A Night at the Opera

A Night at the Opera
November 15, 1935
MGM
Comedy, Musical
VHS
B-

Today's tale:  So the Marx Brothers went to MGM, and "genius" Irving Thalberg said, "Women don't like your movies.  You need more sappy romance, boring songs, and, oh yeah, temporary defeat."  They listened to him and had a hit movie again.  The End.

OK, there's a bit more to it than that, but that's basically the story on how this film came to be, and how, after Thalberg's death, the formula was beat into the ground until we got, well, The Big Store (1941).  At least here they had good writers, not just Marx veterans Kaufman and Riskind, Kalmar and Ruby, but newcomers Robert Pirosh, George Seaton, and Al Boasberg, who would return for A Day at the Races.  I'm not tagging the newbies, because I reached the label limit for this post.  But, yes, Buster Keaton, then down on his luck, also contributed.  The writing, especially Groucho's wisecracks, is amusing some of the time, without the highs or lows of Monkey Business (its nearest equal so far).  Despite the Code, Groucho still gets some suggestive lines, not just the censored-by-individual-states reply to "Otis, do you have everything?" ("I haven't had any complaints yet"), but one about Mrs. Claypool (good ol' Dumont) not yet having  experienced his "services."  There is too much of Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones as the romantic couple, but, hey, they're much better than the pair in The Cocoanuts.  (Or the one in Roberta for that matter.)  And, yes, the songs, not just the opera, are boring, but I like Chico at the piano (an instrumental of the "All I Do Is Dream of You" song Debbie Reynolds sings in Singing in the Rain) and Harpo at the, yeah, harp (sounding a bit proto-Pet Sounds, believe it or not).

Alex Chivra and Frances Maran were in Flying Down to Rio.  Stanley Blystone, the television operator in Phantom Empire, is a ship's officer here.  A couple of the Fields folk appear, George Irving and Jerry Mandy.  Mario Dominici and Leo Sulky were in Duck Soup.  Edmund Mortimer was in both FDtR and Soup.  Allan Jones, Sig Ruman, and extras Edna Bennett, Ruth Cherrington, Field Norton, and Phillips Smalley would be back in A Day at the Races, while villain Walter King would return in Go West.  Lorraine Bridges would be in Wizard of Oz, Bruce Sidney in Citizen Kane, and Al Bridge in Miracle in Morgan's Creek.  Art Howard and Edward Keane went on to It's a Wonderful Life.  Kitty Carlisle would appear as a singer more than fifty years later in Radio Days.