The Marx Brothers were such an idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind collection comedic strengths and strong personalities that it is easy to assume that they would be responsible for the bulk of any movie in which they appeared. Especially considering that they been enjoying careers in show business nearly all their lives and were already legendary stage performers before ever stepping foot onto a film studio. This is, of course, a common assumption about comedians the greater bulk of whom—especially back then—did not actually write their own material. The confusion of the interpretative talents of performance with the creative talents of writing is perhaps more understandable in those cases—such as the Marx Brothers—where the performance indicates a particular strength of personality at work.
On the other hand, Leo McCarey is not one of those directors who is immediately recognizable due to the repetition of a certain “voice.” He has no real cinematic trademark that uniquely identifies himself as having been behind the camera. Given the option of choosing who had more influence over the Duck Soup—the performers who appear pretty much here as they do in any other of their films or the solidly dependable, workman like director without a signature—the tendency would be to assign credit to Groucho, Harpo and Chico.
This is likely to be especially so when one learns that McCarey was dead set against directing the film and afterward publicly acknowledged it is not among his favorites and that the most surprising thing about directing it was that he retained his sanity by the time it was completed.
Despite all the circumstantial evidence to the contrary, however, the inescapable fact is that the guiding influence over the creation of Duck Soup was not any one particular Marx brother nor all three as a collective unit, but rather Leo McCarey. Just to what extent does the film reflect a stronger influence by McCarey than by its famous anarchic players?
In an interview with critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich, McCarey laid out his essential framework for directing: everything that happens needs to stimulate what happens next. He preferred to avoid creating intrigue about what is going on by simply putting it on the screen for the audience to connect. Despite the fact that Duck Soup is arguably the most anarchic and absurd of the Marx Brothers movies, it is also—paradoxically—one of the most controlled. Each individual scene is brimming with absurdity and non-sequiturs and insane leaps of logic that produces laughs, but put them all together without focusing on the absurdity and Duck Soup is really the only Marx Brothers movie that actually tells a coherent story in which the narrative builds logically upon itself. From anarchy, McCarey creates order but tellingly does so in a manner in which it seems disorderly. That is the guiding force of his influence as a director, but like the film, the precision of the whole is constructed from parts that on their own reveal a more definite and concrete authority.
Groucho himself attributed the more pointed political satire of the film to McCarey. The brothers themselves were far more interested in getting laughs than making political statements. McCarey’s influence even extends to the title which had at various times originally been Firecracker and Cracked Ice. The title had previously been used for a Laurel and Hardy short; McCarey directed several of the team’s shorts. Most impressively, however, is the influence of McCarey over some of the most famous routines in the film which also are among the most famous routines in all the body of work of the Marx Brothers. It was McCarey who devised what is almost beyond question the single most famous bit in any Marx Brothers film, the mirror pantomime with Harpo disguised as Groucho and mimicking his every move as Groucho wonders if he’s looking in a mirror or not. McCarey also gave up with idea of Harpo running amok with a pair of scissors throughout the film. And finally, McCarey was the guiding force behind both the lemonade seller routine and the sequence in which Chico and Harpo try breaking into the mansion of Mrs. Teasdale.
