Word: harpo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...international embroglio from which not even a rapier-keen cigar can extricate him. His butt is Louis Calhern--since elevated to tonier company as "The Magnificent Yankee"--an embassy villain who early in the film loses his coattails, and his dignity, to the omni-present shears of Harpo, the foursome's fair-haired and superbly equipped delinquent...
...into fumbling sleuths, who, finally, get their man, if not their woman. Such concern over villains and their "just deserts' cuts the Marx Brothers out of much of the fun, giving Sig Rumann-labelled for future generations as the typical National Socialist-as many scenes as Groucho, Chico and Harpo together. And unlike Margaret Dumont, the gracious Mrs. Rittenhouse of earlier Marx Brothers triumphs, Rumann is not content to remain a foil, and Groucho must contend with him as both a Nazi and a gag-stealer. Harpo, with a new wig and a slightly more fashionable, belt-trailing polo-coat...
...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...
Chico, whom Bob Benchley called the Annie Oakley of the 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...