Overlooked Classic Movies: A Night at the Opera

 

 

Mrs. Claypool: “I’ve been sitting at this table for forty-five minutes.”

Otis B. Driftwood: “Yes, with your back to me. When I have dinner with a woman I expect her to look at my face. That’s the price she has to pay!”

And that was my introduction to Groucho Marx at the age of eight.

To say that the Marx Brothers would get cancelled today goes without saying; the only reason they managed to get away with as much as they did in their movie career was probably because most viewers could not comprehend what they were actually doing. So much of what they did in an hour and a half – and those were often their long films – went by so fast and furiously that I’m pretty sure half of it went over the audiences head. There were, however, no dissatisfied customers because the parts they got were so brilliant that the audience was laughing hysterically at it when it happened.

I can’t imagine for the life of me what it is must have been like to watch the Marx Brothers when they were doing vaudeville or performing on stage. I’ve seen the movie versions of their first two plays The Coconuts and Animal Crackers so many times as a youth there are still passages I have committed to memory. That might appall the Marx Brothers because according to reports, in the original productions Groucho and Chico would change the lines so many times their supporting cast almost had no idea what they were going to say when they came out on stage each night. It must have been like performing with four different Robin Williams and each one had a completely different set of lines. The movie versions of their plays and the nine films they subsequently made in the decade that followed must be the restrained versions of their insanity possible. I sometimes pity the screenwriters who were given credit for their films over their years; how much of their scripts could have survived two minutes of the brothers looking at it, ripping pages out and saying: “We’ll do what we’re going to do.”

I don’t think I’ll get much argument that comedy on the screen, when done well, has a far greater lasting power then drama. Certain elements that have entered the zeitgeist are more from comedy: Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character, Harold Lloyd climbing a building in Safety Last; Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s On First’  and the wonderful world of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and all the animated cartoons that served as short subjects. I have just as much confidence that half a century from now we will still be quoting the dead parrot sketch and almost everything else we saw in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

But the Marx Brothers managed to transcend even that. Much of this comes from the persona of Groucho: his mustache and glasses have been copyrighted and sold even for children who don’t know who he was. When Rob Zombie was doing his horror movies the characters bore the name of Otis B. Driftwood and Rufus T. Firefly. In the series finale of Breaking Bad, one of the villains was using ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’ as a ring-tone. And I’m pretty sure there is a universal appeal to children: the Warners of Animaniacs are for all intents and purposes the animated Marx Brothers, though they all mix and match elements of all three of the major characters that you don’t have a one-to-one correlation. But all of them were as much Groucho as anybody.

The eleven films the Marx Brothers made between 1929 and 1941 were all hysterically funny. (The last two they made A Night in Casablanca and Love Happy, made after the brothers decided to come out of retirement, have moments of inspiration but are far fewer of the jokes land then they did in their earlier films.)  Many of them are clearly in the greatest comedies ever made category and even the ones that don’t work perfectly have moments that leave you in awe. But if I had to pick the one that is perfect in every way, it’s still the first one I ever saw, which was A Night at the Opera.

In his Great Movies collection, Ebert says that Duck Soup is their masterwork and that A Night at the Opera is ‘lesser’ because of the musical interludes. There is vast truth in Ebert’s narrative: Duck Soup is hysterical from the opening credits to the last frame, it’s filled with a comic insanity that have moments that comedians have been trying to echo ever since, and you can’t stop laughing from beginning to end. That is, however, also what makes it the most disorganized movie they ever made. It’s nothing but comic insanity with barely a structure to hang your hat on and it is absolutely a classic. But I’m pretty sure that its total insanity is the main reason it was the troops first box office disaster and led to their careers nearly ending.

Because the film did bomb,  Paramount cancelled their contract and the brothers didn’t make another film for two years. (That’s almost certainly why Zeppo ended up leaving the act.) The remaining brothers went from studio to studio until they ended up at MGM. The story of how they managed to get a contract there is the kind of thing that would fit in a Marx Brothers film. The brothers parked themselves in the waiting room of Irving Thalberg, the wunderkind producer behind so much of MGM’s success who notoriously never had a meeting with anybody. After waiting two weeks, they took papers out of the wastebasket and set them on fire. When Thalberg smelled smoke, he left his office to see the brothers roasting marshmallows over his wastebasket fire. Impressed by their moxie, Thalberg met with them and signed them to MGM where they would make six pictures, starting with A Night at the Opera.

