx Brothers could. For the Surrealists, the Marx Brothers' anarchic eroticism was central to their overall subversiveness. Coming as it did in 1933, Duck Soup's pointed attack aimed at the absurdity of nations and war most likely was responsible for its failure at the box office. But it danced by the censors by way of inspired chaos. By contrast, Jean Vigo's Zéro de conduit (1930) as well as All Quiet on the Western Front and L'Age d'or all were variously banned in European capitals. "No Surrealist will fail to draw an analogy between Harpo's indifference to the call of patriotism in Duck Soup and the behavior of the hero in Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'or, who abandons a political mission to answer the imperious demands of love...Harpo's way of life takes its place in the 'essential disintegration of the real by poetry' with which Artaud credits him and his brothers" (J. H. Matthews, Surrealism and the American Feature Film).