Jan. 01, 2005 - 3:44 pm
this is one of the more famous Marx Brothers films that i had never seen before. luckily, i got a Marx Bros. dvd set for Christmas, along with a lot of other great movies, from my family. this was Jill's first Marx Bros. film to see. it was also the first one that they themselves ever made.
the movie stars Groucho as the hotel manager, Zeppo as a desk clerk, and Chico and Harpo as some petty thieves that infiltrate the hotel. Groucho is trying to get some business going as far as guests visiting the area and purchasing nearby land that needs to be sold. Chico and Harpo are there to steal people's watches, handkerchiefs, etc. there is also a plot by a couple staying at the hotel to steal some valuable jewelry and another couple who has a secret engagement.
this apparently was a wonderfully successful stage play to begin with and they decided to make it into a film once movies could incorporate sound well enough. granted, the sound recording in this film is still fairly terrible. especially at certain points. some scenes are just terrible quality.
i thought the film was ok, but it didn't showcase the verbal and visual humor as well as their later films. there weren't any scenes in this film that you could call genius. frankly there was quite a bit too much singing and dancing by other people that were not the Marx Brothers. it really wasn't even great singing and dancing. i did enjoy the musical numbers by Chico and Harpo as always, but they weren't enough to make up for the non-hilarity of most of the rest of the film. i think this was just a bad first example to show Jill probably.