A Night at the Opera

Three hard-boiled eggs at sea, then a lesson in art. (The Three Stooges are concurrent with Pop Goes the Easel.) Groucho as Otis B. Driftwood, at the Italian restaurant with his back to the opera patroness (Margaret Dumont). "When I dine with a woman, I expect her to look at my face. That's the price she has to pay." Legalese is written to be shredded, Fiorello (Chico) demonstrates with the contract for the aspiring singer (Allan Jones). The Pagliacci costume suits Tomasso (Harpo), the tenor twit (Walter Woolf King) forces him out of it but that's okay, underneath there's a naval uniform and a frilly ingénue's gown. "You haven't got a baboon in your pocket, have you?" The Marx Brothers at MGM, their nihilism somewhat diluted by luxury and romance and songs, their anarchism somewhat hemmed in by Sam Wood's rigors. Even with their edges sanded off and forced to play Cupid to Kitty Carlisle and a Zeppo replacement, their comic upheaval captivates. The famous conference in the ocean liner storeroom ("Come on in, and leave all hope behind") is a vaudeville Brueghel canvas, the floating party for stowaways and immigrant gives way to a slanted detention cabin and a geysering Keaton porthole (cf. The Navigator). "Half-goat" Harpo helps himself to Groucho's stogie and Chico's tie for his breakfast sandwich, the mystery of rearranged beds and furniture in the hotel room ends on an image for Beckett's Happy Days. "What will you give me to set fire to your beard?" Premiere night, a grand piss on aestheticism—violin meets baseball, a page of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" sneaked into the Verdi libretto, rotating backdrops for "a battleship in Il Trovatore!" Citizen Kane registers the debt to Clair's Le Million. With Sig Ruman, Edward Keane, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Billy Gilbert, and Purnell Pratt. In black and white.