Panique à l'hôtel

I saw an undergraduate production of "Room Service" at the University of Rochester, and amazingly enough, it was exactly as good (I should rather say "bad") as this movie. No better, and no worse. I think it's the material. It's so mind-numbingly bland, and so typical of the period (everybody's broke...everybody wants to be on Broadway...blah blah blah), that even the great Marx Brothers couldn't make it fly.

This is the only film that was not specifically written for them, and boy, does it show. Room Service is your garden-variety 1930s comedy, so far beneath the pioneering and progressive humor of the Marx Brothers that it's absurd to even dream of shoehorning them into this pedestrian garbage. And yet they attempted it anyway.

An unfunny Groucho? God, it's unwatchable. Interesting to note that Harpo still manages to be charming, but he's quite marginalized, probably because there was no non-speaking funny man in the original play. The supporting cast consists entirely of tinned hams, and the great Lucille Ball barely features.

The action is rather too literally based on the play, so the Marx Brothers remain cooped up in a hotel room for just about the entire movie. It's about as cinematic as a trip to the laundromat, and about as exciting. Worse yet, Room Service landed the Marx Brothers in hot water with their usual production company, MGM, since they turned traitor and made this turkey with RKO. After returning to MGM, the Brothers found that their stock with the company had fallen, and their subsequent films were never as carefully made - or as good - as their earlier classics. Darn.