Film Details

Made five years after The Big Store (see 8/17 at 8:35), this independent production is perhaps the funniest of the late Marx Bros films. Intended as a parody of the Bogart-Bergman classic but softened into a general spoof of wartime melodramas after Warner Bros threatened a lawsuit, the film is set in postwar Casabalanca, where Groucho becomes the unwitting new manager of a hotel where his predecessors have been serially murdered. Harpo and Chico help identify and thwart the killer—an escaped Nazi war criminal (Sig Ruman) with a cache of looted art works hidden in the hotel. 85 min.