The Big Store (1941) - film review

Singer Tommy Rogers intends to sell his share in Phelps Department Store so that he can open a music school in a poor area of New York.  Unfortunately, his business partner, Mr Grover, has no intention of seeing the store change hands and so plans to arrange for Tommy to meet with a little accident.  After a first attempt on Tommy’s life fails, his aunt, the wealthy Mrs Phelps, engages private detective Wolf J. Flywheel as his personal bodyguard.  With the help of his dumb assistant Wacky and Tommy’s former music teacher Ravelli, Flywheel exposes Grover as the villain of the piece – but will he live to tell the tale...?

The Marx Brothers were so disappointed with The Big Store (their tenth film, not counting their aborted silent short Humor Risk) that they decided this would be the time for them to retire gracefully from the movies.  Of course, it wasn’t their last film – they would return five years later in A Night in Casablanca (1946) and then Love Happy (1949) (primarily to rescue Chico from his gambling debts).  It was however the end of an era – the Marxes’ last film for MGM and the beginning of their decline from international comedy superstars to past-their-prime celebrities.

The Big Store is mercifully not all bad and, in fact, it contains some of the Marxes’ best material.  The scene at the start of the film in which Margaret Dumont pays a visit to Groucho’s seedy Sam Spade office is classic Marx Brothers, packed to the rafters with visual gags and inventive wordplay.  Who cannot fail to be delighted when Chico and Harpo throw themselves into a humorous piano duet which ends up resembling a tug-of-war?  And who can forget the scene in which Harpo, decked out as a regency beau, performs a concert trio with two images of himself seen in mirrors?   But, alas, these nougats of pure comedy gold are few and far between in this film.  Too much time is squandered on silly Mack Sennett-style slapstick and intrusive, over-long musical numbers which are mired in truly hideous lyrics.

It can be argued that MGM was just about the worst thing that happened to the Marx Brothers.  Whilst it is true that the studio was instrumental in rebooting their career after the failure of Duck Soup (1933), it is obvious that MGM undervalued the Marxes and were unsure how to employ them.  Time and again the comic potential of the brothers was compromised by MGM’s insistence on using them as comic support in an otherwise conventional Hollywood romantic comedy.  Extravagant musical numbers and overly complicated plots would provide unwelcome distractions from the Marxes’ elaborate, anarchic and unceasingly funny, comedy routines.  The Big Store exemplifies what a wasted opportunity the MGM Marx Brothers films were – a unique comedy genius straitjacketed by Hollywood conformity.

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