Development
The Marx Brothers' previous film, Horse Feathers, had been Paramount's highest-grossing film of 1932. Encouraged by this success, the studio suggested on August 2, 1932, that they rush out a follow-up. Already at this early stage, the story (provisionally entitled Oo La La)[6] was set in a mythical kingdom. On August 11, 1932, the Los Angeles Times reported that production would commence in five weeks with the famed Ernst Lubitsch directing.
This was a turbulent time in the Marx Brothers' career. The Great Depression was raging and Paramount Pictures was attempting to stave off bankruptcy. A reorganization of the studio brought fears that money due the Marxes would never be paid; as a result, the Brothers threatened to leave Paramount and form their own company, Marx Bros., Inc.[12] Their first planned independent production was a film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical Of Thee I Sing, with Norman McLeod leaving Paramount to direct.[2] During late 1932 and early 1933, Groucho and Chico were also working on Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, a radio show written by Nat Perrin and Arthur Sheekman; there was even, at one time, talk of casting the two as their radio characters for the new film,[12] an idea that was eventually used by Perrin in the 1941 Marx Brothers film The Big Store.[2]
By October 4, 1932, Arthur Sheekman, Harry Ruby, and Bert Kalmar began writing the screenplay for the next Paramount film, which was now called Firecrackers.[6][11] Herman Mankiewicz was to supervise production, beginning in January 1933.[12] By December 1932, Firecrackers had become Cracked Ice.[11] Grover Jones was also reported to have contributed to the first draft by Ruby and Kalmar.[12] In The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, Glenn Mitchell says that "the first script's content is difficult to determine".[13]
On January 18, 1933, Harry Ruby, Bert Kalmar and Grover Jones submitted to Paramount their "Second Temporary Script" for Cracked Ice,[11] and Paramount announced that shooting would commence on February 15. This script shows that the basic plot of Duck Soup was in place. In February, Paramount announced that the title had been changed to Grasshoppers[6] ("because animal stories are so popular"), and that filming was set back to February 20.
However, on May 11, 1933, the Marx Brothers' father Sam "Frenchie" Marx died in Los Angeles,[2] and shortly afterward the contract dispute with Paramount was settled.[3] The New York Post reported on May 17 that the Brothers would make a new comedy for Paramount, called Duck Soup. Leo McCarey was set for direction of the film. Three days later The New York Sun reported that Duck Soup would start filming in June. Duck Soup's script was completed by July 11.[11] The script was a continuation of Ruby and Kalmar's Firecrackers/Cracked Ice drafts, but contained more elements.[12] Many of the film's clever gags and routines were lifted from Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel,[2] giving Perrin and Sheekman an "additional dialogue" credit.
Title
Director McCarey reportedly came up with the title for the film, having previously used it for an earlier directorial effort with Laurel and Hardy.[6] This continued the "animal" titles of the Brothers' previous three films, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers.[12]
"Duck soup" was American English slang at that time, referring to something easy to do. Conversely, "to duck something" meant to avoid it. When Groucho was asked for an explanation of the title, he quipped, "Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life."[6]
McCarey also thought up "the very Laurel & Hardy-like sequence in which Harpo and Chico stage a break-in at Mrs Teasdale's house."[12] Another McCarey contribution was the "mirror scene", a revival of an old Marx Brothers vaudeville act.[2][6]
Mirror scene
In the "mirror scene", Pinky, dressed as Firefly, pretends to be Firefly's reflection in a missing mirror, matching his every move—including absurd ones that begin out of sight—to near perfection. At one point, the two men swap positions, introducing the question of which is the reflection. Eventually, Chicolini, also disguised as Firefly, enters the frame and collides with both of them.
Although its appearance in Duck Soup is the best known instance, the concept of the mirror scene did not originate in this film. Harold Lloyd used essentially the same routine in his short The Marathon (1919). Max Linder included it in Seven Years Bad Luck (1921), where a man's servants have accidentally broken a mirror and attempt to hide the fact by imitating his actions in the mirror's frame.[14] Charlie Chaplin used a similar joke in The Floorwalker (1916),[6] though it did not involve a mirror.
