A Night in Casablanca

A swan song. The last film to unite the personal trinity of destructive humour and poetry known as The Marx Brothers: one of their most entertaining and malicious genre parodies. Like a plague of locusts, they descend upon the seriousness of Casablanca and other anti-Nazi films. While they desecrate their dramaturgy in particular and the logic of the world spirit in general, they do not miss the opportunity to pay homage to the muse of uselessness: with a cascade of words, a finger dance across the piano keyboard and a silent harp solo in the most impossible place at the most impossible time. (H.T.)