A Girl in Every Port (1952)

Starring: Groucho Marx, William Bendix, and Marie Wilson
Grade: F

The close-ups of Benny and the accompanying corny music when he’s “thinking” was just the beginning of a series of unfunny ideas brought to the table in A Girl in Every Port. Giving an aged Groucho this awful of material just feels disrespectful.

Summary

Sailors and best friends Benny (Groucho) and Tim (Bendix) are in trouble for their latest money-making scheme and are stuck peeling potatoes on the brig of the ship. A sailor named McGonago comes in with another barrel full of them to give to the two, along with Tim’s mail. Always looking to make money from some scam, Benny tries to convince McGonago to play him in a dice game that can double his money. McGonago knows how Benny is and isn’t too keen on playing with him. As Benny has a favorable roll for himself, Tim declares he’s an “heiress” to a fortune after reading his mail.

Technically, Tim is an “heir”, but he’s the stupid one out of the two.

Anyway, his aunt has passed away and he’s getting $1,450 worth of inheritance money. Benny doesn’t think Tim is getting the full amount and tells him he should sue and get something in the millions, but Tim knows his aunt wasn’t a millionaire. In fact, he’s not even sure he had an aunt. McGonago reads the rest of the letter, and it says Tim has to go to the bank in person to collect the money. He says that by the time they get out of the brig to do it, the interest alone will make it worth more than a million. Benny agrees and tells McGonago to tell Fleet Admiral Temple (Hanley Stafford) about their situation and how they need to talk to him. Benny also asks McGonago for the two dollars he’s owed but this is ignored. Once McGonago exits, Tim talks with Benny about how he doesn’t want to complicate things and is fine with just getting the $1,450 from his “Aunt Gussie”, the apparent aunt from the letter. Benny realizes he knew a Gussie from Brooklyn and pulls out a picture of her from his mail. Apparently, they were very close when he was in school, with Benny admitting he was almost Tim’s uncle. If he didn’t get drafted, Benny could have ended up with her and the $1,450 could have been his money. Because of this and how they consider themselves partners, Benny thinks he has a say in what to do with the money and “allows” Tim to get half of the cut. Ever the stupid one, Tim agrees to this. He does tell Benny he can’t sue her though. Benny is okay with this, as he’s already beginning to hatch a money-making scheme with the money he will get and thinks he can pull off a million anyway.

Later, Benny finds out that Tim went to the bank to collect the money without him, and he’s brought into Temple’s office, with Tim already waiting for him. Apparently, Tim used the money to buy a racing horse named “Little Aaron” at an auction and Benny is pissed. As they argue, Temple cuts in and flips out on both of them since Tim made the Navy look like fools for being tricked by some guy at a bar for buying the horse and losing his inheritance. Because of this, Temple puts Benny in charge and gives them a five-day leave from the brig to fix the matter. When they finish the mission, they will return to the brig to finish their sentence. Before they leave, Temple points out how much he hates that the two of them have served under his command for the last twenty years because their escapades have cost the Navy a lot. To prove his point, he shows them three drawers of files that have to do with battles the Navy has been involved in. The rest of the drawers are filled to the brim with files regarding the two and what they’ve done together. He yells at them to be careful because there isn’t any more space to file their next screw-up. Sometime after, Tim introduces Benny to the team he already hired around horse Little Aaron. The first guy is Mr. Garvey (Gene Lockhart), the guy who’s supposedly going to train Little Aaron. Garvey insists he was childhood sweethearts with Gussie. He also meets jockey Skeezer (George E. Stone) and a child named “The Pearl” (Rodney Wooton), who’s apparently Little Aaron’s mascot. He won’t do anything without the child being there. The Pearl then blurts out that Little Aaron’s feet are sore, and he has bad ankles. This is why he’s lost a slew of races, though Garvey tries to downplay this fact.

The Pearl says Little Aaron needs rest to recover. He was born sickly too because he was born with a twin. In fact, Pearl was there for the birth and his father worked for Pop Sweet, who sold the horses before his death to Bert Sedgwick (Don DeFore). In addition, Pop Sweet’s daughter is Jane (Marie Wilson). She took the other horse and kept him. Currently, she works at a drive-in as a waitress, so Benny, Tim, and Pearl go to see her.

