A Night at the Opera is the best film of the Marx Brothers after they were dropped by Paramount in 1933 and went over to MGM two years later. MGM studio head Irving Thalberg signed them and at first discomfited Groucho by insisting that their movies have elements that would appeal to female audiences. (Those looking for reasons why there were so many women-oriented movies in the 1930’s and are so few today need look no farther than the essential difference in movie audiences then and now: in the 1930’s movies were entertainment for the whole family, and it was typically the wife and mother of the family who determined what film they would go see; today movies are primarily a teenage date item and it’s the male who decides what film they see, with the result that studios emphasize violent action and other elements that will grab the testosterone of the ticket buyer.) Groucho said that women had just never liked their sort of comedy, and that’s all there was to it; Thalberg responded that that’s why their MGM movies would have to contain lavish musical production numbers and romantic subplots to give women things they would like.
The formula worked beautifully when Thalberg himself was around to make sure the disparate elements of comedy, music and romance were carefully balanced; unfortunately, A Night at the Opera was the only Marx Brothers movie made at MGM entirely during Thalberg’s lifetime. The follow-up film, A Day at the Races, was prepared by Thalberg and was a week and a half into actual shooting when he died, and the finished product shows the glitches in the formula — the dead stops the action comes to when it’s time for a musical number or a romantic interlude — that Thalberg was able to overcome on Opera. And the three films the Marxes made at MGM in 1939-41 — At the Circus, Go West and The Big Store — were done to Thalberg’s formula but without his input (and in the face of opposition by Louis B. Mayer, who seemed to make it his policy to hate everything Thalberg had liked for no better reason than that Thalberg had liked it), and simply creak along between the still-great comedy moments.
A Night at the Opera
has it all, though: a tightly-knit script by George S. Kaufman and Morrie
Ryskind (whom Groucho always insisted were the best writers for the Marx
Brothers), a first-rate physical production (there are actually shots in this
film that are carefully lit by photographer Merritt Gerstad and directed by Sam
Wood with at least some flair for visual eloquence — in the Marx Brothers’
Paramount films the cameramen seemed to be interested in little more than
aiming the cameras in the general direction of the action and hoping they picked it up), and a great supporting cast
including Margaret Dumont (in her fourth of seven Marx films), Sig Rumann (in
his first of three), Walter Woolf King (inimitable as the arrogant bad-guy
tenor) and the quite good voices of Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle as the nice singers whom the Marxes help to an operatic career.
The witty script enables Groucho to dominate the screen for just about the last
time in the Marxes’ career (as the quality of the dialogue deteriorated in
subsequent Marx Brothers films, Harpo looked better by comparison if only
because he didn’t have to speak any of the unspeakable and unfunny lines the
Marxes’ later writers concocted for them all too often), and the film’s great
comic set-pieces — the contract routine between Groucho and Chico, the infamous
stateroom scene (written by gag writer Al Boasberg and shredded by him and
stuck to his office ceiling before he let the Marx Brothers or anyone else see
it), the scene in Groucho’s hotel room where he and the (unseen) other brothers
make four beds dance about from room to room and drive the usually unflappable
Robert Emmet O’Connor (playing — what else? — a cop) to the edge of a nervous
breakdown, and the final disruption of the performance of Verdi’s Il
Trovatore — are as gloriously amusing as
ever.
It’s surprising, in retrospect, that the Marx Brothers concocted a
superbly funny sequence set in an opera house without doing much to satirize what one would think would be
the most risible aspect of the opera scene, the high-class atmosphere of it and
the number of people who are there just “to be seen” and who couldn’t care less
about the music — as it is, they basically treat an opera performance much the
way they treated Margaret Dumont’s high-class party in Animal
Crackers (another Kaufman-Ryskind script),
as an arena in which to run amok and disrupt things for the sheer joy of doing
so. (The real comedown in the
sequence is when they’re obliged to stop disrupting once good-guys Jones and Carlisle are on stage doing the
“Miserere” — though they’re surprisingly good in it, it’s hard to watch them
and keep a straight face after the previous five minutes have done so much to
render the entire concept of opera utterly absurd.) When I read Joe Adamson’s
book Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo I found myself regretting that the rejected Bert
Kalmar-Harry Ruby script for A Night at the Opera (which Adamson quoted at length) hadn’t been used,
and indeed there are aspects of that script that are funnier than the movie
that actually got made — but the movie that actually got made is quite funny
enough, thank you. — 1/2/98
•••••
The film was A Night at the Opera, a movie that hardly seems to need any more comment —
it’s become so integral a part of popular culture that in the episode of the TV
show The Odd Couple featuring New
York City Opera baritone Richard Fredericks (whom Tony Randall had insisted on
including in an episode!), Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman) growled out to Randall,
“The only opera I ever saw had the Marx Brothers in it!” A Night at the Opera took two years to make — unusual for a film in the
1930’s — partly because the Marx Brothers were considered over the hill (their
immediately previous film, Duck Soup,
had been a box-office flop on its initial release; it didn’t really find its
audience until the 1960’s, when young people began to distrust the government
and rebel against authority, and they found in this 35-year-old movie a
reflection of their anarchic attitudes and conviction that all politics were
stupid and soul-destroying) and partly because MGM production chief Irving
Thalberg wanted to be very
careful in how he re-introduced them to movie audiences. Thalberg began their
relationship by telling the Marxes he’d thought Duck Soup was funny but wasn’t a good movie — to which
Groucho, being Groucho, replied, “Well, we didn’t think Grand Hotel was so hot, either!”
