Duck Soup at 85: Make Freedonia Great Again | Features
There’s no question “Duck Soup” is still funny. But is it still relevant? For those who are not fans of the current president, it is hard not to think of him when Rufus T. Firefly, laying down the laws of his administration, sings, “The last man nearly ruined this place/He didn’t know what to do with it/If you think this country’s bad off now/Just wait ‘til I get through with it.”
It is true that Donald Trump shares Firefly’s thin skin; Firefly plunges his country into war when Trentino calls him an “upstart.” But that’s where the parallels end, according to Roy Blount, Jr., whose salute of the film, Hail, Hail Euphoria! is the literary equivalent to home video commentary. By email, he offered, “‘Duck Soup’ remains profoundly tonic in its take on what’s toxic.”
Conventional wisdom labels “Duck Soup” a scathing anti-war satire. Here’s the punchline: It was not intended as such. This according to Steve Stoliar, who as a college student at UCLA in the 1970s led the charge for the re-release of the long stuck in the vaults “Animal Crackers,” which helped revitalize interest in the Marx Brothers, and who chronicled his years as Groucho’s archivist in the memoir Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House.
“Groucho alternated between being amused and annoyed by people reading things into the films that were never intended,” he said in a phone interview. “He was the head of a hotel in ‘The Cocoanuts’ and the head of a college in ‘Horse Feathers.’ The writers thought, ‘Where else can we put Groucho where he doesn’t belong?’ and you can’t get loftier than the head of a mythological kingdom.”
During the heyday of the Marx Brothers revival, Groucho was often asked his favorites of their films. He invariably cited “A Night at the Opera” and “A Day at the Races,” which were made for MGM. “It was when the college students started embracing the Paramount films that Groucho started filtering in ‘Duck Soup,’” Stoliar said. “He didn’t think of “Duck Soup” for years because it marked the end of their Paramount contract (the film had received mixed reviews at the time and, while not a bomb, was not as big at the box office as their previous films). Then [legendary producer Irving Thalberg] brings them into the wonderland of MGM and makes two big moneymaking movies. Groucho felt 'Opera' and 'Races' were their best in terms of story and production values, but in terms of funniness, 'Duck Soup' is the obvious winner. You get out of it that war is not good and that countries start wars over seemingly trivial things. That’s fine, but in terms of the artists’ intentions—it may sound simplistic—but Groucho said, ‘We were just trying to be funny.’”
