Film Club: "A Night at the Opera"

A Night at the Opera (USA, 1936)
Director: Sam Wood
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 93 minutes

The musical comedy, “A Night at the opera,” is the sixth of thirteen Marx Brothers feature films and universally considered to be the Marx Brothers’ best and most popular film, receiving critical acclaim when released. In homage to this film, the mid-70s raunchy, mock opera rock band Queen, with lead singer Freddie Mercury, named its fourth album after this film. (They also named their next album after another Marx Bros. film, “A Day at the Races.”)

The less anarchic plot and slapstick comedy of this Marx Brothers film (the first one without straight-man Zeppo) was derived from a well-developed screenplay written specifically for them by playwrights George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (who had previously worked with them on “The Cocoanuts” (1929) and “Animal Crackers” (1930).

The most famous of the comedy team’s routines are included here, the crowded shipboard stateroom scene, the contract-tearing scene between Groucho and Chico, the rearranged furniture and bed-switching sequence to elude a private detective, the operatic finale (a lavish production number) with Harpo swinging Tarzan ape-like on stage fly ropes in tune to Verdi’s music, and sprinkled throughout – Groucho’s zippy one-line insults and flirtations with his perennial nemesis, Margaret Dumont.

It was their first film for MGM Studios – under Irving Thalberg’s production. This music-oriented film followed the commercially and critically unsuccessful at the time “Duck Soup” (1933), the fifth and last film they completed for Paramount. The brothers had left behind brother Zeppo, and the more rampant, absurdist, and surreal antics that were characteristic of their first five films.