The Big Store

Kitsch wins over comedy in the Marx Brothers' last MGM film, which remains in the mind mainly because of the amazingly awful 'Tenement Symphony', in which Tony Martin and a screen full of sparkling urchins warble a lyric of the finest drivel: 'The songs of the ghetto inspired the allegretto'. Nothing the Marx Brothers do is funnier than this, though Harpo and Chico's musical bits are livelier than usual. Dumont is prominently featured and totally mishandled, Groucho seems half asleep, and the plot (centred on a department store) doesn't bear thinking about.