Jump Cuts

In addition to many explosions, the restored Duck, You Sucker includes the following scenes and shots, excised from previous American release prints:

photo: MGM

A revolution to embrace: Duck

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• Christopher Frayling

Juan pushes the landowner's wife into a barn and shows her what he's got in his pants: "Pretty good, huh?" (We have to take this on faith; his lumpen-proletariat putz is below the frame line.) After raping the woman and stripping her husband, Juan leaves them groveling in a pigsty.

Juan and Sean bond when Juan tricks Sean into dynamiting his new employer, a German mine owner, along with his men. They are blown to smithereens in an abandoned church, no less.

A final flashback reveals Sean's idealized Irish romance to have been a ménage à trois. According to Leone, this lost love represented "the revolution" that "everyone wanted to embrace."

The title is actually a punchline. In the final shot, Juan—now on his own—plaintively cries, "What about me?" The image freezes on his close-up and the words "Duck, You Sucker!" are emblazoned for the first time across the screen.

The opening epigraph, however, is incomplete. As Christopher Frayling notes, Leone cut Mao's last sentence short. "The revolution is an act of violence" should be followed by the words "by which one class overthrows another."

Related Story:
J. Hoberman's review of Duck, You Sucker