A Night At The Opera (1935)

 A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)

By Ralph Santini - ****

                Hysterically funny and fancifully witty, the Marx Bros. satirical farce “A Night at the Opera” is greatly their finest of all film comedies. Directed by Sam Wood with terrific humor, the film’s storyline is centered on an incompetent stage music manager Otis P. Driftwood (isn’t that a funny name?) who can dodge anything payment related including an expensive hotel bill and team up with two equally crackpot (but good natured) boys to bring a mere chorus boy, Ricardo (Allan Jones) to show business. However Driftwood’s cold and prejudiced, no-nonsense boss, Mr. Gottlieb (the always dastardly wonderful Sig Rumann) ignores their offer by becoming a lot more interested with a more well-known but hot-headed tenor Lasparri (Walter Woolf King) who is also madly in love with his beautiful soprano colleague Rosa (Kitty Carlisle) but she hates him with a passion and would rather hook up with Ricardo.

                All of this premise would lead us to a great number of misadventures, particularly on a cruiser, where Otis happens to bring the two other Marx bros., Chico and Harpo playing respectably playing Fiorello and Tomaso, and Ricardo on a trunk because they are stowaways so Otis implores them to hide themselves more carefully but Fiorello insists that he and his friends are hungry so they escape Otis’ room and they find a place where they have some spaghetti dinner but unfortunately they are snitched by Lasparri to the cruiser officers and they are imprisoned to the Brig. However they manage to escape, and when they arrive from Italy to the United States (specifically, New York City)  they manage to escape even by disguising themselves as three long-bearded air force veterans and they do their best to avoid the speech prepared for the real ones.

                This is among many hilarious moments in this memorable comedy classic, along with one great one-liner scene where Driftwood first tries to give food to Fiorello, Tomasso and Ricardo in the first place and every time Otis asks for certain entries from the cruiser menu, Fiorello repeats his remarkable one-liner “and two hard-boiled eggs”. It is easily among one of the finest jokes in the history of American film comedies. Another equally hysterical scene is when after Otis and his two other crazed friends and Ricardo are all wanted for shady travelling, a tough police officer wants to arrest them in his apartment for the aforementioned crime but the stubborn businessman wants to insist that no-one else is in his room and every time the cop sees multiple beds disappear he gets a lot of wacky bamboozlement from our heroes.

                One more memorable scene in this comedy masterpiece is a seminal physical comedy take where our heroes are chased by Gottlieb and the police during the iconic classical music piece “The Anvil Chrous” from “Il Trovadore” the opera where Lasparri was supposed to star in. This scene is often copied but never equaled and that’s why “A Night at the Opera” is a prime example of comedic filmmaking. The Marx Bros. have never been better, their fabulous co-hort Margaret Dumont is simply astonishing as the conservative businesswoman who distrusts Otis’ affection for her, Ruman is superb as Otis’ pompously rigid, antagonistic boss, Gottlieb, and Jones and Carlisle sing marvelously together. Sam Wood’s direction seems to have good touch of comedy for this gem and George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s absolutely wonderful screenplay has tremendously hilarious one-liners that include Groucho Marx’s iconic line "The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part."