I was determined to avoid the news on the night of the presidential election of November 2024, and not check the results until after I awoke the next morning. But I needed a distraction that night, and so I watched the 1946 Marx Brothers film A Night in Casablanca.
No points for guessing where the picture is set or which movie inspired it. There are actually are very few references to that famous film. The most notable one is in the opening scene, where the most recent manager of the Hotel Casablanca has been poisoned, prompting the police chief to order his men to round up the usual suspects. After that, the references are, at best, several steps removed. Alas, an Ingrid Bergman lookalike never graces the screen.
There’s not even a Margaret Dumont, the best straight person the group ever had, and my vote for the fifth Marx sibling. But you do get Sig Ruman as a villain trying to get treasures looted out by Nazis out from where they are secreted in a hotel and out of the country. Ruman, a staple of Lubitsch films, is a guaranteed laugh-getter, though he hammed it up here just a hair too much for my taste.
Groucho enters the scene as the latest in the series of hotel managers, where each of his predecessors met an untimely end, as they were in the way of Ruman’s scheme. Chico is the president of The Yellow Camel Company, as dromedaries are the only cabs in the city. This seems strange to me as there are also cars, or at least there is one in a joke Groucho makes later about an attempt on his life. Harpo hangs around the margins in his usual manner.
The three band together to foil Ruman’s attempts to take Groucho’s life and get the hidden treasure out of the country. Ruman’s right-hand-woman is Lisette Verea, as the femme fatale who tries to seduce the Groucho.
Typical of the brothers’ work after their initial stint at Universal, we also have a conventional (read: boring) couple who are supposedly the real heroes and the audience surrogate. Charles Drake is the pilot the Nazis forced to transport the ill-gotten booty to Morocco, and now he’s looking to clear his name. His girl is Lois Collier and, together, they drive the laugh-free patches of the film which executives thought were necessary for the story.
That a Marx Brothers film had to be driven by plot was an idea that had been steadily decreasing the quality of their films. The first to do so, A Night at the Opera, is brilliant, but I still detect the faintest whiff of the impending decline even in that work.
As much as I like Chico, the film is really at its best when it focuses on either Groucho or Harpo. Alas, it seems obvious Groucho was tired of making movies, or maybe the brothers collectively were past the point of caring about the scripts. The line I think I laughed hardest at is his reaction when he is informed his laundry will be picked up once a month: “If you wait that long, you won’t be able to pick it up.” But there is something about even his delivery of that line which had me feeling he was going through the motions.
Hapro gets visual gags, as usual, and so fares the best here. In his first scene, an officer sarcastically asks the man if he is holding up the building he’s leaning against and, of course, Harpo takes a step away and it collapses. It is an obvious setup, but it made me smile, regardless.
Of course, Chico and Harpo each get one musical number each at a piano and harp, respectively. I used to be deeply baffled by these moments, but I now look forward to them in each film. These moments are pure and beautiful, in both flawless technique and in feeling.
But it wouldn’t be a Marx film without a couple of large-scale gags of complicated mayhem. The best of these has Chico and Harpo completely filling a busy restaurant with additional tables and chairs until nobody can move. This bit recalls the stateroom scene from Opera, even if it is not of that caliber.
Though there is some debate at this, A Night in Casablanca is generally regarded as the last true Marx Brothers picture. It is at least better than Room Service, At the Circus, Go West and The Big Store, though still being one of their lesser works. I honestly like Love Happy a bit more, and that was intended to be a solo Harpo film. Still, lesser Marx Brothers is better than the best of so many others, and it provided the soothing balm my aching brain needed on Election Night.
Dir: Archie Mayo
Starring The Marx Brothers, Sig Ruman
Watched on Classic Flix blu-ray