This is another good one by the Marx Brothers. A young singer, named Tommy Rogers, inherits a department store. This store is up for sale by him and the proceeds will help to build a conservatory for young kids. The store manager is a crook who is planning to kill the inheritor, marry Martha Dumont since she will get the store after the murder, kill her off and get the store for himself. Oh there is a bleached blonde tart but she does not realize she is superfluous to the plan. The scene in the store with the Italian family with all the kids is excellent. So funny,IMO. Of course it is politically insensitive by today's standards. This makes it even funnier to me. I am so tired of the PC people. Laugh at life because it laughs at you. Anyway this is a good flick and of course as typical for the time the good guys win again.

The Big Store is a Marx brothers movie from 1941.The plot is irrelevant as it is in any other Marx movie.All that makes any difference is how funny these movies are and I can tell you about this one; IT IS.This time the brothers go crazy in a department store.Groucho plays Wolf J. Flywheel, the private eye, Harpo is Wacky, his silent partner and Chico is Ravelli, the bodyguard of the singer Tommy Rogers (Tony Martin).The amazing Margaret Dumont makes her last appearance with the Marx brothers playing Martha Phelps.It was most hilarious in all those movies to watch Groucho court Margaret and at the same time humiliate her the worst way.She didn't seem to mind.The Big Store is an underrated gem that shouldn't be thrown away.There are lots of scenes that raise this movie higher than many modern movies would deserve to be raised.It's incredible to watch the brothers roller skating in the store.There are also some musical numbers in the movie.It's great to watch and listen to Groucho singing "Sing While You Sell".There's the lady (Virginia O'Brien) singing "Rock-A-Bye Baby with a frozen face.I just loved her! Chico and Harpo playing piano together is just hilarious! Harpo playing his beloved harp with the mirror reflections is just magical! I'm just reading Harpo Marx' autobiography "Harpo Speaks!".It's fascinating to read how these brothers grew up in poverty under the wings of Minnie and Frenchie and became the comedy team everybody loves.These brothers worked great as a team.The viewer can sense that.That's probably why we still love them.It's timeless, their humor.You can live the 1940's or whatever decade or millennium, it always works.If somebody woke them up now and they'd be back in the moving pictures, the movie theaters would be packed with people.And the laughter would be heard miles away.

By 1941, Groucho didn't want to make any more movies. The Brothers continued to do so just to keep oldest Brother Chico afloat, due to his gambling habits.Someone commented earlier about Virginia O'Brien, the deadpan singer in the "rockabye" sequence. The deadpan delivery was her "shtick", and predated a similar approach taken by Keely Smith some years later. Legend has it that the first time a spotlight fell on Ms. O'Brien for an on-stage solo, she froze, an delivered her song with a pre-Botox facial paralysis. The audience thought it was part of the act and roared approvingly with laughter. From then on, Ms. O'Brien sang no other way. (She also sings a few bars of the Jerome Kern song, "A Fine Romance" in the semi-bio, "'Til The Clouds Roll By".) The big store is best remembered (and viewed) for the rousing "Sing While You Sell" piece about 38 minutes into the movie.

While I disagree with the conventional wisdom about the Marx Brothers' film made before The Big Store, Go West (1940), believing it to be yet another one of their many masterpieces, I have to agree with the conventional wisdom about The Big Store. It has the feeling of a contractual obligation film. One, two or all three of the Marx Brothers are absent for long periods of time. The story is often confusing. The film doesn't flow very well. Some of the material featuring other performers simply doesn't work. Even when it does work, it's never as good as the Marx Brothers' material, and even their work is too often strangely flat.The Big Store is really the story of Tommy Rogers (played by famed pop singer Tony Martin). Rogers has just gained partial ownership of the Phelps Department store with the passing of a relative. However, he's not interested in the store, so he plans to sell and use the money to build a state of the art music conservatory in conjunction with his friend, Ravelli (Chico Marx). Unfortunately, not everything at the Phelps store has been on the up and up, and surviving store manager Mr. Grover (Douglass Dumbrille) is worried about buyers discovering their creative bookkeeping. So they try to off Tommy, which leads to hiring private detective Wolf J. Flywheel (Groucho Marx) and his assistant, Wacky (Harpo Marx), who happens to be Ravelli's brother. At the same time, Mr. Grover is courting Martha Phelps (Margaret Dumont), Tommy's aunt, with machinations of eventual ownership of the store.In terms of meatiness, that's far more of a plot than I usually relay, but all of that is presented in the first 10 - 15 minutes of the film. The remainder involves playing out those threads. The problem is that the above is way too complicated, especially for a Marx Brothers film. The Marx Brothers style was that plots were really secondary to their anarchic, madcap skits. In truth, the two were usually well integrated in their films, with meatier plots than the conventional wisdom has it, and the skits relatively seamlessly enmeshed in the plots.Here, the plot is often difficult to follow, and when you do manage to follow it, it just isn't that interesting. Despite this, there are still a number of fabulous set pieces. The scene where we first meet Groucho and Harpo in Groucho's private eye office is hilarious. The bedding department scene is good. The climax, featuring an extended chase through the department store, is a lot of fun, including its cartoonish use of wire stunts and camera tricks.But there just isn't enough of that stuff, and one of the Marx Brothers' strongest points--Groucho's verbal bantering, is oddly flat just as often as it isn't. Even the usual musical sequences are problematic, unlike their sublime charm in Go West. Only Harpo's musical sequence and a brief duet with Chico on the piano are worthwhile. Groucho is given a schmaltzy "big musical production number" that goes on too long, is supposed to be funny and isn't, and ends up with Groucho doing little else but mugging and doing his trademark walk while other characters we're not familiar with sing the song.Tony Martin has a song early on in the film that's okay, but doesn't exactly fit the tone of the film, and later, he does another "big musical production number", called "The Tenement Symphony", that is bizarre, to say the least, but not particularly funny. Instead, it's a strange mish-mash of styles that is strongly derivative (in a negative way) of George Gershwin.While Marx Brothers completest certainly can't avoid The Big Store, it's difficult to imagine this being anywhere near the top of the list for any Marx Brothers fan. It's also not a great way to introduce anyone to their work (as they're likely to not be very interested in seeing more), and there are far better films for casual viewers who are not particularly interested in the Marx Brothers.The few hilarious scenes could easily be excised and work just as well (if not better) in isolation, as "random" skits. But the film is very slightly recommendable for them.