Eighth Marx

Um, I'm not sure what happened here. This is an RKO picture... and it's definitely not good. Room Service.

Groucho is Gordon Miller, who is putting on a play but is having a little financial trouble. He's staying at the hotel of his brother in law, but has racked up quite the bill for him and his actors. News comes of a backer and he has to stall the hotel director enough to put it through... which he sort of does? Enough to get a play going, but then they have to stall more to get the play completed, and go to death and back.

This is a "bottle" movie, whereby the majority of this takes place in the hotel room. We get some antics, some word play, and some... huge amounts of nothing funny happening. Was this not supposed to be a comedy? We don't get any 'logues from Groucho, no big pieces from Chico, not even some harp playing from Harpo. Instead we get long scenes of earnest people trying to make do with their situation, and hardly be entertaining about it.

(The trivia says that this was not written for them, and in that respect it shows dramatically.)

This is the only RKO picture, so we should be back to the proper stuff next time.

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