A Night at the Opera is a masterpiece for countless reasons but perhaps the best is because it gives an example of all three archetypes each of the three brothers played in everyone of their careers. Groucho’s Otis B. Driftwood holds a job with the New York Opera company and is wooing a wealthy socialite played by the brothers favorite partner-in-crime, Margaret Dumont. (She appeared in seven of their films always playing a wealthy socialite with a ridiculous amount of money; in Duck Soup, her character has so much wealth she’s essentially bailing out an entire nation.)

As always Groucho is simultaneously wooing and insulting Dumont’s character for her money. Unlike all of their other films together, where he’s almost always trying to marry her, this time its completely professional: he’s trying to get her as a backer for his boss Herman Gottlieb, played by that wonderful comic character actor Sig Ruman. Ruman’s characters were always wonderful at playing people with bluster and egos needing to be punctured; his most famous roles was in To Be or Not Be as  ‘Concentration Camp’ Erhardt, who Jack Benny manages to completely humiliate.

Gottlieb works for the New York Opera company and is trying to get money from Claypool to finance a great tenor from Italy to make his American debut. Driftwood is working more than Groucho’s characters in most of his film, which is to say the bare minimum. At the last performance when his carriage pulls up and he’s told that it’s still going on, he berates his driver: “On account of you, I nearly heard the opera!”

Groucho Marx is, of course, the premiere insult comic of all time – every satirical remark is a dig at the action onscreen – but it’s worth noting that in this film as much as all the others, all of his insults are directed towards the rich and powerful, the structures of society, or the true villains of the piece. Groucho is clearly a social climber who is usually punching above his weight financially and always trying to con the rich and powerful. Groucho is always berating the society and authority; he never once does so to the poor or downtrodden, or in this case, the love interest.

All the Marx Brothers are essentially playing con men, but different kinds. Chico is essentially the working class con man, who is essentially salt of the earth and has less room for pretention than Groucho does. Chico is as much a womanizer as Groucho is but he never gets in the way of true love; if anything, his character is always working hard to make sure in runs smoothly. This is true in A Night at the Opera as much as the others. He plays Fiorello, who has known Alan Jones’ struggling tenor Ricardo all his life and believes in him. He agrees to be his manager and laughs when Ricardo tells him he won’t make any money.” “That’s a fine. I break even. Just as long as I no lose nothing” he tells him when he signs on.

Most of the highlights of the Marx Brothers movies come when Groucho and Chico have scenes together, and A Night at the Opera is no exception. The two of them meet when both men are putting their legs on a tenor than Harpo has just knocked unconscious  (twice) and the two of them start having a conversation (“Two beers, bartender,” Groucho begins it). Groucho believes Chico is the manager of a tenor that’s about to be signed for $1000 a night and spends it trying to con Chico for $10 a night. The comedy always comes because invariably Chico’s characters thinks Groucho’s are higher up the social ladder then they invariably are and that Groucho so badly wants money, he falls for anything.

After this comes the classic contract bit, where Groucho and Chico take out the enormous contracts and the two of them start going through the boilerplate language, none of which Chico agrees with, no matter how basic: “The party of the first part…”  This bit will make the most hard-hearted person laugh because it matches  both physical comedy, word play and perfect timing. The last exchange involving the ‘sanity clause’ has essentially entered comic lore: when The Santa Clause came out in 1993, Roger Ebert bemoaned the entire film went by and the punch line from this exchange never got made.

Harpo is the noble savage, brutal, chasing skirts, always able to contort himself, saying volumes by saying absolutely nothing, driving everybody around him nuts – except Chico and Groucho (occasionally). Harpo is essentially a live-action cartoon, who seems able to do just all the physical comedy the movie requires. At the climax of the film, he spends much of the time  behind the scenes, ripping down scenery, making havoc onstage blissfully unintentionally (“A battleship in Il Trovatore!’ is just one consequence of his actions). In many ways he is a live-action pre-cursor of so many of the Warner Brothers Cartoons that were just a few years away of debuting; the rules of physics never seem to apply to him. At one point, trying to get away from authority figures, he simply runs up the curtain in defiance of gravity and manages to get away. You sometimes wonder how much men like Chuck Jones and Tex Avery took the inspiration for Wile E. Coyote’s antics or Tom and Jerry’s  simply by watching Harpo Marx in basically any film.

