This week we ask the question: Is Room Service a Marx Brothers movie? Does it quack like a duck? Does it walk like a duck? Why a duck? Viaduct!
Exactly!
So even if it isn’t quite a Marx Brothers film, it does have the three Marx Brothers in it so…what did Dave and Ian make of it? Listen and you will know all.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Neither “Of Thee I Sing,” not its sequel “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” is in the public domain. The former was adapted for a CBS TV special starring Carroll O’Connor, Cloris Leachman, and Michele Lee. It is not good, but the play still is.
I can’t believe you didn’t mention the idea that the Brothers were going to drop their characters for this one.
And Wheeler and Woolsey are funny (to me). Bert moreso than Bob, but still…
RKO didn’t bother building any extra sets and they still lost $330,000. Every time you guys pointed out the knock at the door or the phone rings I’d think “and RKO still lost money.”
Best thing about Room Service was this podcast! Okay, the movie had one or two moments, but overall was so awful it left me wondering how the original play could have been considered any good in the first place. Ian’s insights about the best comedy bits happening offstage (moose head / revolving door) or to the wrong people (waiter dancing while Groucho sits) were spot on.
I haven’t seen the later films in some time, so it will be interesting to catch up again. Clearly nothing from now on matches the past glories, whichever ones are your own favourites, but there are still some fun bits to come. I remember mostly enjoying A Night in Casablanca, and parts of (whisper it) Love Happy, though mainly for sentimental reasons.
Be strong, friends, we can get through this.
I’ve seen the play and it’s pretty funny. Among the problems of the movie are that it forces the Marxes into a framework that wasn’t built for them, and it lacks the pace that the farce has on stage.(That former is one of the reasons that their wanting to do “Of Thee I Sing” baffles me. So much of the basic plot, circumstances, and score would have had to have been abandoned that they would have done better starting from scratch. It would have been a perfect vehicle for Bob Hope, had Paramount purchased it. For that matter, Hope would have been far, far better in “Arsenic and Old Lace” than Grant was, but Warners couldn’t work a deal to borrow him.)
Had the Brothers gone through with the plan to abandon their traditional characters, it might actually have been a better move (it’d certainly be a more interesting one …), and would certainly have opened up new possibilities for them. If nothing else, we might have been spared “The Big Store.” Seems like most people in my world TBS to “Go West,” but I find a lot of stuff in GW likeable, especially the stuff that Keaton obviously came up with.
I can’t believe they have a guy yelling “Jumping Butterballs!” through the whole movie and a turkey but it never occurs to them to put the two together.
Layne, out of curiosity I investigated the history of Butterball turkeys. It turns out that the original patent for Butterball turkeys was filed on June 11, 1940 making it impossible that the writers of Room Service would have made such a connection in 1939. So when we hear “Jumping butterballs!” we think of turkeys; back then, they would have thought of actual balls of butter.
I saw that too, but I have a theory turkeys were commonly called butterballs before the patent registration and formation of the company, who adopted it in a reverse branding effect/proprietary eponym sort of move. Doing a Google book search for the word does bring up pre-1939 uses associated with plump people and bufflehead fowl, but nothing specifically turkey-related.
I kept waiting for a Wheeler and Woolsey reference during the discussion of RKO. They were cranking out 2-4 features per year and impressed that RKO built a huge set for “Half Shot at Sunrise.” If you want to see how production values don’t equate to better comedy, look at “Cracked Nuts” (1931) and their map reading scene, with overhead shots, close ups, and careful framing all struggling to get half the laughs that come from the Marxes’ static “Why a Duck” sequence in “The Cocoanuts.”
…and I nearly forgot… “Jumpin’ butterballs” Donald MacBride can be seen in the welcoming chorus for Captain Spaulding in “Animal Crackers,” both at the top and the bottom of the stairs!