YMMV / Duck Soup

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Is Trentino really so hot-headed, vindictive and petty as to take Sylvania to war with Freedonia over being slapped (three times) by Firefly, or does he see it as a convenient excuse to have Sylvania invade and conquer Freedonia from without, since his attempts to bring the country down from within keep failing due to Chicolini and Pinky's screw-ups?
  • Is Rufus T. Firefly really the leader Mrs. Teasdale think he is and only acts like a Deadpan Snarker, or is he a crazy grifter that conned a woman into giving him a seat of power in a country too financially and politically unstable to do anything about it? He might have won a war with the military of a financially precarious country, but keep in mind that he was the one who started that war in the first place over being call an "upstart." Even in the 30's there were worse things to be called.
  • Did Rufus declare war over an insult, or did he see this as a method of stabilizing Freedonia's economy? War is profitable, after all.
• Award Snub: This film didn't get any nominations at the Academy Awards.
• Awesome Ego: Firefly. He declares war on another country for name-calling... and wins! Being played by Groucho Marx helps, of course.
• Cult Classic: While people still liked it at the time, it didn't win any awards and while it wasn't a bomb, Paramount still considered it a disappointment. Today, many see it to be their best film, or at least one of their best films, and is considered a masterpiece.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Be honest, how many of you guys mainly saw the film for the mirror scene?
• Moral Event Horizon: Invoked for comedy. Firefly pretty much starts the war because Trentino called him an "upstart". Granted, Trentino did plot to take over Freedonia but he did seem to want to avoid a war. The only reason he ends up declaring war is because Firefly slapped him a third time for assuming that Trentino would reject his handshake. The song-and-dance number about going to war that follows right after shows how hopelessly (and hilariously) corrupt he is.
• Nausea Fuel: When Groucho gets his head stuck in a vase, he comments "Last time this happened to me I was crawling under a bed!" Consider that he (and probably a good share of the film's original audience) grew up in an era where chamber pots were still used...
• Signature Line:
  • "Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?"
  • "Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot."
• Signature Scene: The Mirror Routine.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Freedonia's national anthem sounds an awful lot like "Rule Britannia".
• Values Dissonance
  • Back when the film was first released, the notion of a wealthy elite using their money to force changes to a government, including arbitrarily picking the country's new leadership, seemed like a novel idea. Nowadays, it's a nightmare to folks on both the right and the left.
  • Groucho's line "My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that's why darkies were born." It's a reference to a then-contemporary popular song, but the racist language is hard to excuse. Granted, it's an easy line to ignore, as it's arguably the only joke in the movie that's a dud.

---