Room Service (1938) on Netflix
Gordon Miller, a flat-broke producer, has stashed his twenty-two actors in a hotel ballroom. The hotel wants the whole company gone before the backer's check is signed.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.6/105,985 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Hail and Farewell has twenty-two actors, no backer and a $1,200 bill at the White Way Hotel, where its producer, Gordon Miller, has hidden the company in the empty ballroom. Joseph Gribble, the hotel manager and Miller's brother-in-law, tells him everyone must clear out before Gregory Wagner, the supervising director, finishes inspecting the books. Miller means to slip away without paying. Then Christine Marlowe, one of his actresses, reports that she has lined up a backer for the production. Miller has to dodge eviction and keep everyone out of sight until he can meet the man and take his check. His assistants, Harry Binelli and Faker Englund, help hold the hotel off, and the play's young author, Leo Davis, arrives broke and hoping for an advance on his royalties.
Cast
- Philip Woodas Simon Jenkins
- Alexander Asroas Sasha Smirnoff
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Room Service (1938)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ann Miller said that while making Room Service, Harpo Marx dropped his pants in front of her, beeped his horn and chased her across the set, and that she was so scared of him she thought he was crazy.
- Ann Miller was 15 years old when she made Room Service; she had lied about her age and obtained a fake birth certificate saying she was 18 shortly before signing with RKO Pictures.
- RKO paid $255,000 for the film rights to Room Service, breaking the $200,000 record set months earlier by that season's Pulitzer winner, You Can't Take It With You.
- Room Service is the only Marx Brothers film in which neither the story nor the characters were created especially for the team of Groucho, Harpo and Chico.
- Room Service was only the second Marx Brothers film, after Duck Soup, in which Chico does not play the piano and Harpo does not play the harp.
