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#722 - The Big Store
Charles Reisner, 1941
When the manager of a department store hatches a plot to kill off the store's rightful owners and take over for himself, a trio of detectives are hired to protect the owners and foil his plan.
Long-time followers of the thread will have seen me cover a number of Marx Brothers movies and grow increasingly unimpressed with just about each new one that I encounter. While the scale of each production definitely grew with each film that they did, it was unfortunately cancelled out by the fact that the jokes wore thinner and thinner against a formulaic plot that also got increasingly padded out with musical numbers of extremely debatable quality. The Big Store follows the usual Marx plot involving an attractive young couple fighting back against a villainous executive who plans to take over a lucrative establishment (in this case a department store). Enter the brothers as a detective and his associates who become involved in protecting the couple from harm, but not without causing their fair share of havoc throughout the store.
By this point I'm pretty much numb to the Marx brothers' antics and not even the increased scale of the production can compensate for the ways in which they run through their usual bag of tricks. Granted, there is something to be said for technique involved in the scene where Harpo plays a harp in front of a couple of mirrors only for his reflections to start playing their own tunes, but the climax involves some wire stunts that may not lack for ambition but fail to yield any laughs. Even the musical numbers, which are usually the weakest part of your average Marx brothers movie, somehow come across as better because the rest of the film is so incredibly weak. I don't recommend The Big Store - chances are that if you're thinking of watching this then you're probably intending to watch as many Marx brothers movies as possible anyway. You might get more out of it than I do, but that really wouldn't be too hard.
Charles Reisner, 1941
When the manager of a department store hatches a plot to kill off the store's rightful owners and take over for himself, a trio of detectives are hired to protect the owners and foil his plan.
Long-time followers of the thread will have seen me cover a number of Marx Brothers movies and grow increasingly unimpressed with just about each new one that I encounter. While the scale of each production definitely grew with each film that they did, it was unfortunately cancelled out by the fact that the jokes wore thinner and thinner against a formulaic plot that also got increasingly padded out with musical numbers of extremely debatable quality. The Big Store follows the usual Marx plot involving an attractive young couple fighting back against a villainous executive who plans to take over a lucrative establishment (in this case a department store). Enter the brothers as a detective and his associates who become involved in protecting the couple from harm, but not without causing their fair share of havoc throughout the store.
By this point I'm pretty much numb to the Marx brothers' antics and not even the increased scale of the production can compensate for the ways in which they run through their usual bag of tricks. Granted, there is something to be said for technique involved in the scene where Harpo plays a harp in front of a couple of mirrors only for his reflections to start playing their own tunes, but the climax involves some wire stunts that may not lack for ambition but fail to yield any laughs. Even the musical numbers, which are usually the weakest part of your average Marx brothers movie, somehow come across as better because the rest of the film is so incredibly weak. I don't recommend The Big Store - chances are that if you're thinking of watching this then you're probably intending to watch as many Marx brothers movies as possible anyway. You might get more out of it than I do, but that really wouldn't be too hard.