{"id":4704,"date":"2010-06-08T22:37:28","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T02:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=4704"},"modified":"2010-06-08T22:37:28","modified_gmt":"2010-06-09T02:37:28","slug":"a-night-in-casablanca-1946-archie-mayo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/4704","title":{"rendered":"A Night in Casablanca (1946, Archie Mayo)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Weirdly slow, clunky and unfunny Marx brothers movie.  It kinda stars Harpo, or at least he&#8217;s onscreen more than the others.  No Zeppo at all.  I&#8217;d think that would be a good thing, but he&#8217;s replaced by generic heroic-type Charles Drake (<em>No Name on the Bullet<\/em>, <em>It Came From Outer Space<\/em>) with bland girlfriend Lois Collier (<em>Cobra Woman<\/em>, <em>Flying Disc Man from Mars<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>Managers at a certain hotel keep turning up dead, so Groucho is hired to run the place as a last resort.  But a disguised nazi count (silly-toupeed, funny-voiced Sig Ruman of <em>A Night at the Opera<\/em>, <em>Ninotchka<\/em>, <em>To Be or Not To Be<\/em>) has stashed stolen treasure in the hotel and has been scheming to escape with the goods while our gallant hero tries to stop him.  Sig&#8217;s vamp nazi chick Lisette Verea and his overeager soldier Fred Giermann (who has a long, painful swordfight scene with Harpo) try not-so-hard to thwart the Marxes instead of focusing on the do-gooder and leaving the harmless clowns alone.  Groucho gets to use his funny walk more than his funny dialogue, and the movie slows to a crawl a couple times establishing that Chico can play piano and Harpo can play the harp.<\/p>\n<p>The Brothers&#8217; second-to-last film, and also the second-to-last by Archie Mayo (who replaced Fritz Lang on <em>Moontide<\/em> and adapted Sam Fuller on <em>Confirm or Deny<\/em>).  Two writers plus (allegedly) an uncredited <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/tag\/frank-tashlin\">Frank Tashlin<\/a>, and the Marxes went on tour before the filming &#8220;hoping to sharpen the script&#8217;s comedy&#8221; &#8211; so why does it feel like the jokes were so few and inadequate?  It was meant to be a spoof of <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/587\">Casablanca<\/a><\/em>, but they chickened out under legal scrutiny, so maybe all the best material got jettisoned in a last-minute rewrite.  I don&#8217;t mean to be so hard on the movie &#8211; it was lightly amusing, a nice waste of 80 minutes &#8211; I was just expecting something more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Weirdly slow, clunky and unfunny Marx brothers movie. It kinda stars Harpo, or at least he&#8217;s onscreen more than the others. No Zeppo at all. I&#8217;d think that would be a good thing, but he&#8217;s replaced by generic heroic-type Charles Drake (No Name on the Bullet, It Came From Outer Space) with bland girlfriend Lois [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[416,1092,72,508,248],"class_list":["post-4704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1940s","tag-archie-mayo","tag-frank-tashlin","tag-marx-brothers","tag-nazis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4704"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4767,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4704\/revisions\/4767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}