It has only been in the past five years or so that I have truly come to appreciate the Marx Brothers, but I can still recall many of the reasons why, even if I didn’t actively dislike them, I was confused by why they are so legendary.  With this in mind, I have decided to present 1935’s A Night at the Opera in a manner meant to appeal to the unconverted.  Really, given all the existing essays, books and videos about even this one film, I doubt anything new can be said about it.

So, let’s start with some of the hurdles I had to overcome in order to appreciate their work.

First, even for somebody who watches a lot of cinema from nearly a hundred years ago, I still had trouble understanding much of what they said.  It didn’t help their work was in poor condition before pristine restorations were performed in this century.  While the audio is now significantly clearer than before, it still helps to train one’s ear by watching other films from this era. 

Even then, you’ll need to be receptive to the peculiar “Mid-Atlantic Drawl” that was the accent used by most actors in the first era of talking pictures.  I’ve never had any trouble understanding it, but then I also never had any problems reading cursive writing, so maybe I just have an old soul.

Another technical hurdle is the odd pacing and editing.  There are frequently pauses after humorous lines, and these were intentionally timed so audience laughter would not step on the next line.  But, if you’re not laughing, these moments will seem awkward and weird. 

Modern viewers may also be confused by the numerous jump cuts.  There are a couple of reasons for those.  In even their initial release, these films were meant to maximize the potential for laughs, so some rather artless excisions may have resulted from that process.  For films made during or before 1935, however, there likely will also be censor’s cuts made per the Production Code in the years following.  Since re-release prints of such films are largely all that remain, we will only ever have these truncated versions, as studios used to destroy the parts they took out.  I have to stop myself before I think too much about such facts, as I will get pointlessly worked up.

Lastly, there’s the nature of the Brothers themselves, who will seem very strange for the uninitiated. 

Groucho has a “mustache” that is obviously black face paint.  There’s an amazing bit in Duck Soup where two of the other Marxes find in his bedroom a jar of that paint, and each makes themselves over to look like him, which means Groucho himself (in the world of the film, no less) is wearing a fake mustache.  It is a moment so meta that I’m amazed the movie doesn’t collapse in on itself into a point of singularity.

Then there’s Chico, which everybody is always shocked to learn is pronounced “Chick-O”.  Even more astonishingly, that is because the ladies used to throw themselves at him.  He’s an odd character, with an “Eye-tal-yan” accent so preposterous that it goes so far beyond being offensive until it becomes acceptable.  It is simply too ridiculous of a caricature to cause any affront.

Lastly, there’s Harpo, a mute in a fright wig, usually wearing a trench coat from which any number of unlikely objects might be retrieved from its magically bottomless pockets.  Honestly, I was weirded out and even a bit scared of him the first couple of times I tried to watch one of their pictures.  He is exhibit A for silence being intimidating, which is why I suspect most people don’t like mimes. 

Actually, there’s one more “lastly” beyond that lastly, and that is Zeppo.  This poor guy—he didn’t really have any kind of shtick, so he was the straight man.  But since these films usually pit the brothers against everybody else, everybody but the main three are the straight men, rendering him a surplus good.  He bowed out of the group after Duck Soup.

He wasn’t even the best straight man they had, and that person is really a straight woman.  Margaret Dumont is the textbook definition of the “wealthy dowager” stereotype.  She was a great foil for Groucho, who often said the actress was so straight in real life that she never got his jokes.  Not only is that insulting to her intelligence, but that is flat-out wrong.  In the first scene of A Night at the Opera, you can see her trying not to crack up, and it is a beautiful moment.  She is widely, and correctly, regarded as the fifth Marx Brother.

If there is one scene I think would be a great introduction of the uninitiated to their work, it is the stateroom scene here.  The setup is Groucho has been given a very small room on an ocean liner.  Opening his steamer truck, he discovers he has three stowaways.  It would hard enough to get four people, the trunk and the bed in that room, but Groucho gleefully lets anybody and everybody in, until there’s also three waiters with overflowing trays of food, two service men there to fix a pipe, two cleaning women and a woman who asks to use the telephone.  The resulting churning mass of humanity has reduced me to tears of laughter every time I’ve seen it.  I’m smiling just thinking about it as I write.  My favorite moment is when there’s a knock on the door and a woman asks Groucho if he would like a manicure.  With a sarcastic enthusiasm that would be a clear inspiration for Bugs Bunny, he says, “No!  Come on in!”

The Brothers are like a hurricane, often causing havoc in any situation they are remotely proximate to.  At first, I didn’t understand this, and often found them pointlessly harassing innocent bystanders.  Then I apparently had some manner of surgery I can’t remember where the stick was removed from my ass, and I started finding these shenanigans endlessly hilarious.  Really, there’s no good reason for them to swap an orchestra’s operatic score with sheet music for “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”, but I love it that they do.  That Groucho is immediately hawking peanuts to the opera attendees makes a weird kind of sense.

Their work prior to this feature was all chaos, and usually dressed in the thinnest semblance of a plot.  Opera would be the first of their films where they actually are in the assistance of others, and it makes for a more solid viewing experience, though also more conventional.  This time they are helping young star-crossed singers who aspire to become opera stars (Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle, the latter being somebody who really could sing opera).  The two leads are quite bland, but you wouldn’t expect anybody who could possibly upstage the real stars.

Another standard of their movies is a piano scene for Chico and a harp scene for…wait for it…Harpo.  Each has their own fascinating self-taught approach to their respective instruments.  For the longest time, I was tempted to fast-forward through these numbers, but I now find them deeply satisfying.  Chico has a peculiar manner of “shooting” the keys, occasionally pointing a finger like a pistol and striking a key almost faster than the camera can capture.  An even greater joy is Harpo at his instrument.  He is fully in his element, despite his method apparently being completely unorthodox.  In his autobiography, he writes about wanting to learn how to play it correctly, but one master after another he hired told him to not change a thing.

There are many Marx Brothers films I would recommend as a starting point for newcomers, and A Night at the Opera is way up there on that list.  Even then, you may need to see a couple of their films to know whether or not they’re right for you.  I remember when I couldn’t appreciate them, and that just makes me all the more grateful that now I can.

Dir: Sam Wood

Starring The Marx Brothers, Margaret Dumont, Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones

Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray (Side note: a bonus feature on the disc is an Academy Award winning short by Robert Benchley, of Algonquin Roundtable fame. Harpo was also part of that group of wits, treasured because the others wouldn’t stop talking and they were so glad to finally have a listener.)