This scene has been imitated many times; for instance, in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Hare Tonic,[6] the Mickey Mouse cartoon Lonesome Ghosts, The Square Peg (1959), The Pink Panther (1963), the Tom and Jerry cartoon Cat and Dupli-cat (1967), Big Business (1988), the X-Files episode "Dreamland" (1998), Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006) and the Family Guy episode "Road to Germany". Harpo himself did a reprise of this scene, dressed in his usual costume, with Lucille Ball also donning the fright wig and trench coat, in the I Love Lucy episode "Lucy and Harpo Marx".[15]
Other scenes and jokes
The climactic production number ridicules war by comparing nationalism to a minstrel show. One segment is a variant on the old Negro spiritual "All God's Chillun Got Wings":
They got guns, We got guns, All God's chillun got guns! I'm gonna walk all over the battlefield, 'Cause all God's chillun got guns!
Another repeated gag involved Harpo, who drives a motorcycle with a sidecar, as a chauffeur, to transport Groucho. Twice, after Groucho gives the orders to Harpo, Harpo rides his motorcycle away, leaving Groucho stranded in the sidecar. Later, Groucho has Harpo sit in the sidecar, while Groucho gets on the motorcycle, the sidecar, with Harpo in it, rides off away, again, leaving Groucho stranded.
Shortly after, during the final battle scenes, "rightfully [...] called the funniest of all of cinema",[7] Firefly can be seen wearing a different costume in almost every sequence until the end of the film, including American Civil War uniforms (first Union and then Confederate), a British palace guard uniform, a Boy Scout Scoutmaster's uniform, and even a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Meanwhile, the exterior view of the building they are occupying changes appearance from a bunker to an old fort, etc. One of Firefly's generals assures him that he has "a man combing the countryside for volunteers." Sure enough, Pinky is wandering out on the front lines wearing a sandwich board sign reading, "Join the Army and see the Navy." Later, Chicolini volunteers Pinky to carry a message through enemy lines; Firefly tells him, "[...] 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." Thomas Doherty has described this line as "sum[ming] up the Great War cynicism towards all things patriotic".[16]
The melodramatic exclamation "This means war!" certainly did not originate with Duck Soup, but it is used several times in the film—at least twice by Trentino and once by Firefly[17]—and was repeated by Groucho in A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. Variations of this phrase later became a frequently used catch-phrase for Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny in Warner Bros. cartoons.[18]
In another scene, the film pokes fun at the Hays Code. Due to the code, a man and woman could not be shown in bed together. The camera begins the scene in a woman's bedroom, panning across the foot of the bed. A pair of men's shoes are shown on the floor, then a pair of women's shoes and then four horseshoes. The camera cuts to a shot of the entire room: Pinky is sleeping in one bed with the horse, while the woman is in another bed.
The film's writers recycled a joke used in Horse Feathers in this dialogue with Chico:
Prosecutor: Chicolini, isn't it true you sold Freedonia's secret war code and plans?Chicolini: Sure! I sold a code and two pairs o' plans!
The street vendor confrontations are also well-crafted pieces of physical comedy:[6][7] Chico and Harpo harass a lemonade seller (comedy film veteran Edgar Kennedy), egged on by his irritation that they have stolen his pitch.
First, there is a scene involving the knocking off, dropping, picking up and exchanging of hats. Later, Kennedy (a much larger man) steals bags of Harpo's peanuts, and Harpo responds by burning Kennedy's new straw boater hat; in return, Kennedy pushes over their peanut wagon. Harpo responds by stepping knee-deep into Kennedy's lemonade tank, where he imitates a stereotypical Italian grape-crushing peasant; this drives off Kennedy's waiting line of customers.
Just before the Mirror Scene is the Radio Scene. Harpo tries the combination to the safe on a box which proves to be a radio, and it starts blaring the break-up strain of John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever". The music continues despite frantic efforts to silence, and finally destroy, the radio, by throwing it out the window, shattering the glass.
Harpo often doffed his hat on-screen, but Chico very rarely removed his Tyrolean hat, even when indoors. For a few seconds on-screen in the earlier scene, Chico's head is uncovered, revealing a wavy wig. Chico had already started going bald when the brothers appeared in their first Broadway production, I'll Say She Is, in 1924. All of the Brothers' natural receding-hairline patterns were similar, but Harpo and Chico covered theirs with wigs (Groucho later sported an obvious toupee in the films At The Circus and Go West).
