A Night at the Opera (1935)
Dir. Sam Wood
Starring Kitty Carlisle, Alan Jones, Groucho Marx, Chico Marx & Harpo Marx
Ranked #85 on AFI’s Top 100 Films of All Time
A great number of vaudeville acts were able to jump from stage to screen with great success. Acts like Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy were massive successes but none were ever able to achieve the following of The Marx Brothers. Today my film is their first with MGM entitled A Night at the Opera.
The Marx Brothers team together to put two opera singers in a big show in New York and help them fall in love while showcasing their madcap antics to the grief of an opera program director and a woman trying to break into high society.
Rather than spend too much time going over the plot and story of this film, I’d rather wax poetic about these three brothers and the years of entertainment they have given me over the years.
The Marx Brothers are still, even after all these years, one of my favorite comedy teams to grace the silver screen. Honing their talents on the stage of Vaudeville, they took years and years of perfecting their craft before even going on the silver screen. Paramount took the chance of putting their antics on film for mass audiences to enjoy the slapstick humor mixed with verbal stabs that would be their calling card. It was at this time that they would put out classics like Coconuts, Animal Crackers, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup. Duck Soup would be their biggest movie with critics but bombed at the box office. This would eventually lead to their dismissal from Paramount.
Numbers at the box office was not their only reason for Paramount for getting rid of Harpo, Chico, Zeppo and Groucho. While on set, they were virtually uncontrollable and refused to film unless their ideas were put in scripts. Directors would literally walk off set because of the difficulty the brothers displayed, but it was their intervention and refusal to put out a bad product that made their Paramount movies a success with the fans rather than in box office receipts.
MGM took the chance to give the brothers one last shot at movie star status. However, instead of 90 minutes of the brothers running mad around the set and ad-libbing dialog like crazy, they gave them strict scripts to follow. Their first was A Night at the Opera, and while it was successful at the box office, it was a failure in the eyes of the fans.
A Night at the Opera is fun, but only in parts. Instead of being the main focal point, allowing the brothers to do what they do best with verbal jabs and pratfall humor, they played second fiddle to plot and story. A majority of the plots in their MGM movies involved some kind of love story where the brothers, through humor helped the two lovers of the story find each other. A Night at the Opera is no different.
One plus is that we get to see the musical side of Chico and Harpo during their MGM years and in my movie I watched today. Harpo was an acclaimed and classically trained harp and piano player while Chico was also an accomplished piano player in his own right. They kept interest in these down times of the movie by playing these beautiful musical pieces with comical panache.
I know from just reading this that one can formulate my distaste for this film and a majority of their MGM films and I will be truthful. I do enjoy their Paramount films and their much later United Artists releases, but there are enough of the good parts to make me like A Night of the Opera. While I would choose to watch the early stuff more than anything else, if they are on TV or I need a good laugh, I will pop in just about anything with Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo.
4/5
James
The Life of a Filmmaker moving @ 24 fps 