A Night at the Opera does have a plot, to be sure, as well as a love story but even this is an advance forward for the film. During their first five movies, Zeppo had frequently been the quasi-romantic lead in many of them, and that proved a distraction. Zeppo was handsome and a decent actor, but his being shifted that way made him seem as an outsider. It is possible if he had stayed with the act Zeppo would have continued serving that purpose for the rest of the way. Theoretically I could have seen him playing Ricardo – like his brothers Zeppo had a good singing voice and he was handsome – but it would have distracted from the seriousness of the plot.

There were love stories in every Marx Brothers film that went forward but I think they helped their movies. Now their insanity and ridiculousness towards society and the world had a purpose: they were using their insanity for love as well as money.

I also appreciate the musical interludes in this film the way I didn’t before. It’s worth remembering that while Chico and Harpo never took anything seriously when either sat before their instrument, they were deadly serious. How many movies would dare pause for a few minutes today just to let a performer play the piano, much less the harp? Harpo was probably the most skilled musician of the brothers; in one film he and Chico did a duet on the piano and in The Coconuts  he played a clarinet. These interludes may have made less sense than the antics onscreen but I imagine most of it had to do with the Marx Brothers training in vaudeville.

It's a shame that Groucho doesn’t sing in the film; he was actually a skilled singer and many of his songs are among the highlights of the films. Songs such as ‘Hurray for Captain Spaulding’, ‘Hello I Must Be Going’, and of course ‘Lydia the Tattooed Ladies’ are highlights of his pictures and there were more than a few other skilled ones. There have been many great Broadway performers who have transitioned to movies over the years, but the idea of the musical clown has died out. It was a major factor in comic movies for decades and I will deal with one of the most undervalued in another review.

But of course you don’t discuss A Night at the Opera without the stateroom scene, and it’s worth noting that the brothers build to it gradually. Groucho has a cabin that compared to the others we’ve seen is barely the size of a closet. “Tomorrow, you can open the trunk and leave the room,” he says as the porter leaves. He opens the trunk and Chico, Harpo and Alan Jones have stowed away having thrown away all his clothes. Driftwood has invited Claypool to his room and tells them to get out of there, but they insist on being fed.

The scene that follows would be one of the comic highlights of a lesser movie as Groucho stands outside his door and places his order, but at the end Chico says: “And two hardboiled eggs.” After which Harpo (who is asleep) honks his horn and Groucho says: “Make that three hard-boiled eggs.” Each time he says it gets funnier and there’s a punch line so great at the end, I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen the film because Groucho’s reactions sells it.

Driftwood comes in and is jovial: “If that steward is deaf and blind, we’ll be fine.” Then the scene officially begins when three maids come in to make up the room. Slowly more and more people begin showing up and Driftwood cheerfully invites each one in no matter what. When a woman asks if he ask for a manicure, he actually says: “No. Come on in!” Another woman comes in looking for her Aunt Minnie and asks if she can use the phone: “Use the phone? I’ll lay even money you can’t get in the room.”

As viewers we’re aware how crowded the room is getting, and we know the inevitable is coming but this a case where the punch line is as good as the buildup. In a film studies course in college, I showed the entire scene to a group of students, saying it was one of my favorite scenes. I didn’t have to explain why the same way others did; with each new arrival, the laughter got bigger and bigger.

Like every Marx Brothers films, A Night at the Opera ends with a hysterical comic set-piece where all the plot elements are resolved, the bad guys are humiliated, love triumphs and the Marx Brothers make fun of every single thing that happens. Groucho climbs all over the opera house, giving commentary as he tries to escape. Chico and Harpo engage in slapstick everywhere and the bad guys keep getting hit in the head. And because these are satires and farces, it is the stiffs and upper class who have to come crawling to the lower class and as is frequently the case, the same people who have spent the entire film humiliating them. Indeed, it’s not enough for Gottlieb to have come crawling back to the brothers, the last gag of the film is of Harpo ripping up his suit as he does.

I will close with a personal reminiscence to say what an effect this film has had on me. My father has loved opera his whole life and I am fond of certain pieces. We’ve gone to the Met and New York Opera many times. When we discussed this film he said that the two of us should see Il Trovatore the opera that is being performed at the climax of the film. I’ll admit I probably should – it is a masterpiece and well worth seeing. But I told my dad it would probably be disappointing by comparison. And really, if an opera doesn’t start with the orchestra  suddenly transitioning from Verdi to ‘Take Me Out To the Ball Game’,  it’s probably going to be a disappointment for most fans.