The New Pictures

A Night in Casablanca (United Artists) restores the Marx Brothers to the screen, which has been deprived of their irreplaceable weirdness for five years. Groucho is the rattily natty new manager of a swank North African hotel in which the Nazis have cached French art treasures. Chico knows all about the rival lines of camels, yellow and checkered, which take tourists around. Harpo is valet to the hyperpunctilious Nazi (Siegfried Ru-mann) who is trying to escape to South America with the art.

The forces of evil are eager, for no very memorable reason, to liquidate Groucho, Their finger-woman is a sort of marked-down Mata Hari (Lisette Verea). The powers of good, most intelligently represented by Chico and Harpo, are out to frustrate dastardy and. raise all possible hell in the process.

Nice scenes and bits: the Brothers cramping more & more tables onto the already crowded dance-floor of a supper club; the extraction, from a de luxe wine bottle, of a cork so gigantic that it leaves no room for wine; Groucho's love scenes with the femme fatale, interrupted by innumerable moves from room to room, and as gruesomely encumbered (with roses, iced champagne and all the paraphernalia of sophisticated seduction) as an old-fashioned family picnic.

Chico, whom Bob Benchley called the Annie Oakley of the piano, obliges on that instrument as pleasantly as ever. Harpo, who once was dangerously close to artiness, still has the best of his old wildness, plus new restraint, sadness and subtlety. He is used more centrally than before, and this is on the whole his finest performance. Groucho still carries the weight of the show and the woes of the world somewhere in the kidney region and walks, accordingly, with the famous sway-backed stoop. He still fires off his lines in the voice of a baying hound, with such irrefutable conviction that even the outrageously bad ones are funny. (Sample: "Your life is hanging by a thread." "So are my pants.")

Many things in A Night in Casablanca are not as funny as they should be--the Brothers have been doing this sort of thing for more than two decades, and are far too intelligent not to show the Marx of it; and the teetering hauteur of Margaret Dumont is especially missed. But even in their sleep the Marx Brothers could stage a funnier masque of anarchy than anyone else.

Cluny Brown (20th Century-Fox), the mildly daffy niece (Jennifer Jones) of an English plumber, can't keep her helping hands off defective drains no matter what the social circumstances. In fact, she seems incapable of learning "her place." This combination of ability and inability becomes acutely embarrassing when she goes into service for one of the better county families (Reginald Owen, Margaret Bannerman and Scion Peter Lawford).

Before Cluny knows it, she is raising hob with the punctilio of three levels of snobbery--the aristocratic, the backstairs (Sara Allgood et al.) and, deadliest of all, the lower middle class. A tyrannical druggist (Richard Haydn) woos her with selections on the parlor organ; his phlegm-racked, fearsome little mother (Una O'Connor) believes her unworthy. Cluny's guardian angel throughout her tribulations is a prewar anti-Nazi refugee (Charles Boyer), who finds it equally impossible to persuade liberal English friends that he won't be assassinated at any moment, and to persuade tories that England has anything to fear from the Nazis.

The kidding of naively melodramatic antifascists comes a few years late, but it still tickles. Thanks to the knowledgeable irony of Producer-Director Ernst Lubitsch, the snob mannerisms of the three classes, which might have been heavy going, become deftly funny. The whimsically dizzy heroine, who leaves her hoofprints in the ferns and her bloomers all over the place, was rather wearing for some readers of Margery Sharp's popular novel; but Jennifer Jones does her proud. Charles Boyer wastes his talents like a gentleman, and Una O'Connor, without a line to her name, is a howl.

But the man who walks away with the picture is Richard Haydn, who plays the mean-souled apothecary with style enough for Hamlet. Haydn is more & more clearly one of that group of supporting players (Hume Cronyn is another) who make American movies worth adult attention.

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