Love Happy (1949) Reviews

Poor in comparison to the ol' best Marx. Groucho's noirish voice in off tries to knit the shenanigans,woth a plot of lost romanof jewells, Ilona Massey a good bad girl, tue musicial backgrond with Vera Ellen has not enough charm...Harpo ans Chico a bit tired, and Marilyn was really an amateur then

No Marx Brothers film is truly complete unless all three (or four, depending on the studio) are allowed to unleash their zany, madcap lunacy upon an orderly and unsuspecting world. So Love Happy clearly earns its place as the Marx Bros. movie with an asterisk next to its name. Groucho narrates and remains off-screen until the very end, Chico is a minor supporting player with relatively little interaction between the other two brothers and Harpo is the star. So, the three brothers all appear, but they rarely appear together.

Harpo has long been the most anarchic and chaos inducing brother, while Chico hurled out one malapropism after another and acted lecherous around female characters (no worse than Groucho or Harpo really) and Groucho would hysterically zing and insult everyone and everything within earshot. Harpo would silently leave behind him a series of destructive elements or use props to create sight-gags, but he needed the others to create the perfect balance. That perfect balance was easily achieved in Horse Feathers, Monkey Business and Duck Soup, but not here as his presence tilts the film too heavily towards relying on secondary characters to propel the plot and provide the dialog. That would be Irving Thalberg's influence on their storytelling coming into full-bloom to overtake the brothers once and for all.

And by and large they are an uninteresting bunch. Of course, Harpo is love sick for a girl who treats him as friend and nothing more. Here that girl is Vera-Ellen, pre-MGM and White Christmas so her body is still more athletic and toned. She looks positively lovely and healthy, and it’s no wonder that she’s the central romantic heroine. The story also involves a stolen bag of jewels, gangsters and a Broadway production. These elements actually come together quite well, but aside from Vera-Ellen, none of the characters standout in the mind long after the film has ended.

Well, there is one sequence with a minor character that stands out. Love Happy is notable for being the last Marx Bros. film, and the first film to feature Marilyn Monroe. She appears only in a very brief scene at the very end of the film, but like Groucho said about casting her in the bit part: when she enters the entire room moves. It’s hard to distinguish if this is us watching her through the prism of her legend, or if her impact on screen is truly that seismic. Groucho’s horn-dog reaction to her mere existence hints back at the magic of the RKO films.

Love Happy is never truly terrible, in fact, it’s better than their first film. But it’s a minor work. Some greats go out with an elegiac swansong like Bette Davis and Lillian Gish in The Whales of August. Others go out with on a career high-point like Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond. But far too many go out with a mere whimper, and the Marx Bros. deserved to go out in a cartoonish spectacle. Luckily, Love Happy’s finale rallies the troops and delivers that moment, but the rest of the film is slim but enjoyable, but nowhere near the best representation of their work. There are a few solid laughs, but too much mediocrity surrounding it.