Groucho complains when a taxi driver gets him too close to the opera, because he “almost heard” it. Pathos? I don’t think so!Ĭase in point: an opera house is indeed a good place to set the Marx Brothers loose, and, granted, the film is not without their patented irreverence. The Marx Bros have been enlisted in the service of the status quo. Now Thalberg would begin the process of taming them. What they do best is skate along the top of a plot and shoot holes in it with both barrels. It was Thalberg who talked them into a new formula in an attempt to increase audiences (in affect, adding the factions of the population that didn’t care for crazy comedy) by beefing up the romantic sub-plot, making the Marx Brothers’ characters somewhat more realistic, and integrating them into the plot, giving them motivations, feelings, and points of view.Īnyone with any understanding of what is unique, special, interesting and in the long run successful about the Marx Brothers is that they are ABOVE and AGAINST those conventions. They found one at the most prestigious studio of the 1930s, MGM, and they found themselves in a direct working relation with production head “boy genius” Irving Thalberg. But after Duck Soup, Paramount and the Marx Brothers parted ways, forcing the team to seek a new home and a new situation. Their modus operandi had always been contrariness, anarchy, exploding conventions and conventionality with TNT. That’s a strange and rare thing to have to say, but then the Marx Brothers are unlike almost any other movie stars. If backed into a corner, I would have to concede that it is their best movie (best constructed, most crowd pleasing among general audiences), but not my favorite one. People who cite it as their favorite Marx Brothers film tend to be movie buffs or lovers of musicals but not Marx Brothers fans per se. And yet it is good at the expense of the Marx Brothers. A Night at the Opera (1935) usually presents a bit of a problem for most hardcore Marx Brothers fans.
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