Margaret Dumont has returned to Boston, only to find herself roundly insulted by Mr. Groucho Marx, who is currently flaunting his right of primogeniture as Mrs. Marx's eldest son. Rolling in the aisles of the Laffmovie, shuddering as Hub men laughed in the wrong places and gasped at the low cut dresses of pre-Will Hays days, our hearts went out to Mother Marx, who, patiently and understandingly reared and molded four heterogeneous scions into a quartet of the laugh-makingest zanies ever to be rolled onto the American scene. The scene is "Duck Soup."

"Duck Soup," which bests Lowell House Puree Mongol four reels to the wind, even has chuckles left over for Edgar Kennedy, who, for the first and last time finds himself on humorous celluloid. The Marx Brothers, happily caught in the revival cycle, have been racing through a cinematic renaissance. No serious student of Comparative Comedy can afford to finesse this eighty-minute demonstration of diplomatic rompings and political perambulating. Groucho, as Rufus J. Firefly, premier of Freedonia, involves himself in an international embroglio from which not even a rapier-keen cigar can extricate him. His butt is Louis Calhern--since elevated to tonier company as "The Magnificent Yankee"--an embassy villain who early in the film loses his coattails, and his dignity, to the omni-present shears of Harpo, the foursome's fair-haired and superbly equipped delinquent.

For students of Marxiana, even the uninspired face of Zeppe, the vestigal remnant, should help to recapture the "good old days" when the Brothers' only comedy competition was Cal Coolidge. Chico, who triples as peanut-vendor, confidential agent and Minister of War in Groucho's parlor cabinet, shows the verve and talent for pantomime that has, in later productions, been drowned in a flood of dialogue and cute piano-peeking. Margaret Dumont, accused by Groucho of looking like an old tenement, is the perfect foil through bedroom to parlor to bedroom. If S.J. Perelman did not invent the gags there was some compensation in money-maker Leo McCarey's direction.

Unless you want to find yourself with nothing to say as that post-game cocktail party, throw away your Reader's Digest, dab your ear-lobes with DDT and get over to the Laffmovie to catch the latest in Marxist doctrine.