Duck Soup is a 1933 American pre-Code musical black comedy film written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin) and directed by Leo McCarey.

Released by Paramount Pictures on November 17, 1933, it stars the four Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo in his final film appearance) and also features Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern, Raquel Torres and Edgar Kennedy.

Compared to the Marx Brothers' previous films, Duck Soup was a financial disappointment,[2] though not an outright box-office failure as is sometimes reported.

[3][7] In 1990, the United States Library of Congress deemed Duck Soup "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

[8][9] Wealthy widow Gloria Teasdale is asked to give twenty million dollars to the small, financially struggling nation of Freedonia; she agrees on the condition that Rufus T. Firefly is appointed the country's leader.

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] McCarey also thought up "the very Laurel & Hardy-like sequence in which Harpo and Chico stage a break-in at Mrs Teasdale's house.

(The song makes a reprise in the 1937 Marx Brothers film A Day at the Races as "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm" in the Lindy Hop production number.)

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."

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.

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.

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).

Zeppo, playing according to James Agee "a peerlessly cheesy improvement on the traditional straight man",[19] sings with the group, including soloing the first few lines of the first song, "When the Clock on the Wall Strikes 10".

"When The Clock On The Wall Strikes 10", the first musical number in the film, is part of the same scene as "Just Wait 'Til I Get Through With It",[6] Groucho's song about the laws of his administration.

However, in Monkey Business, Chico briefly bangs on the piano while the other three play saxophones while eluding their pursuers on an ocean liner.

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.

[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.

[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".

The site's critical 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".

[6] His earlier Bananas (1971), a film chronicling the humorous rise of an unlikely dictator, has been dubbed a "spiritual sequel to Duck Soup.

One specific gag from the original, the constant singing of the Freedonian national anthem, was spoofed in particular with a Perry Como caricature.

"[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.

What made her column even more galling was the satisfied tone in her statement that such a "well-made edit makes the film a pure zany joy without an ugly blot in it to spoil the fun."

Another potentially sensitive moment in the film — Groucho's punchline, "and that's why darkies were born", a dated reference to a popular song from the '30s — is also still intact.

But that he communicated with T. S. Eliot, Antonin Artaud, Dalí, etc., all who praised the Brothers' work, means that he was at least aware of the various readings of the film, and he engaged them on some level.

Towards the end of his lifetime, critics reexamined the Paramounts and embraced them, and perhaps this gave Groucho incentive to finally admit that the film indeed was an intentional, biting satire.