The Big Nothing

It’s all here in this image — the Marx Bros are behind bars. Everything is cluttered and unclear, with too many elements poorly organized, and a big empty space in the upper right. The title is slapped on top of Groucho. They can’t even find room for Harpo. This film is in trouble already.

THE BIG STORE is the second Marx Brothers film I suddenly realized existed, that I had never seen. The title came to me as I was nodding off one night, and in the morning I IMDb’d it and learned that yes, there was such a film. How can one Marx Bros fan, married to another Marx Bros fan, be so slack on such things? It’s not as if there anywhere near enough Marx Bros films in the world.

The supporting cast: mannequins. The leading lady has no head, and nothing below the waist. Margaret Dumont is a man. Dumbrille is a bust.

Sadly, TBS is no ROOM SERVICE. It’s the last film from the Bros’ MGM period, and is a very sloppy piece of writing. Again, the studio throws in big sets and lavish musical numbers, which were never really essential — though it helps to have a glossy backdrop for the boys to demolish, I guess. But the script is pretty bad, with few memorable lines, tons of padding, and lots of downright bad visual comedy — and this from the director credited with Buster Keaton’s COLLEGE and STEAMBOAT BILL JNR.

Groucho this time is a detective, (as he would be again in LOVE HAPPY) Wolf J. Flywheel , Chico is Ravelli and Harpo is Whacky. The recycling of names may suggest desperation (how hard can it be to come up with Grouchoesque names? Julius T. Hambone; Housely Q. Pinochle; Webster V. Grift; Morton P. Fingersmith; I’m not even trying here), and the plotting certainly does. Having selected a department store as setting, the army of writers struggle to integrate musical numbers, suspense, and comedy. The bland hero this time (Tony Martin) is a singer/songwriter who just wants to sell the store he’s inherited so he can open a conservatory, a project mooted in scene one and then basically forgotten about. A bunch of kids have been trained to play piano like Chico, a decent gag, and they’re all excited about the new conservatory: “New conservatory, new conseravatory,” they rhubarb unconvincingly. We’ll never see them again either.

Margaret Dumont is a beloved aunt, with no real role in the plot, but Groucho can romance her and annoy villain Douglas Dumbrille, which is of course essential. Dumbrille is repeating his shitheel role from A DAY AT THE RACES, but the movie has him spend an inordinate amount of time flying through the air, replace by a stand-in (or dangle-in). This movie has more wirework than a Shaw Bros wuxia. Dumbrille is joined by various colourless stooges, of which the best is Bradley Page, underplaying briskly. But he has no reason to be in the movie. The stooges multiply like rabbits, but unlike rabbits they never seem to do anything useful.

Dumbrille’s plot to cover up his cooking of the store’s books soon involves plans for kidnapping and murder: he even hints that he’ll off Margaret Dumont after marrying her. This is all de trop. It’s not really in keeping with the world of the department store.

Neither are the songs. Groucho gets the uninspired “Sing as you sell,” which affords pleasing bits for novelty acts Six Hits and a Miss, the Four Dreamers (no MGM Marx film is apparently complete without an embarrassing reference to cotton fields redolent with ante bellum slavery nostalgia) and best by far, Virginia O’Brien, the deadpan comedy singer. Tony Martin croons a ballad and then a bit of faux Gerswhin nonsense called Tenement Symphony, performed by orchestra and choir in the store as part of… what? The “ceremony” that accompanies his selling of the store. MGM musicals shouldn’t NEED lame naturalistic excuses for characters to burst into song.

Marion “blonde menace” Martin plays vamp, very briefly, but her vamp act consists of pretending to be a snooty music journalist. Are we outsmarting a vamp or deposing a snob? Does robbing a snob of dignity count when they’re only pretending to be a snob? And why bring her in for one skit only to forget about her?

