I
In Room Service (1938), the Marx Bros. are living at a hotel. They are theater producers. They cannot pay their bill, and they are waiting for a visit from a backer, who will bring a check. They want to continue to stay in the hotel but are afraid of being caught out by the hotel manager, who is being watched by the hotel inspector, who, he says, is being surveyed by his company from which he hopes for promotion. Dora is surveyed severally — by her father, Herr K, and Freud, who recounts their accounts. Dora’s mother and Frau K do not surveil her, or this surveillance is not reported by Freud.
In order to remain in the hotel, the Marx Bros. must appear to be ill or, rather, Leo (Frank Albertson), the writer of their play, must appear to develop symptoms. They paint spots on Leo’s face. He has a tapeworm, they tell the hotel manager, and laryngitis. Like Dora, he cannot speak. Then he really becomes sick. It’s difficult to tell somata from genuine illness.
The symptoms are produced by the producers’ lack of money (in the Marx Bros.’ movies someone is always going bankrupt).
LEO
Say what kind of a hotel is this? You move in and you owe $600 right away.
Someone knocks at the Marx Bros.’ hotel room door:
GROUCHO
Shh. money!
They are expecting their theater backer’s agent, but it is the REPO MAN trying to claim a payment on Leo’s typewriter.
GROUCHO
He tore up all his money.
REPO MAN
He must be out of his mind.
Where did they take him?
GROUCHO
The maternity hospital.
REPO MAN
The maternity hospital? But I thought you said he was crazy.
GROUCHO
Well if he wasn’t crazy, he wouldn’t go to the maternity hospital.
There are no mothers in the plot of Room Service, no Margaret Dumont to chase Groucho, as she does in seven of the other Marx Bros. movies, just two young women, who do not pursue anyone, but who are both love interests.
WILDE
All women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy.
The two women in the play are one-man women, and the men are one-woman men. No one is exchangeable for anyone else and there are not enough women to go around. In Room Service there are no girls for Harpo to chase, as there are in other Marx Bros. movies, though the movie poster shows him chasing a miniskirted chambermaid. Instead he watches the lovers in the park. As he must stay in the hotel, and all the women in the hotel are spoken for, he must watch them through the hotel window, as if they were a silent film.
(Dora avoids watching lovers in the street. They disgust her.)
The theater backer will fund the Marx Bros.’ play, he says, if they will give a part to his girlfriend, but there is no part for her. As in Room Service itself, most of the cast of Leo’s play is male.
GROUCHO
The young lady can play one of the miners.
(Is there a joke about minors here? Dora was fourteen when Herr K first kissed her.)
LEO
But the miners are all men!
GROUCHO
Do me a favour and keep sex out of this conversation.
I’ve never produced anything but clean plays!
GROUCHO claimed his female straight man, Dumont, was his most successful foil because she never understood what was indecent about his jokes.
MARGARET DUMONT:
There is an art to playing the straight role. You must build up your man but never top him, never steal the laughs.3
Because she is not there, hearing innocently, because there is no Dumont, the mother/lover, the feminine at its most terrifying, there is little opportunity, in Room Service, for indecency. Room Service is a cleaned-up version of a Marx Bros. movie — the movie was not written by the Marx Bros. but was originally a Broadway play first produced in 1937.
The Marx Bros. worry about a visit from “the hotel dick.”
“Are you the hotel dick?” they ask everyone.
The hotel dick turns out, after all, to be the hotel doctor.
The doctor is repeatedly mistaken for the hotel dick, by different characters. That’s transference perhaps.
Everyone is expecting the hotel dick, but, like KM’s husband, he never comes.
II
Later in the movie, the Marx Bros. again cannot pay their bill. This time the hotel manager incarcerates them in the hotel until they can pay. The room they wanted to get into has become the room they want to get out of.
CHICO
Let’s let off the fire alarm!
GROUCHO
It ain’t a fire alarm without a fire.
HARPO gestures (Harpo, like Dora, has aphonia).
CHICO
(always Harpo’s interpreter)
Alrighta then let’s have a fire.
(Dora dreams there is a fire, and that her mother wants to save her jewelry box.)
HARPO (always the creeping id) necks a bottle of champagne, throws paper out of the waste bin and lights it with a flaming torch produced, suddenly, from his hat. He sits and warms his hands, and the fire, turned into something friendly, is impracticable.
WILDE
I’m glad to hear you smoke. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.
The Marx Bros. think again.
When they wanted to stay in the hotel, one of them had to pretend to be ill. Now that they want to leave the hotel, one of them has to pretend to be dead. Leo, they decide, must pretend to kill himself.
CHICO
He drinks a bottle of poison. We have to rush him to the hospital. They’ll have to let us through.
(Dora mentions suicide in a letter. She puts it away in a drawer; her father finds it nonetheless.)
The Marx Bros. put Leo into the bed in the bridal suite. It is a single bed, pink and chintzy. Leo’s LOVE INTEREST enters. She should be anguished, but she is undramatic, or perhaps she’s no actress.
LOVE INTEREST
(flatly)
Mr Gribble said you were dying.
(Dora saw Herr K walking down the street. He was knocked over by a car. She didn’t show immediate distress; she didn’t stick around to see what happened.)
LEO
(who is a playwright)
It’s only a plot darling.
(That might have been parapraxis I mean a joke.)
LEO
(pretends to be dead)
CHICO
All he said was, “Mother!”
WILDE
(in that comedy of the mystery of maternity, The Importance of Being Earnest)
Mother!
HOTEL INSPECTOR
You struggle for money. What good is it. You never know who’s next. Too bad he didn’t die at the Aster.
CHICO, GROUCHO (HARPO) sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Coming For To Carry Me Home” and take Leo out of the hotel and into the theater. The hotel’s exit is around the back. It is small, an emergency exit, for things that should not be taken through the hotel entrance, which we never see. Leaving the hotel is more difficult than it seems.
They arrive in the theater or, rather, they are already there. We don’t see how they get in, but they had no need to leave the hotel. Leo’s play takes place (as in a dream) in a theater that appears on the premises. The play that is staged in the luxury hotel is about miners. The actors enter carrying shovels, to show their trade.