A Night in Casablanca ***½ (1946, Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, Sig Ruman, Lisette Verea, Charles Drake, Lois Collier, Dan Seymour) – Classic Movie Review 3064

Director Archie Mayo’s entirely enjoyable enough 1946 comedy finds the Marx Brothers still happily crazy and subversive in their later years. It introduced the song ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’, which became a bigger hit than the movie.

Groucho Marx, Chico Marx and Harpo Marx send up a cinematic sacred cow, Casablanca (1942), in this, their last big motion picture, though legal problems with the spoof forced them to change it to a more original story. It starts well with a superb sight gag involving a collapsing wall and is peppered with delicious one-liners. But its nervous energy is eventually drained by an over-complex plot involving double-agents and stolen Nazi treasure.

Helped by funny dialogue by Joseph Fields, Roland Kibbee and Frank Tashlin, Groucho proves as watchable and hilarious as ever as Ronald Kornblow, the Humphrey Bogart-style prickly manager of a fleapit hotel in postwar Casablanca.

Kornblow: ‘From now on the essence of this hotel will be speed. If a customer askes you for a three-minute egg, give it to him in two minutes. If he askes you for a two-minute egg, give it to him in one minute. If he askes you for a one-minute egg, give him the chicken and let him work it out for himself!’

There at the hotel, Kornblow finds himself having to deal with troublesome guests and a troubling Nazi (Sig Ruman), Count Pfefferman, aka the notorious Heinrich Stubel. Pfefferman’s mute valet Rusty (Harpo) and Corbaccio (Chico) are also at the hotel. 

It seems that a ring of old Nazis is trying to recover a hoard of stolen treasure, war booty that they have cached in the hotel. French soldier Pierre (Charles Drake) suspects Pfefferman but is accused of collaborating with the enemy, and attempts to clear his name with the help of his girlfriend Annette (Lois Collier) and buddy Corbaccio.

Also in the cast are Lisette Verea, Lewis L Russell, Frederick Giermann, Harro Mellor, David Hoffman, Paul Harvey and Dan Seymour as the Prefect of Police, who gets on his microphone and says ‘Round up all likely suspects.’ But if you read his lips, he really says ‘Round up the usual suspects’. The replacement line was dubbed in later to avoid legal problems with Warner Bros.

The story goes that Warner Bros, producers of Casablanca, threatened to sue the Marx Brothers for using the word Casablanca in the title. Groucho Marx wrote a letter to Warner Bros in which in return he threatened to sue them for using the word ‘Brothers’: ‘Professionally, we were brothers before you ever were,’ he told the studio.

However, Warner Bros never threatened to sue, only inquired about the story of the Marx Brothers’ film, to make sure there was no copyright infringement. Groucho used the inquiry as an excuse for a publicity stunt. He wrote a series of comic letters to Warner Brothers published in The Saturday Evening Post to publicise his movie.

The Marxes financed this movie themselves as Loma Vista Films and did a brief pre-filming tour of scenes from the movie, as they had done with A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937), to sharpen the script’s comedy.

Harpo declined an offer of $50,000 to utter the word ‘Murder!’ in this film by having him speak for the only time on screen. He never spoke publicly until a concert one year before his death.

Rick never says ‘Play it again Sam’ in Casablanca and the line does not appear in this film either.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3064

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