When a group of high-spirited young American war correspondents arrived home from France in 1919, they celebrated with lunch at Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel, fitting comfortably round a little table for eight. That table would soon acquire an enduring legend to match the Café Royal of Oscar Wilde and Frank Harris. One after another, the new luminaries of the Twenties - Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman - found it to be their spiritual home, and it became virtually the canteen of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.
Sumptuous entertainment it was not; many of the regulars were short of money (Vanity Fair paid peanuts). But the hotel manager had a soft spot for good writers, and the admission ticket was wit - the more savage and spontaneous, the better. At any moment, the table might become the scene of a verbal jousting tournament, and it was only a matter of time before someone dubbed it The Vicious Circle.
How it could have survived ten years without blowing apart seems amazing. But we should remember that Prohibition was in force throughout that decade (though frequently ignored: President Harding was serving alcohol in the White House), and it seems that only one of the twenty or so Algonquins mentioned here was a heavy drinker. We're not talking Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald - both notably absent from the round table. But the film unaccountably leaves out any mention of food and drink, or anything else about the legendary hotel and restaurant.
Also, behind the professional rivalries, the Algonquin set do actually seem to have been fairly agreeable and well-adjusted people, though happy marriages are a bit thin on the ground. So for example, the civilised Marx Brother, Harpo, was welcomed in, while Groucho was not (apparently chafing about it, in defiance of his famous philosophy about clubs!)
In the end, the film rests mostly on fairly conventional interviews, with sons and daughters of the original set, spiced with some lively home movies (silent, of course) backed with rather too much of those predictably loud Charleston numbers we have come to expect.
Sumptuous entertainment it was not; many of the regulars were short of money (Vanity Fair paid peanuts). But the hotel manager had a soft spot for good writers, and the admission ticket was wit - the more savage and spontaneous, the better. At any moment, the table might become the scene of a verbal jousting tournament, and it was only a matter of time before someone dubbed it The Vicious Circle.
How it could have survived ten years without blowing apart seems amazing. But we should remember that Prohibition was in force throughout that decade (though frequently ignored: President Harding was serving alcohol in the White House), and it seems that only one of the twenty or so Algonquins mentioned here was a heavy drinker. We're not talking Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald - both notably absent from the round table. But the film unaccountably leaves out any mention of food and drink, or anything else about the legendary hotel and restaurant.
Also, behind the professional rivalries, the Algonquin set do actually seem to have been fairly agreeable and well-adjusted people, though happy marriages are a bit thin on the ground. So for example, the civilised Marx Brother, Harpo, was welcomed in, while Groucho was not (apparently chafing about it, in defiance of his famous philosophy about clubs!)
In the end, the film rests mostly on fairly conventional interviews, with sons and daughters of the original set, spiced with some lively home movies (silent, of course) backed with rather too much of those predictably loud Charleston numbers we have come to expect.