The Big Store

A young singer inherits half a department store and wants to sell. The store's manager does not, and plans to remove him. The bodyguard hired to protect him is an incompetent detective named Wolf J. Flywheel. He has two brothers with him, and the store shortly becomes a battlefield. Charles Reisner directs. Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx star, with Margaret Dumont opposite Groucho as usual. This was the Marx Brothers' last film for MGM, and the producers announced it as the end of their career. It was not: they came back five years later with A Night in Casablanca. But the studio era was genuinely over. The film's problem belongs to that era. MGM had a habit of balancing the brothers' chaos with romantic subplots and musical numbers, and here it became heavy. The Tenement Symphony sequence sung by Tony Martin has been the most criticised passage in it for decades. Against that, the chase through the store and Harpo's mirror sequence rank among the best of their late work. Who it is for: viewers who like the Marx Brothers and want to see classic comedy in its studio period. Who it is not for: anyone approaching it as their best. The chaos is sparse and the musical interruptions keep breaking the rhythm.