The Marx Brothers have the reputation for producing some of the funniest movies of the 1930s and 1940s.\u00a0 This is in some ways deserved but it is by no means justified for all of their films.\u00a0 In addition, no one would claim that the entirety of any of the movies is consistently funny.\u00a0 After all, the number of people who would laugh through a three-minute harp solo is extremely small, probably zero.<\/p>\n
But I consider A Night at the Opera their best effort.\u00a0 For that reason, I\u2019ll start with a review of it and if I decide to tackle any of the others it will involve comparing them to the qualities of A Night at the Opera.<\/p>\n
The story starts out in Italy with Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho Marx) trying to convince the wealthy widow Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont) to donate $200,000 to the New York Opera in order to cement her place in high society.\u00a0 With the money, the opera company\u2019s director Herman Gottlieb, can sign a famous Italian tenor Rodolfo Lassparri for the upcoming season production of Il Trovatore.\u00a0 There is a love triangle between the soprano Rosa Castaldi, an unknown but brilliant tenor, Ricardo Baroni and the villainous Lassparri.<\/p>\n
Tomasso (Harpo Marx) and Fiorello (Chico Marx) work to get Ricardo Baroni signed by Driftwood to the New York Opera instead of Lassparri but fail and the two of them are forced to stow away along with Baroni on the steam ship heading for New York.\u00a0 Driftwood hides them in his closet sized stateroom and this gives rise to one of the funniest scenes in the movie when a troop of cleaning, maintenance and wait staff along with other miscellaneous persons end up crowding into the stateroom with the Marx Brothers and eventually explode out into the ship corridor when Mrs. Claypool opens the door.\u00a0 This scene contains one of Groucho\u2019s trademark wisecracks.\u00a0 With about ten people already in the room a knock comes on the door and Groucho opens it to discover a young woman.<\/p>\n
Groucho<\/strong> – Yes?<\/p>\n Girl<\/strong> – Is my Aunt Minnie in here?<\/p>\n Groucho<\/strong> – You can come in and prowl around if you want to.\u00a0 If she isn’t in here, you can probably find somebody just as good.<\/p>\n Girl<\/strong> – Could I use your phone?<\/p>\n Groucho<\/strong> – Use the phone?\u00a0 I’ll lay you even money you can’t get in the room.<\/p>\n The whole plot including the love story is a thin pretext for the Marx Brothers to sow chaos everywhere they go.\u00a0 The climax of the movie is the opera opening night and the three brothers doing everything imaginable to sabotage Lassparri\u2019s performance and provide Baroni with an opportunity to sing as the lead tenor in his place.\u00a0 Harpo (or more likely his stunt double) ends up performing swashbuckling acrobatics in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and eventually kidnaps Lassparri right off the stage to allow the climactic aria duet to be sung by Baroni and Castaldi.<\/p>\n And just as it looks like the brothers will be carted off to jail by the NYPD, Baroni blackmails Gottlieb into hiring himself, Castaldi, Driftwood, Fiorello and Tomasso and calling off the police in exchange for Baroni and Castaldi agreeing to perform an encore that is being thunderously demanded by the overjoyed audience.<\/p>\n This absurd story line is actually one of the tighter Marx Brother movie plots.\u00a0 Their movies were sort of like a variety show out of vaudeville.\u00a0 In between dramatic scenes you would get Chico playing the piano or Harpo playing the harp.\u00a0 And most of the movies had several comic songs sung by Groucho.\u00a0 In this movie there is also a number of songs and arias sung by the Baroni and Castaldi characters.\u00a0 So, depending how you feel about songs in a movie will decide whether you can tolerate any Marx Brothers movie at all.<\/p>\n As indicated initially I like this movie.\u00a0 That is not to say I wouldn\u2019t prefer to cut out the harp solo.\u00a0 And that is not saying all the comedy routines are equally successful for me.\u00a0 But taking the whole movie together I would call A Night at the Opera a funny movie.\u00a0 And I would say, compared to many of the Marx Brothers movies, the personalities of the brothers are much less obnoxious than they typically are.\u00a0 And it is notable that the production values for this movie produced by MGM are much higher than their previous movies for Paramount.\u00a0 If you are already a fan of the Marx Brothers and have never seen \u201cA Night at the Opera\u201d then I can unreservedly recommend this movie for you.\u00a0 For everyone else, especially those born in the 21st<\/sup> century your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Marx Brothers have the reputation for producing some of the funniest movies of the 1930s and 1940s.\u00a0 This is in some ways deserved but<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237],"tags":[43,191,38,1355],"class_list":["post-11460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-movie-review","tag-ocf-classic-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n