Movie Time: "The Story of Mankind" (1957)

I had mentioned when discussing "The Big Store" (1940) that it was not the Marx Brothers' last movie, but they only made a couple after that.

The last movie that all three of the core brothers (Groucho, Chico, Harpo) appear in is the 1957 oddity "The Story of Mankind."

I'm a huge Marx Brothers fan, but had never seen "The Story of Mankind" before it popped up on TCM recently.

I wasn't avoiding the movie, but I never sought it out, as I knew that the brothers only made brief appearances and did not work together at all. And the movie has a really bad reputation!

But in this day and age of being able to watch something by hitting a couple of buttons on a service you're already paying for, what can you lose?

Well, I lost about 100 minutes of my life that I can't get back, but I can now say I've seen every Marx Brothers movie, so I came out ahead.

"The Story of Mankind" is pretty bad, though, and deserves it's reputation a bomb. There are worse movies to be sure, but this is the type that has a lot of talent involved and some sort of ambition, but is just a mess.

I'll point out that I'm not a "hate watcher" in that I don't revel in the badness of things, but I can see those who do pursue such activities having a field day with this one!

The basic premise of having Ronald Colman (in his last movie role) as "The Spirit of Man" vs. Vincent Price as "Mr. Scratch" at a celestial tribunal headed by Cedric Hardwick is actually solid, but the snippets of history each side uses are questionable at best!

So, how do the Marx Brothers fit in and how do they fare?

That's Groucho's wife, Eden Hartford, and she's stunning!

Well, Groucho portrays Peter Minuit, the Dutch colonial governor known for purchasing Manhattan for some trinkets. That's an odd choice by Mr. Scratch to illustrate that mankind is evil, but whatever.

Groucho is funny (How can he not be?) and gets off some snappy anachronistic one-liners, but it's odd.

Harpo is Sir Isaac Newton who is hit on the head by the apple while playing the harp (Newton is playing the harp, not the apple!). Harpo is also amusing as he gets to make some fun facial reactions.

That's another odd choice, this one by the Spirit to illustrate the merits of mankind. What's strange, though, is that the Spirit says something like the story may be true or not. But they're going back through time to witness actual historical events, so wouldn't that apple business have actually happened within the context of the movie?

In any event, Chico is wasted in the role of a monk to whom Christopher Columbus explains his theory about the world being round. I guess that's because part of Chico's shtick was the exaggerated Italian accent, but they don't give him any funny dialogue at all. He just says, "Could be" a few times.

They could have had Chico portray a classical composer and had him play the piano or something else to show off his talents.

So, the bottom line is that "The Story of Mankind" should be seen by Marx Brothers completists and can be "enjoyed" by bad movie buffs.

Everyone else should stay away!