Room Service put the Marx Brothers in a hotel, where a producer tried to stage a play without paying for the rooms.
Room Service was released in 1938, directed by William A. Seiter and based on a Broadway play by John Murray and Allen Boretz. Groucho played Gordon Miller, a theatrical producer who was living, with his company, in a New York hotel without paying his bill. Chico and Harpo played his associates, and the group tried to keep the hotel manager, played by Donald MacBride, from evicting them while they rehearsed a play.
The film was less anarchic than the brothers’ Paramount films, because it followed a stage plot more closely, but Groucho’s Miller was still a fast-talking schemer, who talked his way out of every bill and into every room. The play within the film, and the hotel setting, gave the brothers a single location in which to work.
Room Service was the Marx Brothers’ last film for RKO, and it marked a quieter period in their career before they returned to MGM. It remains an enjoyable example of Groucho’s later screen persona: a man who could talk, charm and cheat his way through any crisis, at least for one more night.