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The Ritz Brothers were an American comedy team who appeared in films, and as live performers from 1925 to the late 1960s. Although there were four brothers, the sons of Austrian-born Jewish haberdasher Max Joachim and his Russian wife Pauline, only three of them performed together. There was also a sister, Gertrude.〔.〕 The fourth brother, George, acted as their manager. The performers were: * Al Ritz (August 27, 1901 – December 22, 1965) * Jimmy Ritz (October 4, 1904 – November 17, 1985) * Harry Ritz (May 22, 1907 – March 29, 1986) All three brothers were born in Newark, New Jersey. The family name was Joachim (pronounced "joe-ACK-him", as Harry himself explained on a Joe Franklin TV interview), but eldest brother Al, a vaudeville dancer, adopted a new professional name after he saw the name "Ritz" on the side of a laundry truck. Jimmy and Harry followed suit when the brothers formed a team. The Ritzes emphasized precision dancing in their act, and added comedy material as they went along. By the early 1930s they were stage headliners. ==Movie career== The Ritz Brothers were hired for a New York-filmed short subject, ''Hotel Anchovy'' (1934), produced by Educational Pictures. This did well enough for the film's distributor, Twentieth Century-Fox, to sign the Ritzes as a specialty act for feature-length musicals. During this period they appeared in ''On the Avenue'', a 1937 Irving Berlin musical. That same year Fox gave the Ritz Brothers their own starring series, beginning with ''Life Begins in College''. The brothers had a large following, and some fans compare them to the Marx Brothers, but the Ritzes did not play contrasting characters like the Marxes did; the boisterous Ritzes frequently behaved identically, making it harder for audiences to tell them apart. The ringleader was always rubber-faced, mouthy Harry, with Jimmy and Al enthusiastically following his lead. They frequently broke into songs and dances during their feature comedies, and often did celebrity impersonations (among them Ted Lewis, Peter Lorre, Tony Martin, even Alice Faye and Katharine Hepburn). Their talent was also noted by Samuel Goldwyn, who borrowed them from Fox for his Technicolor variety show, ''The Goldwyn Follies'', where they appeared with other headliners of the day including Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Perhaps their most successful film during this period was Fox's 1939 musical-comedy version of ''The Three Musketeers'', co-starring Don Ameche. Later in 1939 the Ritzes staged a highly publicized walkout (complaining about the low quality of their latest script, ''The Gorilla''). Fox responded by completing ''The Gorilla'' anyway, terminating the Ritzes' starring series, and casting them in a B picture ''Pack Up Your Troubles'' starring Jane Withers. The Ritz Brothers left Fox for good in 1939. The Ritz Brothers were also caricatured, along with several other then-popular Hollywood celebrities, in the 1939 Donald Duck short, ''The Autograph Hound''. In 1940 they moved to Universal Pictures, where they were scheduled to star in ''The Boys from Syracuse'', but were removed from that production and reassigned to make brash B comedies with music. Their final film as a trio was ''Never a Dull Moment'' (1943). Al died in 1965. Harry and Jimmy continued to appear in films up until the 1970s, though the productions were strictly amateurish. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ritz Brothers」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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