Thalberg patiently explained that
you couldn’t make a great movie by just building gag on top of gag without any
letup, and when Groucho asked why not, Thalberg said because women wouldn’t
like such a film. “Women have never liked our kind of comedy, and that’s all
there is to it,” Groucho said. Thalberg replied, “That’s why your film has to
have romance and music in it, so there’ll be things in it women will like.” The obsession with appealing to women came
from the fact that two-career couples were incredibly rare — indeed, one of the
major cliché plots of the 1930’s was the poor but honest couple who can’t get
married because the man isn’t earning enough money at his job to support both
of them — and the theory was that while their husbands were away at work, wives
would be scanning the movie listings in the papers and deciding what film the
family would go see that night. That’s one reason why so many 1930’s movies
have strongly etched female characters — whereas today the studios assume that
most of the movie-theatre audience is adolescents and it will be the boys who
decide what movies they will take their girls to, which is why so many of
today’s films seem to appeal mostly to an audience of young men whose brains
are being pickled in testosterone.
Anyway, getting back to the Marx Brothers
and A Night at the Opera,
Thalberg went through his usual incessant preparations — and as usual he kept
the Marxes waiting for hours on end when they supposedly had appointments to
see him (they literally smoked him out of his office at one point!) — and he
accepted a story by James Kevin McGuinness dealing with a fast-talking swindler
who wants to bilk a wealthy widow out of her millions by having her sponsor an
opera. Groucho brought along a writer named George Oppenheimer and tried to get
the story remodeled into an earlier version of The Producers — he would play a producer who would charge his
backers 1,000 percent of the cost of his opera and put on a deliberately bad
show, but instead it would be a hit (the premise had been an urban legend on Broadway
for years and, well before Mel Brooks got hold of it, was used seriously in the film The Falcon in Hollywood). Thalberg turned it down and instead hired Bert
Kalmar and Harry Ruby, principal screenwriters on Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, who came up with a really intriguing screenplay giving Groucho some of
the wild, self-contradictory witticisms they’d written for him before and some
elaborate pantomime routines for Harpo. Judging from the excerpts from it
published by Joe Adamson in his book Groucho, Harpo, Chico and
Sometimes Zeppo, the Kalmar-Ruby A
Night at the Opera would have made an
excellent movie — as good, certainly, as the one we have — but neither Thalberg
nor the Marxes liked this script either.
Groucho then remembered that their two
most successful stage shows, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers —
which both had been turned into hit movies — had been written by George S.
Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, and though Kaufman absolutely loathed Hollywood,
the promise of a large amount of MGM’s money was enough to lure him there. (It
was during the writing of A Night at the Opera that Kaufman was assigned an office on the MGM lot.
His door was kept closed and his only contact with the studio was that every
week a minion would slip his paycheck under the door. Kaufman decided to take a
vacation, and returned several months later to find that no one had bothered to
contact him during his absence, no one at the studio had noticed he was gone,
and the studio’s minion had continued to slip paychecks under his door until he
now had an accumulation of nine months’ worth of them — an interesting tale of
Kaufman’s life imitating his art, since he’d written a similar scene involving
a Broadway writer brought to Hollywood, paid a large sum and otherwise ignored,
in the play he and Moss Hart co-wrote, Once in a Lifetime, and Kaufman had himself played the writer in the
play’s Broadway premiere.)
Kaufman and Ryskind duly turned in a script — with
Al Boasberg called in as a gag man (it was he who wrote the celebrated
stateroom scene — and shredded it, forcing the Marxes and Thalberg to
reassemble it so they could read it) — but nobody was particularly thrilled
with that version, either. So Thalberg and the Marxes hit on the idea of taking
the movie, or at least parts of it, on tour, performing it before live
audiences in vaudeville theatres and seeing which jokes went over, which ones
didn’t, and taking writers along so anything that didn’t work could be punched
up or totally rewritten on the spot. The Marxes also got the services of a
visually inventive director, Sam Wood, and a marvelous cinematographer, Merritt
Gerstad, with the result that this is the best-looking film the Marxes ever appeared in. By this time they
were down from four brothers to three — Zeppo Marx had left the act to work as
an agent — and A Night at the Opera
emerged as a disjointed but brilliant movie in which, for the first and only
time in the Marxes’ career at MGM, the comedy, music and romance reinforce each
other instead of getting in each other’s way. The singing stars, Allan Jones
and Kitty Carlisle — providing the appeal to female audiences Thalberg insisted
on — are attractive and personable, with great voices. (Jones had been offered
the lead in MGM’s operetta Naughty Marietta and, in one of the most boneheaded career decisions
of all time, had turned it down; instead Nelson Eddy agreed to co-star with
Jeanette MacDonald, thus launching their fabulously successful series of eight
films together.)