Nat Perrin is credited with the story: he had a hand in HELLZAPOPPIN and contributed dialogue to DUCK SOUP, so I’m disinclined to blame him too much. but this is shoddy work by someone, probably a whole heap of someones. Writing visual gags for Harpo can’t be too hard, since he’s allowed to violate the laws of God and man, but he needs a sensible set of surroundings whose reality he can disrupt. Every time the movie requires him to do something, it throws in props that have no reason to be there. The usual deadly harp solo is performed in an eighteenth century room with mannequins in period garb: why does this room exist? When vases are smashed in a bit of slapstick, Dumbrille refers to them as “priceless antiques.” Why were they in a store? Why is there a moose head? Is it Chico’s from ROOM SERVICE, the one he “ate up to the neck”? What are THESE?

A few cameos of interest (discounting the physiognomic startle effect attendant on any appearance by Dewey Robinson). Clara Blandick, Auntie Em, from THE WIZARD OF OZ, turns up as a Tony Martin fan (believable). Silent star/director King Baggot is in there somewhere. Come to think of it, “King Baggot” would make a good name for a Groucho character. And the movie ends with Charles Lane, so good in TWENTIETH CENTURY, repossessing Groucho’s ancient car, a “gag” which never actually develops beyond the fact of a car being repossessed: not a gag at all, then.

Songwriter/producer Sid Kuller is probably a bad influence on the script, as is Ray Golden, another songwriter, and Hal Fimberg is the future creator of Derek Flint, so he doesn’t seem like the right kind of guy to have on a Marx picture. The IMDb says George Oppenheimer made uncredited contributions, and he had worked on the two best MGM Marx films, RACES and OPERA, but he was about to help end Garbo’s career with TWO-FACED WOMAN the following year.

The movie has more writers than it has Marx Brothers, which would be fine if they were fighting on the same side, but every MGM movie with the Bros. is something of a battlefield in which Thalberg’s idea of classy entertainment and Mayer’s idea of family values comes up against the very spirit of what the Marx Bros should be all about — chaos. In this movie, depressingly, MGM wins.

Everything But the Boys

The five Marx Bros: Dicko, Flappo, Groucho, Bono and Beardo.

Continuing what may be a series looking at the non-Marx Bros elements in Marx Bros films. A project which may be on a par with the “definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx” spoken of in Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES.

If ANIMAL CRACKERS shows some potentially strong collaborators not quite at their best (Lillian Roth at sea, Margaret Dumont slightly too amused), by the time of A DAY AT THE RACES everything is a lot more polished — maybe too polished. Thalberg threw quality trimmings at the Bros, as if to submerge them, and the results are somtimes jarring. Harpo and Chico (and formerly Zeppo) supplied their own musical interludes, which vary the pace more than I’d like already — the addition of big song and dance numbers not featuring any of the main characters (I refuse to consider Allan Jones a main character) has a serious drag effect.

Still, Margaret Dumont is by now in her pomp. In ANIMAL CRACKERS she was my age, and was starting to seem worryingly sexy to me. Here, she’s a bit older and again appears a genderless dowager cutout. She’s standing on her dignity more, when not swept off her feet, and more plausibly suggests Groucho’s characterisation of her an an innocent who didn’t understand his jokes. That’s the character, mind you — we have to accept by now that Groucho was greatly exaggerating. The woman had been in comedy for years.

Mrs. Upjohn is an essentially decent person, only a hypochondriac and apt to throw her weight around. Her most unsympathetic qualities are (a) she likes the water ballet and (b) she offers money to support Maureen O’Sullivan’s sanitorium but does not immediately dosh it out. This is one reason we dislike rich people, isn’t it? They COULD give us lots of money, but choose not to.

O’Sullivan scores points by sulking through the water ballet. Audience identification is complete.

As a cause to strive for, this sanitorium is a dim proposition, mind you. We never see any of the good work it presumably does, and O’Sullivan hires a horse doctor as chief of staff without checking his credentials. I think we’re supposed to care just because Maureen is so damned attractive, and also because she’s being bullied by businessman Douglas Dumbrille and her own business manager, Leonard Ceeley. Both actors are instantly hateful — did they ever play nice guys? Ceeley seems charmless even for a heavy, but comes into his own wonderfully when tormented by Groucho over the telephone. This man does apoplexy on an international level.

