Word: groucho
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...Night in Casablanca (United Artists) restores the Marx Brothers to the screen, which has been deprived of their irreplaceable weirdness for five years. Groucho is the rattily natty new manager of a swank North African hotel in which the Nazis have cached French art treasures. Chico knows all about the rival lines of camels, yellow and checkered, which take tourists around. Harpo is valet to the hyperpunctilious Nazi (Siegfried Ru-mann) who is trying to escape to South America with...
...forces of evil are eager, for no very memorable reason, to liquidate Groucho, Their finger-woman is a sort of marked-down Mata Hari (Lisette Verea). The powers of good, most intelligently represented by Chico and Harpo, are out to frustrate dastardy and. raise all possible hell in the process...
Nice scenes and bits: the Brothers cramping more & more tables onto the already crowded dance-floor of a supper club; the extraction, from a de luxe wine bottle, of a cork so gigantic that it leaves no room for wine; Groucho's love scenes with the femme fatale, interrupted by innumerable moves from room to room, and as gruesomely encumbered (with roses, iced champagne and all the paraphernalia of sophisticated seduction) as an old-fashioned family picnic...
...piano, obliges on that instrument as pleasantly as ever. Harpo, who once was dangerously close to artiness, still has the best of his old wildness, plus new restraint, sadness and subtlety. He is used more centrally than before, and this is on the whole his finest performance. Groucho still carries the weight of the show and the woes of the world somewhere in the kidney region and walks, accordingly, with the famous sway-backed stoop. He still fires off his lines in the voice of a baying hound, with such irrefutable conviction that even the outrageously bad ones are funny...
...GROUCHO MARX...