OK, but not great, Marx Brothers movie. Started off well enough. Set up was good, some good one-liners from Groucho and was quite coherent. Middle section had some great sight gags (anything involving the turkey, and Harpo being diagnosed by the doctor, especially). However, from a point it lost coherence and just got silly. Not ridiculously, unwatchably silly, but just mundane and not too funny.Overall, the jokes were weaker than their best, and even Groucho's famous wisecracks seemed weaker and fewer-and-further-between. Performances, given the material, are OK though. Lucille Ball is great in a supporting role, and not just for her acting... Good support too from Ann Miller and Frank Albertson. Certainly not in the same league as A Night At The Opera, but reasonably entertaining nevertheless.

Room Service marked for the first and last time in their careers the Marx Brothers would work with material not written specifically for them. Based on the successful stage play the brothers make you quickly forget it is anything but a Marx romp.Gordon Miller (Groucho) desperately attempts to stave off eviction from his hotel room until he can get a backer for his play. Enlisting Harpo and Chico and a series of arch ruses the boys put up a spirited and inane struggle to hold the room and get the play financed.Room Service is the usual Marx Brothers versus the establishment and polite society vehicle they excelled at in their first half dozen films. By the time they did Day at the Races it was evident they were slowing down and Room Service expands on it. Veteran Marx collaborator Maury Ryskind tailors some of the play to the brothers strengths but they only serve as reminders of when they were sharper and in better productions. Room Service is far from the worst and further from their best work. It has flashes of their famed anarchic style but remains incapable of sustaining the zany outrageous pace found in the earlier films and as some close ups glaringly revealed, they were not getting any younger.

30 years ago today, Groucho Marx died at 86, three days after Elvis Presley. For the occasion, I'd thought I'd view some of his movies of which Room Service is one of them. Unlike the others he made with his brothers, this one wasn't especially tailored to their talents since it was originally a Broadway play starring other people. So the action is mostly confined to the hotel and the pace slows down a little bit. Nevertheless, there's still some witty lines and visual humor concerning Harpo that makes this one of the more enjoyable latter day-Marx Brothers films. And there's a wonderful supporting cast with Frank Albertson as the playwright and, especially, Donald MacBride as the hotel manager who keeps exclaiming, "Jumping Butterballs!" Also of note is the fact that a couple of young players named Ann Miller and Lucille Ball appear here long before their established personas. So while not the classic of their five Paramount and first two MGM pictures, this RKO production was nothing the Marx Brothers should be ashamed of.

As was pointed out by another reviewer, the Marx Brothers were languishing at the MGM studio under Louis B. Mayer because they had been brought there by his rival, Irving Thalberg. There last film had been A Day At the Races and they were idle for over a year when RKO requested their services for Room Service. Which L.B. Mayer gave them I'm sure for a good price.Room Service is a fast moving slapstick farce which the Marx Brothers adapted easily to. There's even a Zeppo part which in this case is filled by Frank Albertson as the naive kid from Oswego who wrote the play that Groucho is trying by hook or crook to get produced. Emphasis on the latter.Room Service ran for 500 performances on Broadway in the 1937-1938 season and the great George Abbott directed it. Here he was the supervising producer and I'm sure credited director William Seiter served under some real strict supervision. Frank Albertson's role was played by Eddie Albert and the three Marx Brothers parts were played by Sam Levene, Phillip Loeb, and Teddy Hart. Loeb who had Chico's role in the Broadway show played the bill collector trying to get $42.00 on Albertson's typewriter. Well money stretched a lot farther in 1938.Repeating their Broadway roles were Alexander Asro as the waiter with ambitions to be an actor and Cliff Dunstan as Gribble the hotel manager who is Groucho's brother-in-law. And of course Donald MacBride who had the slowest burn in film next to Edgar Kennedy and could get exasperated faster than anyone else on screen is Dunstan's boss. MacBride usually gets as many laughs as stars do in their films and Room Service is no exception. JUMPING BUTTERBALLS.The key to the whole plot is the fact that a big backer of Groucho's show pulled out and stopped payment on a $15,000.00 check. But the bank is in California and it took five days for the stop payment to go through. That was interesting to me because in the film Catch Me If You Can, forger/confidence man Frank Abegnale played by Leonardo DiCaprio used that exact same gimmick in the sixties to get a whole lot of money by memorizing codes for routing on checks. Was Abegnale inspired by Room Service?Favorite scene, the Marx Brothers and Albertson chasing a turkey through their room that Harpo finagled. Favorite line belongs to Frank Albertson which is ironic with Groucho Marx in the same film. When they decide to fake the fact that Albertson is dying, Albertson says that, "I'll give the best performance you'll ever see in a hotel room."How did that one get by Mr. Breen?