Who else? Ah, Sig Rrrrumann, rrrolling his rrrrs and eyes, pointing his beard with deadly pinpoint accuracy. With Dumont and Rumann sharing the screen, the movie packs more stoogepower than a Republican debate. If the MGM patina of moralism and sentiment deceives us into worrying about who’s in the right, we’d be forced to conclude that Rumann is the film’s hero, campaigning for medical standards like Will Smith in CONCUSSION. No such thing. He is a legitimate target for Groucho, since (a) he’s a stuffed shirt and (b) what his shirt is stuffed with is finest-grade Sig Rumann. I think it’s genetic.

A lot of outrage has been expended over the big musical number with the black folks, which is indeed somewhat patronizing, but only becomes downright insulting when the boys smear axle grease on their faces to merge with the crowd (apart from Harpo, who disguises himself as an inhabitant of Cheron, the Frank Gorshin planet in Star Trek). On a more positive note, the sequence features some great singing and dancing talent, and there’s a teenage Dorothy Dandridge as an extra, somewhere in the throng of happy ethnic stereotypes.

Wingnut Sam Wood directs, probably the most skilled filmmaker to get his hands on a Marx Bros film since Leo McCarey, and he produces much slicker results. It’s kind of startling to see Groucho look, and then get a cut to what he’s looking at. Unlike ANIMAL CRACKERS, where we peer into a proscenium arch throughout, here the action is photographed from the inside, as Hitchcock would say. Whether the Marxes need or even benefit from this cinematic value is questionable.

The most tiresome aspect of MGM’s high-gloss approach, apart from the diversionary set-pieces, is the need to tie the boys to some noble cause. Groucho has to enlist out of some kind of innate nobility, and his relations with O’Sullivan have to be portrayed as chivalrous. This is all wrong, terribly wrong. ANIMAL CRACKERS had the sense to keep Groucho from interacting with the sympathetic characters at all, because all he could do in character would be abuse them. By surrounding him with stuffed shirts and stooges, the Paramount films gave him free rein to be himself. Buster Keaton departed MGM telling Louis B. Mayer, “You warped my character.” Though the damage is less, the charge is true here also.

 

What did the catman do?

Anne Billson runs the excellent CATS ON FILM blog — so I asked her if she’d seen CATMAN OF PARIS (1946). Do you know what her reply was? “Is it rubbish?” The cynicism of the Modern Woman.

Well, yes it is rubbish, but it’s not TOTAL rubbish, or at least it’s not devoid of interesting weirdnesses. Like the way the hero, right before he blacks out and becomes, we presume, the titular man-feline, is tormented by images of ice, snow, a lightning bolt in negative, and a violently swaying buoy in a stormy sea. What’s that all about? I don’t know, but it’s rather Lynchian.

The film takes place in a low-budget Republic Pictures backlot Paris, and boasts reliable sleaze Douglas Dumbrille as its most recognizable name/face. Although the catman himself is pretty recognizable once you’ve seen him.

I’ll also give the film five extra points for its audacious opening shot, in which a black cat saunters blithely down a miniature street, like Kitten Kong. The shot is reprised later in the film and proves to be exactly what it appears to be: a miniature set (constructed for some slender plot pretext) with a housecat in it. So I deduct three points for that naturalistic cop-out.

The plot makes very little sense and doesn’t even allow for many exciting situations: I do like the nonsense myth about the catman being immortal and turning up in different periods of history. The Cat Came Back. I got curious about incompetent scribe Sherman L. Lowe and looked up his credits — he enjoyed a longish career (thirty years) without concocting anything celebrated or memorable, and always working in lowbrow genre stuff — serials and B-westerns and TV episodes. Working with Rin Tin Tin Jnr seems about the high point. Possibly he marks a useful benchmark for Hollywood employability — I don’t imagine you could be much less talented and still get work, unless you had a father-in-law.