In the late 1940s both Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx were in their slump years–the Marx Brothers were essentially over and Groucho’s attempts at movie-star solo work were met mostly with a shrug. He made two movies–‘Copacabana’ and ‘A Girl In Every Port’–that were disappointments and the final Marx Brothers excursion ‘Love Happy’ was more or less disowned by both the brothers and the audience. Sometime in the middle of this, he was teamed with an equally lost-in-the-wilderness Sinatra in a movie called ‘It’s Only Money’. It was shot after ‘Copacabana’ and before ‘Port’ and perhaps before ‘Love Happy’. The reason for the vagueness here is due to the entrance of Howard Hughes into the proceedings. Hughes bought RKO Pictures in the mid-forties and immediately set about wrecking the place, canceling planned quality projects and initiating either unpromising ones or failing to release films that were finished for years sometimes. (The most egregious example of this was ‘Jet Pilot’, directed by Josef Von Sternberg which was shot in 1951 but not released until 1957). The order of the day at RKO at the time was irrationality. Hughes lived in a screening room on the lot where he subsisted on a diet of milk and Hershey bars. He kept gallon jugs of his own urine stored in the room (for future medical study perhaps?), watched movies non-stop (mostly westerns apparently) and communicated by means of speaking to people from his side of a locked door while the person was on the other. (See the Alec Baldwin/DiCaprio scene in ‘The Navigator—you can’t make this stuff up). In 1948 Hughes decided to use three stars who were either under contract or owed him one more movie and ‘It’s Only Money’ came into being–the third star was Hughes’s masturbatory fantasy-girl Jane Russell who must have rued the day that Hughes discovered her. Though finished in 1948, the film wasn’t released until 1951 at which point Sinatra’s career was even more in the dumps. Groucho, however, had finally found the solo-act success he’d been seeking with the premiere of ‘You Bet Your Life’. The movie was retitled ‘Double Dynamite’, no doubt in reference to the only thing Hughes found interesting about the film–Jane Russell’s mammaries. I’ve never made it through the whole thing. It’s not exactly awful. Perhaps ‘tepid’ is the best way to describe it. Above is a short musical number from the film featuring Groucho and Frank.walking down a street singing what was intended to be the title song. The rear screen projection is inept but its Groucho and Frank in front of it that truly moves it into the realm of the Ministry Of Silly Walks. They race forward at an exhausting pace as if trying to keep up with a moving sidewalk. It’s like they’re on one of those machines they make you walk on when getting a stress test, where the object is to work you beyond endurance at ever-increasing speeds. As with yesterdays clip, Sinatra is neither boyishly charming or menacingly sexy. Most people’s ‘awkward age’ seems to happen around age 14 or so. Sinatra’s happened around 36.