When I was at the height of my obsession with all things
Marxist in the 1970’s I used to sit through the musical and romantic interludes
of their MGM films with teeth gnashing in frustration, waiting for the comedy
to begin again; now I find a lot of the music quite charming, and well filmed —
“Alone” is a haunting song (both Groucho and Chico wanted it deleted; Allan
Jones, of course, wanted it to stay in; and Thalberg told Jones, “The Marx
Brothers know comedy. You know music. It stays in”) that became a number one
hit, and “Cosi-Cosa” is an infectious number vividly filmed, with the beaming
faces of joyous, transfixed children adding to the light, giddy appeal of this
movie. Sometimes the transitions (especially between Groucho as romantic
sentimentalist giving Kitty Carlisle Allan Jones’ love note and Groucho as
remorseless swindler blackmailing Margaret Dumont into coming into his room on
the boat) jar, but for the most part A Night at the Opera is a very funny movie that’s also genuinely
charming. It’s a romantic triangle between established tenor Rodolfo Lassparri
(Walter Woolf King), aspiring soprano Rosa Castaldi (Kitty Carlisle) and
unknown tenor Ricardo Baroni (Allan Jones); Lassparri gets an offer from Herman
Gottlieb (Sig Rumann), manager of the New York Opera Company, to sing in New York,
and he invites Rosa to join him in hopes that she’ll reward him for his favor
to her by having sex with him. But, being the innocent heroine of a 1930’s
Production Code-era movie, she only has eyes for Baroni. The Marx Brothers get
shoehorned into this plot situation in a variety of ways; Groucho is Otis B.
Driftwood, smooth-talking swindler who’s trying to get into the fortune (and
the pants, if he has to) of Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont, in her fourth of
seven films with the Marx Brothers) by serving as liaison between her and
Gottlieb. Harpo is Lassparri’s valet (until the vain tenor fires him) and Chico
is Baroni’s friend and manager.
There are lots of delicious comic highlights in
the film, from the famous contract-tearing scene (just about everyone I know
who shares my love of the Marx Brothers has at some time or other said, “The
party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the
first part”) to the stateroom scene (preceded by a just as hilarious scene in
which Groucho is ordering a meal for himself and the three people — Chico,
Harpo and Baroni — who have stowed away in his trunk; he’s told Chico and Harpo
to shut up but Chico keeps chiming in, “And two hard-boiled eggs,” whereupon
Harpo honks his taxi horn and Groucho says, “Make that three hard-boiled eggs”
— the punch line coming when Harpo emits a whole series of honks and Groucho
says, “Either it’s foggy out or make that a dozen hard-boiled eggs”) and the
finale in which the Marx Brothers disrupt the opening-night performance of
Verdi’s Il Trovatore (a silly
opera the Marxes had already parodied twice before!) to get Lassparri out of
the cast and Ricardo and Rosa on. Their tactics include slipping “Take Me Out
to the Ballgame” into the parts for the orchestra, so in the middle of the
overture the music changes from Verdi to Albert von Tilzer’s baseball classic;
going “booga-booga-booga” as a mezzo-soprano (Olga Dane) wretchedly made up to
look like a hag sings Azucena’s aria “Stride la vampa”; tearing off the clothes
of a dancer as she passes from one end of the stage to the other; switching
backdrops on Lassparri so the tenor ends up singing “Mal reggendo” and “Di
quella pira” in front of New York streetcars and a battleship; and finally
kidnapping him just before the last act so a desperate Gottlieb agrees to put
Ricardo and Rosa on for a surprisingly straight version of the “Miserere” duet.
(In it, Kitty Carlisle adds an un-Verdian high note that is “wrong” musically
but adds to the vertiginous excitement of the scene; it was a traditional
interpolation and I believe Frances Alda took it on her record with Caruso.)
A
Night at the Opera is a lovely movie that
hangs together surprisingly well for all its (deliberate) changes of direction,
and it’s only a pity that the Marxes’ later films for MGM didn’t sustain its
quality. Irving Thalberg died during the pre-production of A Day at
the Races and the absence of his keen hand
in shaping and reshaping a popular entertainment is missed, and in the three
films the Marx Brothers made at MGM after that (At the Circus, Go West,
and The Big Store) the scripts
seem thrown together with chewing gum and paste and the quality of the musical
interludes descends from genuinely talented singers like Allan Jones and Kitty
Carlisle to people like Kenny Baker, John Carroll and Tony Martin. Incidentally, MGM had so many pre-recordings
of Verdi’s Il Trovatore left over
from A Night at the Opera that
they concocted a whole movie the following year, Moonlight Murder — a murder mystery set against the backdrop of a
performance of Trovatore at the Hollywood
Bowl — just to be able to reuse them. — 11/25/11
