Whacky Hijinks and Bumbling Antics: The Ritz Brothers
Vaudeville produced a slew of comedy teams who went on to hit it big in the movies and remain deeply revered to this day, in some cases almost a century after their stage debut: The Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, The Three stooges.
Then there were The Ritz Brothers.
They were hugely popular headliners in vaudeville, but their career in Hollywood was a brief and mostly inauspicious one, marked by low budget films, a much-publicized walkout, and an industry that didn’t know quite what to do with them. Today most people would probably be hard pressed to name all three Ritz Brothers. Or even one.
Al, Jimmy, and Harry Joachim were born and raised in New Jersey (together with a sister and another brother) the children of Austrian immigrants. Al, the oldest, was the first to begin performing in vaudeville as a dancer, adopting the name Ritz along the way after seeing it on the side of a laundry truck. Jimmy and Harry soon followed, both adopting the name Ritz as they tried to get solo careers underway.
Working independently didn’t go so well, however, so the brothers decided to become a team. Over time The Ritz Brothers’ synchronized dance routine evolved to include silly songs, slapstick, and lightning-quick repartee between the musical numbers. Once established, the nature of the stage act would remain essentially unchanged for the next 40 years. By the early ‘30s, The Ritz Brothers had become hugely popular vaudeville headliners.
Although they were often compared with the even more popular Marx Brothers, there were two major differences between Al, Jimmy, and Harry and Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. Unlike The Marx Brothers (or most any other popular comedy team of the era), the three Ritz Brothers didn’t have distinctive and contrasting personalities. They dressed alike, they looked alike, they sounded alike, and most of their moves were carefully synchronized. They performed as a unit, and audiences then and now often had a difficult time telling them apart.
And while the Marx Brothers played out sketches that could later be easily transferred into a film, The Ritz Brothers stuck with the frenetic comedy song and dance routine.
Still, in 1934 the team was hired by Educational Films to make a 15-minute short to cash in on their popularity and see how well their act could translate into a storyline.
In The Hotel Anchovy, The Ritz Brothers playing themselves star as the house detective (Harry), bellboy (Jimmy), and front desk clerk (Al) at a bankrupt hotel. As she waits for two potential buyers to arrive, the hotel’s owner Mrs. Whitney (Doris Hill) informs the brothers that they should try and prevent anyone from checking out. Much loud, non-stop, chaotic activity ensues. For a film this short, it still contains a number of hilarious set pieces: The detective’s attempts to console a woman whose husband just left her; the brothers attempts to help a guest who wants to commit suicide; a demonstration of a “Scotch drunk”; and one of the best (and fastest) revolving door chases I’ve seen in a long time. The Ritz Brothers’ first film appearance may well remain the best cinematic record of just how very good they could be.
The short was a hit, so the distributor, 20th Century Fox, gave them a contract. At first they were used only as comic relief, little more than window dressing in otherwise straight musicals like On the Avenue and Sing, Baby, Sing. Then, noting their huge popularity, in ‘37 Fox handed them a string of starring vehicles including Life Begins in College and You Can’t Have Everything, in which they played themselves as they had in Hotel Anchovy. But as time went on and they were asked to play actual characters with actual dialogue (meaning they had to leave most of their patented shtick behind), a lot of the boisterous chaos of their collective persona seemed to fizzle.
Case in point, the 1939 musical comedy version of The Three Musketeers, in which they played second fiddle to charming, handsome, and dull as mud Don Ameche’s D'Artagnan. There are only two scenes in which you can see the usual Ritz Brothers spark, and even that’s a bit dimmed: their introduction, in which they sing a song about chicken soup, and a scene toward the end in which they pretend to be traveling minstrels and attempt to distract the King of France with a clanging, banging dance routine involving pots and pans. Apart from that, they recite their lines, act cowardly, and run around a lot, but do little else. It became their most popular film in spite of it all.
Later that year they caused a bit of a stir when they walked off the set of The Gorilla to protest the lousy script. They had good reason.
Here they play Mulligan, Harrigan, and Garrity, a trio of private detectives called to a creepy old mansion on a stormy night after a wealthy man (the great Lionel Atwill) is threatened by a mad killer known as The Gorilla. Bela Lugosi is equally wasted here as the butler in a boilerplate, cliche-sodden parlor room mystery. Although they received top billing and do offer a few memorable moments, the Ritz Brothers spend most of the film separated as they run around the mansion looking for clues. They learned early on they didn’t do nearly so well individually as they do together, and here it’s proven again.
After the film was finished, Harry, Al, and Jimmy suddenly found themselves without a contract. They moved over to Universal, but things weren’t much better there. Apparently the studio heads had already decided that unlike The Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers didn’t have what it took to carry a feature, ignoring the fact that the thing that made the Ritz Brothers so great and so popular was being kept out of the films in question. But there you go.
After being yanked off The Boys From Syracuse they were dropped into a very short string of supporting roles in B films. After appearing in 4 or 5 wastes of film between 1940 and ‘43, they figured they’d had enough of Hollywood and returned to the nightclub stage where they could do their act the way they wanted. Through the ‘50s and early ‘60s, they were a top draw in Vegas.
When Al died in ‘65, Jimmy and Harry continued the act as they could. Then in the mid-’70s they had one last, brief fling with Hollywood. In ‘75 the pair appeared as themselves in Al Adamson’s miserable sex comedy Blazing Stewardesses. Having since called him the funniest man who ever lived, Mel Brooks gave Harry a cameo in Silent Movie. And that same year Harry and Jimmy appeared onscreen for the last time in Michael Winner’s homage to old Hollywood, Won Ton Ton. They weren’t given much to do in any of the films. In Won Ton Ton they play cleaning women who walk into a room toting mops and buckets. Then they stop. The scene lasts two seconds.
In the years after their deaths (only a few months apart), Harry especially has been cited by the likes of George Carlin as a profound influence on the language and style of modern comedy.. Unfortunately it was something the studios never fully understood.
by Jim Knipfel