[3][4] It is the third of the Marx Brothers' released movies (Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo), and the first with an original screenplay rather than an adaptation of one of their Broadway shows.

After singing "Sweet Adeline", they are discovered and the ship's officers spend the rest of the voyage chasing and attempting to catch the stowaways who are running amok.

Chico and Harpo disrupt a chess game and confiscate the board, taking it into the stateroom of Helton and his daughter Mary.

Zeppo manages to swipe the passport of movie star Maurice Chevalier, and demonstrates his ability to mimic the Frenchman's singing.

The final script was the result of five months of work by the brothers, gag writers, director Norman Z. MacLeod and Mankiewicz.

[5][7][8] In Ireland, the film was passed on January 8, 1932, with "16 unspecified cuts to script", including characters falling over each other in a dance scene.

In December 1935, Todd was found dead in her car, inside her garage apparently from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

At least one other possible on-screen utterance occurs in the film A Day at the Races (1937), in which Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are heard singing "Down by the Old Mill Stream" in three-part harmony.

[1] One of the sequences in this film involves the four brothers attempting to get off the ship using a passport stolen from famous singer (and fellow Paramount star) Maurice Chevalier.

This poses a problem for the mute Harpo, who mimes to a hidden phonograph tied to his back which plays the Chevalier recording.

Earlier, when Zeppo first meets gangster Joe Helton's daughter Mary on the promenade of the ocean liner, "Just One More Chance" by Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow can be heard playing in the background.

Chico performs two pieces on the piano, the "Pizzicato" from Sylvia by Léo Delibes, which then morphs into the song "When I Take My Sugar to Tea", written by Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal, and Pierre Norman.

"[16] The film was evidently based on two routines the Marx Brothers did during their early days in vaudeville (Home Again and Mr. Green's Reception), along with a story idea from one of Groucho's friends, Bert Granet, called The Seas Are Wet.

[11][17] The passport scene is a reworking of a stage sketch in which the brothers burst into a theatrical agent's office auditioning an impersonation of a current big star.

Also repeated in that later film was the uproarious medical examination that Harpo and Chico give opera singer Madame Swempski (Cecil Cunningham).

The writers quickly shifted gears and instead based the next film, Horse Feathers, very loosely on the Marx Brothers' earlier stage show Fun in Hi Skule.