Movie Review: A Night at the Opera (1935)

A Night at the Opera

Note: This is #9 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

Okay, so I’m going to back peddle a bit on my previous dissing of The Marx Brothers. Unlike Duck Soup, I kind of enjoyed A Night at the Opera.

The plot? It’s mainly a setup for the jokes, but there is some plot there. Suffice to say that Groucho, Chico, and Harpo (no Zeppo by this time) fall in with an opera company on a trip to New York for the last performance of the season. When not causing general mayhem, they aim to help Riccardo, an unappreciated member of the company, pursue his love for Rosa, one of the show’s headliners. This puts them all at odds with the show’s other star, Lassparri, who is your typical blowhard jerk bent on seizing Rosa’s affections himself. Hilarity ensues.

I think what I liked better about A Night at the Opera is that it was more focused and more directed. Instead of random insanity for the sake of a gag, there was a plot, a goal, and clear sets of people to root for, empathize with, and jeer at. The movie was still chock full of absurd jokes and gags, but they’re integrated more into the plot and characters. It felt a lot more natural and flowing, where Duck Soup seemed forced and stilted in too many places.

Two of my favorite scenes were a lengthy contract negotiation between Groucho and Chico that culminated in a groaner of a pun about Santa Claus, and the great, protracted visual gag where the brothers cram person after person –cleaning ladies, manicurists, engineers, a random passenger looking to borrow a phone, four waiters, and several others– into their tiny state room. The funniest part of the movie, though, is the titular night at the opera where the brothers cut loose and do every absurd thing they can think of to sabotage the pompous Lassparri so that they can shut the operation down and unite Rosa and Riccardo. The mayhem his genuinely funny, particularly the part where Harpo starts messing with the stage backdrops so that Lassparri is trying to perform scenes from Il Trovatore against continuously changing and increasingly incongruous backdrops. Sure, this explosion of insanity may lack the subtext of “war IS insane” that the climax of Duck Soup had, but it just worked better.

So, based on my extensive survey of two Marx Brothers films, if you had to pick one to see, I’d recommend A Night at the Opera.

Also this week, Jeremy reviewed Once.

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