At the drive-in, Pearl introduces them to each other, and she confirms she owns the twin of Little Aaron, Little Shamrock. To help her out, Tim takes the tray she was about to serve to a customer and does it for her, though he ends up knocking it to the ground. This alerts Jane’s manager. Jane says she couldn’t afford to support Little Shamrock, so she rented it out to a vegetable farm. This allows for the horse to work for his keep and eat all the vegetables he wants to. She tries to go back to work, but since they brought Little Aaron there, they just want her to take a look at the horse. Confirming the ankle problem, they’re all interrupted by a customer who demands food. Benny goes over instead and talks shit to the guy. He exits the car to fight but slips on food and knocks himself out on the pavement. Since the manager calls the cops, the group leaves and heads to the vegetable farm where Little Shamrock is. While there, Benny, Tim, Jane, Pearl, Garvey, and Skeezer take a look at both horses. Benny comes up with the idea of selling Little Aaron back to Bert Sedgwick with the help of Little Shamrock. They leave Little Aaron at the farm, so Pearl stays with him. Elsewhere, Sedgwick talks with his fiancée Millicent Temple (Dee Hartford) about how he’s a reformed racehorse owner. As they discuss how he’s vice president of the company because Millicent is the boss’s daughter, they drive to the office. This is where Sedgwick realizes how many other vice presidents there are in the company, though Millicent insists his rise to the top will happen quickly since they’re engaged.

After Millicent introduces Sedgwick to his new secretary Miss Brooks (Lillian West), they both go into his new office. Immediately, Sedgwick gets a call from Miss Brooks about two new clients who just showed up, so Millicent wishes him luck and leaves. The two clients are a disguised Benny and Tim. Following Benny and Tim greeting Millicent before she exits and Tim almost blowing it, she tells Miss Brooks to alert her of any news regarding horse racing if the topic comes up. In Sedgwick’s office, Benny and Tim act as Kentucky horse owners, but Sedgwick says he’s done with the sport and has even sold his stable. Benny tells Sedgwick he’s been swindled on the deal. They bought Sedgwick’s old horse Little Aaron and though he was told his ankles were bad, Benny says the horse’s ankles are actually good and his trainer lied to him to buy the horse for himself. Sedgwick thanks them for the information, as it gives him a chance to buy his horse back. Even so, Sedgwick insists he’s out of racing. Benny counters by saying Little Aaron can pull off “a mile and an eighth in 1:50” without being pushed. Sedgwick is interested and agrees to go to see it with them both. However, he’s onto them, telling Benny he can drop the horrible Kentucky accent. Miss Brooks watches as they leave and makes a call. At the farm, Sedgwick watches what he thinks is Little Aaron but is actually Little Shamrock, with the horse looking as good as ever. Quickly after, Jane shows up and Sedgwick gets acquainted once he realizes her father was Pop Sweet. Unfortunately, she’s still mad at how Sedgwick treated the horses her father sold to him and for the races lost. Garvey shows up and plans on timing the horse’s practice run with a trick watch that “stops at 1:50 no matter if takes two hours to run the distance”.

Benny and Tim are happy things are working but aren’t happy with Sedgwick being clearly attracted to Jane. Even so, they all watch the horse and Sedgwick is fully convinced. Just then, they are interrupted by Millicent, who expresses her disappointment with Sedgwick. He explains the situation and how they were just doing right by telling him about his dishonest trainer, and she calms down. Following this, Sedgwick apologizes to Jane and tells the group that he’s given up racing, but they have a great horse. Defeated, the group still talks about how fast Little Shamrock was, so Benny asks what he clocked in at. Garvey is shocked to see it was “1:45 and 3/5 seconds”. They got themselves a racing horse! Garvey comes up with the idea of entering Little Shamrock as Little Aaron. This way, he’ll start at 100 to 1, and they’ll clean up as bettors. However, Benny comes up with a better plan. They’ll enter the horse as Little Shamrock and alert the papers that he’s Little Aaron’s twin. By doing this, Sedgwick will come back and want to buy it thinking it’s actually Little Aaron, and they’ll make the same switch they planned for today, selling him back Little Aaron instead of Little Shamrock.

