Although released before the on-screen partnership was officially acknowledged, and without the couple’s familiar fraying-bourgeois air – Ollie sports a scrubby beard – the ultimate Stan-and-Ollie relationship is already firmly defined. Stan is dithery, timid, but ultimately the more resourceful; Ollie is dominating-going-on-bullying, confident, and generally badly mistaken.
They learn with alarm that the Forest Rangers are rounding up vagrants to fight forest fires, and swiftly take refuge in a mansion whose owners are leaving on holiday. In their absence Oliver endeavours to rent  out the house, while Stan helpfully disguises himself as Agnes the housemaid. Things do not end well.
Although they dominate the film, the nominal star was Madeline Hurlock (1897-1989), who set out as a serious actress, was recruited as a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty, and went on to be teamed, in turn by Sennett and by Roach, in two-reelers with comics like Harry Langdon and Billy Bevan. Here, as Lady Tarbotham, she maintains her poise against all odds.
Though they enjoy the incomparable directorial guidance of Fred Guiol and Leo McCarey, Stan Laurel may well already have been exerting his influence on the concept of their films, since the story is adapted from a sketch by his father, Arthur J. Jefferson.
The film was re-made with sound as Another Fine Mess in 1930. Leo McCarey re-used the title for his 1933 Marx Brothers film.

David Robinson

The restoration  Long lost, then rediscovered in a cropped, foreign-titled sound re-release and in 9.5mm, “the first Laurel and Hardy film” has now been restored by Lobster Films close to its original form, following the rediscovery of a beautiful full-aperture tinted nitrate print at the BFI of what appears to be a British re-release, which is the main source for this new digitization-restoration. A censorship out-take preserved at the Library of Congress preserves the only two known American-English title cards for the film (“My gawd – she is raw!” – when Laurel believes to see naked Madeline Hurlock, who then calls out “Agnes!”), while its script has been published in Randy Skretvedt’s The Laurel & Hardy Movie Scripts: 20 Original Short Subject Screenplays (1926–1934) (2018). But in an ironic twist, British-English titles seem rather appropriate for a piece based on a music-hall classic to begin with. The Giornate is proud to present a new restoration of Duck Soup, made possible through the teamwork of Lobster Films, the BFI, and the Library of Congress.

Ulrich Ruedel