Justin here. So far at The Movie Advocate I’ve written about quite a few of my favorite movies. Today as part of our Favorite Movie series, we’ll be looking at The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera which most days qualifies as my favorite movie of all time.
If I had to pick a platform to advocate movies from it would be this: movies should be escapism. I don’t mean to say that there shouldn’t be social commentary in movies, but rather that when I’m in the movie theater or I’ve put on a movie at home, I don’t want to think about the problems in my life. I want fantasy. I want to be lost in a story. This is why I hated Wall-E. Every time I started getting involved in a cute story about cute robots; I was hit over the head with climate change warnings.
On the opposite end of that spectrum is A Night at the Opera, my ultimate comfort movie. No matter how bad I think things are in my life, for the 90 minutes that Groucho, Harpo, and Chico are on screen, everything is right in the world. The only problem on my mind is how Groucho and co. can reunite star-crossed singers Rosa and Ricardo before it’s too late.
I like to think that it’s not just me. A Night at the Opera came out in 1935 in the depths of the Great Depression. At the time of release, the unemployment rate in the United States was just over 20%. To put that into perspective, at the time of writing this, the current unemployment rate is 9%. Movies have always been a place of refuge and fantasy for weary souls and the lasting legacy of this movie is testament to that sentiment.
The class struggle is palpable in A Night at the Opera. The Marx Brothers are all as poor as sin in this. Groucho’s Otis P. Driftwood in typical picaresque manner is able to use his limited charms to mooch enough off of Margret Dumont’s stuffy aristocratic Mrs. Claypool to keep himself in cigars and not much else.
The most powerful scene in the movie takes place on the deck of the steamer that the brothers use to travel to America. They are surrounded by generic European immigrants who entertain each other with song and dance. Groucho is stuck inside the banquet dining room with Claypool looking bored. On the deck, Ricardo, Chico and Harpo take turns entertaining. This is one of those “magic moments” that we talk about here, to the extent that words don’t really work when trying to describe it. Take a minute and watch it if you haven’t seen it:
Aside from the touching moments this movie has, it is also one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. There are a few main set pieces here, the state room scene, the hotel scene and the caper that closes the movie that are among the funniest pieces of film ever shot. Groucho’s wise cracking is unparalleled here. Harpo is a constant joy to watch as the mischievous bum-mime. Chico’s Italian caricature gets more amusing with each viewing.
There’s somewhat of a rift between Marxists with this movie. Their earlier films, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup with Universal are absolutely relentless. There is virtually no fat on those movies, the jokes come so fast that they demand multiple viewings to keep up. After Duck Soup, the brothers moved to MGM, Night at the Opera was their first movie there and a different approach was taken. Their earliest movies were film versions of their Broadway productions that had been honed over hundreds of performances, paradoxically, this gave those movies a more anarchic quality than their later Universal films which were approached with a more traditional approach. The chaotic magic that method produced had diminished through Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. MGM producer Irving Thalberg let the brothers tour the mid-west rehearsing and refining the big jokes here. Thalberg also pushed the movie into the direction of having more of a plot. That’s why such a substantial amount of time is paid to the love story between Rosa and Ricardo.
The net effect is that there are fewer jokes and comedic situations overall, but the ones that are here are bigger and funnier than the ones in the previous movies. Some Marx Brothers purists argue that the plot heavy parts of the movie bog this one down… they’re probably right to some extent, but they can shove off. This is the best Marx brothers movie and the proof is up on the screen.
Trying to explain the greatness of the Marx Brothers to the uninitiated is like explaining sex to a virgin. If you haven’t seen this or any other Marx Brothers movies, it is your duty as a human being to become acquainted - and this is the best place to start. Life doesn’t seem so bad when the Marx Brothers are on screen. I honestly believe that the world would be a better place if each person who watched Avatar had instead watched A Night at the Opera. Unlike that movie, A Night at the Opera is a movie about the love of life. It’s about how a spaghetti dinner can be more fun than a banquet. It’s about how no one can take away the music that you make. It’s about finding the person who is perfect for you and doing what it takes to be with them. It’s god damn funny and reminds you that sometimes the best thing to do when you’re helpless is to laugh. It has an unbridled hopefulness that things will get better if you follow your heart and are a decent person.