Although Duck Soup did not perform as well as Horse Feathers, it was the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1933, according to Glenn Mitchell in The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia and Simon Louvish in Monkey Business.[2][4][13] However, the film was a box office disappointment for Paramount.[21]
One possible reason for the film's lukewarm reception is that it was released during the Great Depression. Audiences were taken aback by its cynicism at a time of economic and political crisis.[4][6] According to Leonard Maltin in The Great Movie Comedians:
As wonderful as Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup seem today, some critics and moviegoers found them unpleasant and longed for the more orderly world of The Cocoanuts with its musical banalities. [...] Many right-thinkers laughed themselves silly in 1933—but a large number didn't. [...] The unrelieved assault of Marxian comedy was simply too much for some people.[22]
Years later, Groucho's son Arthur Marx described Irving Thalberg's assessment of the film's purported failure during a National Public Radio interview:
[Thalberg] said the trouble with Duck Soup is you've got funny gags in it, but there's no story and there's nothing to root for. You can't root for the Marx Brothers because they're a bunch of zany kooks. [Thalberg] says, "You gotta put a love story in your movie so there'll be something to root for, and you have to help the lovers get together."[23]
Most critics at the time disliked the film because of its "dated" look at politics.[2][6][7] Christopher Null believes that "the send-up of Mussolini-types doesn't quite pan out. Take the comedy, leave the story."[24]
Groucho did not initially think highly of the film. When asked the significance of the film's politics, Groucho only shrugged and said: "What significance? We were just four Jews trying to get a laugh."[4][a] Nevertheless, the Brothers were ecstatic when Mussolini took the film as a personal insult and banned it in Italy.[6][25] Residents of Fredonia, New York, also protested the film because they feared that the similar-sounding nation would hurt their city's reputation. The Marx Brothers quipped in response, telling them to change the name of their town to keep from hurting their movie.[26][27]
Despite the tepid critical and commercial response at the time, Duck Soup is now seen as a classic political farce.[4] Film critic Danel Griffin believes that Duck Soup is "on par with other war comedies like Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, only slightly more unnerving in that Duck Soup doesn't seem to realize it is anything more than innocent fluff."[7] Fellow film critic Roger Ebert believed, "The Marx Brothers created a body of work in which individual films are like slices from the whole, but Duck Soup is probably the best."[28] British film critic Barry Norman considered Duck Soup the Marx Brothers' best work, and included it in his list of the 100 best films of the 20th century.[29]
Revived interest in the film during the 1960s dovetailed with the counterculture of the era.[4] American literary critic Harold Bloom considers the end of Duck Soup one of the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century.[30]
In 1990, Duck Soup was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[9] In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted Duck Soup the 29th greatest comedy film of all time.[4] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 91% rating based on 53 reviews, with an average rating of 9.1/10. The site' consensus reads, "Fueled by inspired silliness and blessed with some of the Marx brothers' most brilliant work, Duck Soup is one of its – or any – era's finest comedies".[31] It is also one of the earliest films to appear on Roger Ebert's list of The Great Movies.[28]
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
- AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies – #85[32]
- AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs – #5[33]
- AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #60[34]
Influence
The United States Library of Congress has added Duck Soup to the National Film Registry,[8] and the film was included in both the original (1998) broadcast of AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies and the 2007 update.[35]
Another testament to Duck Soup's legacy is its influence on Woody Allen's films. Near the end of Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), a chance screening of Duck Soup convinces Allen's character that life is still worth living, and he abandons his suicidal impulses.[6] His earlier Bananas (1971), a film chronicling the humorous rise of an unlikely dictator, has been dubbed a "spiritual sequel to Duck Soup."[36]
Duck Soup is also frequently cited as a major influence on the comedic side of The Beatles,[37][38][39] and The Beatles themselves admitted that it was an inspiration for their film Help![40]
The film has influenced animation as well, with homages appearing in various animated television series. It was spoofed in Animaniacs as the full-episode sketch "King Yakko". One specific gag from the original, the constant singing of the Freedonian national anthem, was spoofed in particular with a Perry Como caricature. Groucho's entrance in the film was borrowed in another Animaniacs cartoon, "The Three Muska-Warners".[41]
The film also inspired parts of Sacha Baron Cohen's 2012 film The Dictator.[42] A critic for The A.V. Club noted that "Admiral General Aladeen and Rufus T. Firefly share the same bloodline, representing a more generalized contempt for world leaders of any stripe, whether they don a 'supreme beard' or a greasepaint moustache."[43] The Nashville Scene considered the film to be "an echo here of that funniest of xenophobe-baiting funnies, Duck Soup."[44] Rolling Stone claimed that Baron Cohen's film "dodges soothing convention and ultimately merits comparisons to The Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator."[45]
The company FASA, which publishes role-playing games, derives its name from an imaginary Freedonian version of NASA, the "Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration".[46]
