A Night At The Opera (1935) Director: Sam Wood
“You can’t fool me! There ain’t no Sanity Claus!”
★★★★☆
The Marx Brothers manage to deliver another comedy classic with A Night At The Opera. After spending the first part of their career with Paramount, the studio canceled their contract after the critical and financial failure of Duck Soup (which is ironically now considered their masterpiece). It was then MGM’s golden boy Irving Thalberg who picked up the brothers and signed a deal with MGM. A Night At The Opera was their first MGM production. By this time, Zeppo –the straight man and “unfunny Marx Brother”– had left the team for this film to become a talent agent. Once word of his departure reached MGM, Irving Thalberg immediately asked if three brothers would cost less than four. “Don’t be silly,” responded Groucho. “Without Zeppo we’re worth twice as much.” It was actually Thalberg who refined the brothers’ style, preferring a more structured story rather than the pure anarchy found in the Paramount films. The goal was to paint the Marx Brothers in a more sympathetic light through a reusable formula. He encouraged the brothers to take their gags out on the road to perfect the comedic timing of the bits in this film. In later years, Groucho admitted in his autobiography that Irving Thalberg produced two of the best Marx Brothers films (A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races). A Night at the Opera features many classic Marx Brothers hijinks, and Margaret Dumont returns as another stuffy society lady (as she does in nearly all of the Marx Brothers films) –and there is also the famous “stateroom scene” wherein passengers aboard an oceanliner are all absurdly packed into a Groucho’s room until Margaret Dumont arrives.
In the film, Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho Marx) is the business manager for a wealthy dowager, Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont) who is dissatisfied with his work (a month ago, he promised to elevate her in society, but he has made very little progress). Her husband died three years prior and left her with $8 million. We first meet Otis B. Driftwood when he is an hour late to dinner with Mrs. Claypool, even though he is openly flirting at a nearby table with another woman. He proposes that she become a patron of the opera by investing $200,000. Meanwhile, a lead opera singer named Rosa Castaldi (Kitty Carlisle) falls for a charming young man, Riccardo Baroni (Allan Jones) who is also singer, but not for the opera. A love triangle ensues when the arrogant lead male opera singer, Rudolfo Lassparri (Walter Woolf King) also falls for the same woman, Rosa, and they travel by boat to New York to be a part of the opera with the owner, Mr. Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman). Driftwood comes along aboard the ship were he finds that the remaining Marx Brothers and the lead singer’s lover, Riccardo Baroni, who have all become stowaways in his luggage. This leads to the famous “stateroom scene” (written by legendary gag man Al Boasberg) and a simply charming and extensive musical sequence featuring Chico playing the piano and Harpo playing the harp. When the ship arrives in New York, Chico, Harpo, and Riccardo don fake beards and impersonate the “three greatest aviators” as they are warmly greeted in a public ceremony by the mayor. The group winds up ruining the opera in a hilarious series of disruptions, culminating in Groucho swinging through the New York Metropolitan Opera like Tarzan to the music of Verdi, and Riccardo makes his triumphant introduction to the New York stage alongside his beloved Rosa.
There were many ridiculous gags happening both on and off-set during the making of A Night at the Opera. Producer Irving Thalberg used to frequently be late to his meetings with the brothers. One time, he left them waiting in his secretary’s office for several hours so they pushed the cabinets together boxing Thalberg inside his own office. He never missed appointments with them again, but he frequently would step out for phone calls. In one such instance, Thalberg returned to his office to find the three brothers totally naked roasting potatoes in his office. Also Director, Sam Wood, reportedly a prude, once tried to convince Groucho to read his lines a different way and when he finally did, Wood said “I guess you can’t just make an actor out of clay.” Instantly Groucho responded, “Nor a director out of wood.” During filming, Wood developed an ulcer so he had a glass of milk each morning, and Groucho arranged for it to be delivered in a baby bottle, a little joke Wood apparently never understood. Wood also instilled a $50 fine for being late to the set, Groucho was the first to receive it and the other brothers responded by nailing Wood’s garage closed. It became a game for the brothers, so Wood abandoned the whole idea. Needless to say, A Night at the Opera was a chaotic film both on and off camera.
Some memorable lines from Groucho in A Night at the Opera:
- “When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That’s the price she has to pay.”
- “I saw Mrs. Claypool first. Of course, her mother really saw her first but there’s no point in bringing the Civil War into this.”
- “Ladies and Gentlemen. I guess that takes in most of you. This is the opening of a new opera season, a season made possible by the generous checks of Mrs. Claypool. [Applause] I am sure the familiar strains of Verdi’s music will come back to you tonight, and Mrs. Claypool’s checks will probably come back in the morning. Tonight marks the American debut of Rodolfo Lassparri. [Applause] Senor Lassparri comes from a very famous family. His mother was a well known bass singer. And his father was the first man to stuff spaghetti with bicarbonate of soda, thus causing and curing indigestion at the same time. And now on with the opera. Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlor.”
- Lassparri: “Never in my life have I received such treatment. They threw an apple at me.”
Driftwood: “Well. Watermelons are out of season.” - Driftwood: “It’s all right, that’s in every contract. That’s what they call a sanity clause.”
Fiorello: “You can’t fool me! There ain’t no Sanity Claus!” - Henderson: “I notice the table’s set for four.”
Driftwood: “That’s nothing – my alarm clock is set for eight. That doesn’t prove a thing.”
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Credits:
- Director: Sam Wood
- Screenplay by: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind (with additional dialogue by Al Boasberg)
- Story by: James Kevin McGuinness
- Produced by: Irving Thalberg
- Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad
- Edited by: William LeVanway
- Music by: Herbert Stothart
- Production Company: MGM
- Starring:
- Groucho Marx…..Otis B. Driftwood
- Harpo Marx…..Tomasso
- Chico Marx…..Fiorello
- Kitty Carlisle…..Rosa Castaldi
- Allan Jones…..Ricardo Baroni
- Margaret Dumont…..Mrs. Claypool
- Sig Ruman…..Herman Gottlieb (as Siegfried Rumann)
- Walter Woolf King…..Rodolfo Lassparri
Other Notes:
- The famous “stateroom scene” was written by legendary gag man Al Boasberg. It features numerous random individuals continually piling into Groucho’s tiny oceanliner cabin. A famously eccentric man, writer Al Boasberg apparently typed up the finished scene, then shredded the pages into thin pieces, and tacked them to his ceiling. It took Irving Thalberg and the brothers hours to cut and paste the scene back together. But the Marx Brothers later ad-libbed the whole scene in order to improve it.
- In his autobiography Groucho and Me (1989) Groucho wrote of the Marx Brothers’ thirteen films, “Two were far above average. Some of the others were pretty good. Some were deplorable. The best two were made by Thalberg” –it was a reference to A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.
- Chico was always pronounced “Chick-o” by the brothers because he always chased the “chickens,” or chicks (women).