My choice for the worst of the worst in the Marx canon would be either "At The Circus" or "The Big Store." I don't think either of these pictures have much to recommend them, and I guess the final verdict for worseness would be how much you can't stand Kenny Baker's performance versus Tony Martin's performance as the substitute for Zeppo in each film. MGM never understood the essence of their act - they had made their names on Broadway starring in *parodies* of musical-comedy conventions, but Metro insisted in putting them in films that took those conventions stone-faced-seriously.
Marx brothers love happy full#
You can sum them up on the back of an envelope - "Stowaways run wild on a ship." "Groucho is president of a college." "Groucho becomes a dictator." The MGM's on the other hand are so plotty and so full of extraneous characters and unneccessary subplots that the comedy seems like something shoved in after the fact. And they just go downhill from there - in contrast to the Paramounts, where the more senseless the plots were the funnier the pictures became. "Day At The Races" also has its moments but it's also full of tiresome subplots and arbitrary musical numbers that distract from the comedy. Harpo needs pathos like I need a velocipede. "Night At The Opera," despite containing some classic individual bits, makes me furious for the way the picture completely misunderstands the essence of Harpo by trying to turn him into a "sympathetic" character. I'm not fond of any of the films they made after leaving Paramount. The Marxes got involved in it as a way of making some fast cash, and that was about it. The script was rewritten to add in "Marxish" bits here in there, but there was nothing inherently Marxian about the characters or the plot, and it could just as easily have featured the Ritz Brothers.
Marx brothers love happy movie#
The thing with "Room Service" is that it really isn't a Marx Brothers movie - it's a movie that the Marx Brothers are in, but it was based on a hit Broadway show that they had nothing to do with and never appeared in on stage. Groucho hated the movie, and in his autobiography "Groucho and Me" he refers to A Night in Casablanca as his final movie with his brothers. So which is the worst? I'd have to agree with Love Happy for the simple reason that it's the least "Marx Brothers like" movie in fact, the three brothers never appear on screen together. Four years later Chico persuaded Groucho and Harpo to make two more movies so he could earn enough money to pay off his gambling debts, so A Night in Casablanca (1946) and Love Happy (1949) were produced by United Artists. They left MGM in 1937 after Thalberg died in 1936, made one movie for RKO ( Room Service), then returned to MGM for the next three movies, after which they announced they were retiring. The problem was that Thalberg insisted on scripts with "strong story structure" that included romantic plots and non-comedic musical numbers that didn't really allow the brothers to exhibit the "free for all" antics seen in the Paramount movies, and the end result was movies that weren't quite as funny but still popular. Not long after that Irving Thalberg convinced them (except for Zeppo who, with his brother Milton "Gummo" Marx, had started their own talent agency) to sign with MGM.
Part of the reason "their stuff really declined" was that their contract with Paramount (the company that produced their first five movies) had expired, and was not renewed.
0 kommentar(er)
