There is a pecking order about comedians and comedy teams. It goes like this for most of us (you can alter the figures on top):<br /><br />Best Comics and comic teams: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, W.C. Fields, The Marx Brothers, Burns and Allan, The Three Stooges, Danny Kaye, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturgis, Ernie Kovaks, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis.<br /><br />Worst ones: The Ritz Brothers, Wheeler and Woolsey<br /><br />There is no way that taste can be universal. Some people can't stand Martin and Lewis, and like Wheeler and Woolsey. Yet I think that most people would agree to the split of comedy teams and comics as I've drawn them up.<br /><br />I have tried, repeatedly, to enjoy the Ritz Brothers. However I have yet to find what is there to enjoy about them. Brooks and Kaye both thought Harry Ritz was one of the funniest men in the world. To me he mugs too much (a tendency his brothers shared). In one film clip of them that I saw there was an actual moment of fun - one of them is doing an energetic dance step while the other two are waiting for him to conclude (it is a nightclub act). When he finishes, he slaps his hand downward towards them as though a signal for them to follow up with their energetic dance steps. They smile, look at each other, and slap arms toward him, as though inviting him to repeat the whole mad dance number he has just completed. <br /><br />THE GORILLA was a Broadway "Murder Mystery" from the 1920s that had been made into a film once or twice before. It's traditions are from Edgar Allan Poe's "THE MYSTERY OF THE RUE MORGUE", where a pair of murders turn out to be committed by an escaped orangutan. Here there is a variation as the criminal is human but calls himself "the Gorilla" and a real "Gorilla" shows up to confuse the investigation. The Ritz Brothers, three inept detectives, are hired by a wealthy man (Lionel Atwill) who has been threatened by the "Gorilla". They, naturally, fumble their assignment, but Atwill's niece's boyfriend does solve it in time.<br /><br />It is dreary - there is no better term for it. When the villain does show up one quickly realizes who is the killer. There is no excitement in the solution to this mystery. <br /><br />The best line in the film goes to Patsy Kelly, as a maid in the household, who is being attacked by the real gorilla, an animal named Poe. When told by his keeper that Poe dislikes women, a frightened Kelly says, "So does Kipling." That one bit was the only piece of humor that was worth recalling. For that bit (with Patsy Kelly) I'll give it a 2.