Confused? Don’t worry, the zaniness will continue.

As the plan naturally goes awry and more parties get involved, Benny has to figure out a way to satisfy everyone.

My Thoughts:

Out of respect for Groucho Marx, to see how he would do without his brothers, and to observe the comic legend play off of someone different for a change, I had to check out A Girl in Every Port. Well, it was a mistake. I’ll just respect him from afar next time.

The character of Benny was written well for Groucho Marx’s shtick. Him being this sly schemer who pisses off everyone he works with in the Navy because he does anything to make a dollar off of anyone does fit the many previous roles Groucho has played in the past. However, this seems to be the only thing A Girl in Every Port does well. First of all, our two main characters are Benny and Tim, and we are led to believe that their escapades over the years have gotten them and the Navy in serious trouble. Additionally, everything is well documented by a superior officer who doesn’t like them. So, how have they avoided being dishonorably discharged for all of the known shit they have caused? There’s no way they could get away with this for the supposed “twenty years” Admiral Temple talks about. Right from the introductory scenes, it just doesn’t make sense for the characters to have gotten as far as they have when you consider how much is known about their con artist ways. If they were criminals or famous locals around town, this characterization could make sense, but I don’t see how two military men could get away with being this hated by so many people above them while engaging in criminal activity at the same time. You can only send someone to the brig so often. Eventually, the shit they do has to catch up with them, and it shouldn’t take two decades for it to happen in any scenario.

How deep are they, you ask? Well, there’s a scene later where fellow sailors attempt to murder Benny and Tim because of their combined history and the last straw being how the sailors got screwed by betting on Little Shamrock to win the race, with Benny doubling down on the horse winning the whole thing and it still losing (due to a myriad of reasons).

William Bendix is supremely unfunny. Given the role of being the stupid one, and the even more important role of being the guy Groucho can play off of, Bendix did a horrible job at being the sidekick. Failing at being the stupid-but-funny sidekick is hard to do, but Bendix just can’t seem to make it work. He looks even worse once Marie Wilson’s even dumber Jane Sweet enters the picture and does a considerably better job. Outside of Groucho, Wilson is the only person in the film who is able to garner legitimate laughs because of how much better she is at playing a moron than Bendix (“Save your explanations for the horses, but it’s not like it would do anything because they don’t speak English”). Accompanied with a deadpan delivery and good comic timing, her aloofness and innocence in everything she says manages to out-stupid Bendix and makes his character and performance almost completely irrelevant. There’s another unforeseen problem with having two stupid characters as well. Not only does it feel redundant in general, but the 2-on-1 dynamic hurts Groucho as well. His smart aleck style doesn’t work well with pure stupidity. Every one of his jokes and humorous comments go right over the two main character’s heads because they’re that fucking stupid, so the reaction is never what it should be. When they should be annoyed or bothered by what Benny says or does, they have to act like they have no idea what he’s doing, and it hurts the potential of the joke reaction. Sometimes, he needs a character to flip out on him, but the only one who does it is Temple. Unfortunately, Hanley Stafford overacts in such a ridiculous manner that it kills the momentum and flow of what could have been some solid moments.

If his character wasn’t used to drive the initial plot with the inheritance money he gets, I would’ve removed William Bendix’s Tim entirely. Groucho doesn’t need him, and the Benny character needs him even less. We’re told this lie that Benny and Tim go together on all of these money-making adventures that either fail gloriously or work somehow, but Tim almost fucks things up in this new hairbrained scheme on numerous occasions. It gets to the point where we’re wondering why Benny even involves him. He doesn’t pity Tim. In fact, he’s only frustrated with him. Are they really that good of friends? We don’t get a single instance where we’re led to believe it. Look, I understand Benny tricking Tim into giving him a share of his inheritance because this is classic Groucho, but Tim doesn’t offer enough as a partner-in-crime to make it seem like he’s worth any of the attention Benny gives him.

