The Court Jester: "The Pellet with the Poison" Bit was Plagiarized

"The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle. The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true."

In The Court Jester, the scene where Danny Kaye's character, who is basically a coward, is supposed to fight a knight, and a witch tries to explain to him how he can avoid fighting him, is a cinematic comedy classic. Kaye is told that one of the cups the two fighters must choose to drink from before the duel, contains poison. All he has to memorize a simple saying to know which cup not to choose. The scene is comic perfection. And the idea was stolen from earlier film.

In Never Say Die, Bob Hope is about to fight a duel, and Martha Raye has developed a plan to ensure that Hope will not be killed during the duel. One of the pistols has a blank in it, while the other pistol has a live bullet. The pistols are marked so that Hope can select the pistol with the bullet. Raye tells him, "There’s a cross on the muzzle of the pistol with the bullet and a nick on the handle of the pistol with the blank." Hope just has to remember the simple saying. Easier said than done. The bit may have been better executed in The Court Jester, but we have to give the writers of Never Say Die the credit for the original idea.

See both scenes in the video:

Never Say Die was released in 1939. The Court Jester was released in 1955. I don't know how many people saw Never Say Die when it was released, but I'm sure that of all of the people who went to see The Court Jester who had also seen Never Say Die,  very few of them remembered the duel scene exactly, so I'm thinking that not many people realized the "bit" in The Court Jester had been stolen. Remember, there were 16 years between the movies' releases, and it was before VHS, DVD, and digital movies, so once a movie left the theaters, you wouldn't expect to ever see it again, unless a movie theater reran it. And I'm sure that Never Say Die wasn't released again after its original run. I'd be interested to know if anyone caught the plagiarism at the time.

Regardless of the similarities of the two scenes, once you see the scene in The Court Jester, you will never forget that "the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle, and the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true." Or is it "the pellet with the poison's in the flagon with the dragon, and the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true?"

Either way - Danny Kaye was a comic genius! And Bob Hope wasn't so bad himself.