Considering the big name cast, this should have been a whole lot better. Groucho Marx didn't seem to be as effectively manic here as he was with his odd assortment of brothers. I just watched him teamed with William Bendix in "A Girl in Every Port", and it was the same story. The charisma just wasn't there with his co-stars. And Jane Russell - what was with her voice in this film? She sounded like a school girl; it was very off-putting. The story itself is a bit mangled as well. When Johnny Dalton (Frank Sinatra) saves gangster 'Hot Horse' Harris (Nestor Paiva) from a beating at the hands of rival thugs, he's rewarded with a thousand dollar bill that Johnny is afraid to take. So instead, Harris takes the money, bets it on a handful of race horses, and builds it up into a sixty-thousand-dollar bonanza. With enough money now to marry his girlfriend, Mildred 'Mibs' Goodhue (Russell), Johnny is still reluctant to pull the trigger, believing he'll be blamed for the money missing from the bank where he works. Since there was no outright robbery, it looks like an inside job!
From there, the story is pretty much Groucho's, taking Dalton's loot and living the high life, even offering a generous donation to the absent owner of Johnny's bank for a charity event. It's not until Emile J. Keck (Groucho) discovers a calculating error in fellow bank employee Mibs' adding machine, that Johnny is put in the clear for the missing money - which wasn't! The whole business with the race horse winnings was on the level, but gee, wasn't it a heck of a coincidence??!! The whole thing felt jury rigged from the start, and not very well done at that.
However, I did pick up on one of Groucho's lines that will go virtually unnoticed today as he luxuriates in his expensive hotel suite entertaining bank owner Pulsifer (Howard Freeman) - "Much better than sitting here alone waiting for some quiz program to call you". You have to be an old-timer like myself to realize it was a sly reference to Grouch Marx's own TV game show program he began in 1950 called "You Bet Your Life"!
From there, the story is pretty much Groucho's, taking Dalton's loot and living the high life, even offering a generous donation to the absent owner of Johnny's bank for a charity event. It's not until Emile J. Keck (Groucho) discovers a calculating error in fellow bank employee Mibs' adding machine, that Johnny is put in the clear for the missing money - which wasn't! The whole business with the race horse winnings was on the level, but gee, wasn't it a heck of a coincidence??!! The whole thing felt jury rigged from the start, and not very well done at that.
However, I did pick up on one of Groucho's lines that will go virtually unnoticed today as he luxuriates in his expensive hotel suite entertaining bank owner Pulsifer (Howard Freeman) - "Much better than sitting here alone waiting for some quiz program to call you". You have to be an old-timer like myself to realize it was a sly reference to Grouch Marx's own TV game show program he began in 1950 called "You Bet Your Life"!