Honestly, the whole reason this movie is happening isn’t logical. Fleet Admiral Temple (who’s referred to as “Captain” and “Lieutenant” on separate occasions for some reason) gives them the assignment of fixing Tim’s fuck up involving giving his inheritance to a potential shyster for a horse. My question is why? Why does it matter to Temple what Tim is doing with his money? Why would he give these two idiots a five-day leave to fix the problem that doesn’t concern him at all, knowing these two have caused more chaos than actual naval battles the ship has been involved in? If anything, Temple should be laughing at Tim for messing up so badly, and Benny and Tim should be trying to sneak off the boat to fix the issue and dually trying to sneak back in each night without being detected. Temple acts as if the world will care that Tim looking like an idiot will make the Navy look bad when this is strictly a Tim problem. This is a personal matter and has nothing to do with the Navy, so why act like it’s a big deal? Why does he need to stick his nose into it? How did he even find out? If Benny and Tim were written as high-ranking officers that find themselves in these money-making schemes and issues like Sgt. Bilko or something, then I could see why it would be an embarrassing look for the Navy if Tim gave up all of his money to buy a horse, but they’re two dipshit sailors that get in trouble all the time. Why help them out? Why make this a priority when it affects the ship and the day-to-day operations in no way, shape, or form?

The pacing and direction are flat, the humor and style are average, and the acting from everyone not named Groucho plays like a cheap, made-for-television movie. The story is also way more complicated than it has any right to be. When the plot starts to finally take shape and we get into what the rest of the movie will be about, you realize how overly confusing the actual plan is. If you were to give me a quiz right now to explain the movie in detail from beginning to end in under five minutes, I don’t know if I could do it. This is how stupidly convoluted Benny’s plan gets when trying to pull the old switcheroo on Bert Sedgwick. The horses being twins and the allegiances of certain characters only complicate the matter further, and it becomes increasingly harder to follow as the movie gets deeper into the web of madness that it creates for itself to the point where you just stop caring. Sedgwick wants to enter the horse in a hundred-thousand-dollar race and offers to give Benny and Tim a 5% stake and buy the title outright from them, but Millicent wants to pay the duo to lose and threatens to get them kicked out of the Navy otherwise because Temple is her uncle. However, since Temple put them on this mission in the first place, wouldn’t he understand? I don’t know because they never consider this point. On top of all that, a gangster named High Life (Teddy Hart) threatens to kill them if their horse loses. Then, Pearl double crosses them and doesn’t go through with the switch of the horses, which was the original plan all along. This fucks up everything and causes Benny and Tim to enter both horses into the race and ride them themselves because they can’t tell the difference.

Are you confused yet?

Also, what the fuck is Pearl’s problem? This kid never has to answer for fucking everything up for seemingly no reason? Yeah, I don’t get it and I don’t think I ever will.

Usually, this is the type of chaos a Marx would thrive in, but it’s never a funny enough experience to warrant the anarchy of the plot to where we can accept it for what it is. The details become overwhelming in a hurry, none of the characters are really that interesting, the actors are dull, there’s too many questions left unanswered, and Bendix’s Tim sucks too much to help out Groucho’s Benny, who isn’t lighting the screen on fire anyway because the material just isn’t up to his standards. On paper, there are amusing elements that add to the bedlam and could work in a normal movie like when Benny and Tim throwing the mysterious briefcase off the board and it ended up being a bomb (which ended up saving them in the end), and the rest of the Navy hating them in general, which was funny when they’re forced to save them from the gangsters but turn around and want to kill them themselves. Sadly, the direction and production as a whole isn’t strong enough to make some of the better written ideas work onscreen. This is why it fails. Now, if you replaced Tim with a combination of Chico and Harpo, kept Jane as is, and throw in Margaret Dumont somewhere, maybe you’d have something.

There’s one amusing scene in which Benny tries to basically explain the plot to Temple and even he looks confused by it, as he silently raises his eyebrows in classic Groucho fashion. It’s almost like Groucho himself was acknowledging that this whole movie was fucking ridiculous. This is pretty much A Girl in Every Port in a nutshell. If you don’t count Skidoo because it was a considerably smaller role, this was Groucho Marx’s last starring role in a film. Honestly, it’s a damn shame he had to go out like this. It’s not funny, it’s confusing, and it’s a waste of talent. If this didn’t have Groucho in it, it would be completely unwatchable.