Driftwood: "Now just, uh, just you put your name right down there and then the deal is, is, uh, legal." Fiorello: "I forgot to tell you. In quintessential Marx fashion, the characters mutually concede the meaninglessness of their own verbal gymnastics by scene's end. You haven't got a baboon in your pocket, have you?") as Driftwood and Fiorello try to out-con each other. The deliriously absurd contract scene lobs one priceless line after another (my favorite: "If my arms were a little longer, I could read it. Harpo Marx plays Tomasso-a dresser fired by Lassparri for wearing all of the costumes (at once)-with his typically magical abandon, mute but otherwise unconfined.īy virtue of an accidental encounter with Fiorello, Driftwood inadvertantly signs Riccardo instead of Lassparri.
Rosa only has eyes for the struggling tenor Riccardo (Allan Jones), whose old school buddy Fiorello (Chico Marx, in his resplendent faux-Italian street dialect) offers to serve as Riccardo's manager. Gottlieb's after Rodolpho Lassparri (Walter Wolf King), a celebrated and hateful Italian tenor with designs on his youthful co-star Rosa (Kitty Carlisle). Driftwood, an opportunist who positions himself between Claypool and New York Opera managing director Herman Gottlieb (Sig Rumann) to field for himself Claypool's investment in the opera. Claypool (Margaret Dumont, Groucho's favorite foil) he's Otis B. Groucho Marx-the lecherous, cigar-chomping shyster in greasepaint eyebrows and moustache-conjures himself in a clever entrance by misdirection, and immediately begins firing on all cylinders with a classic dowager confrontation in a Milan restaurant. One thing is certain: A Night at the Opera is a highly influential, laugh-out-loud film-comedy masterpiece. The result is the Marx Brothers' classiest, most representative-and, some would argue, funniest-feature.
His formula: make the brothers more likeable with careful solicited sympathy, make the comedy funnier by diluting it with more music and romance, and perfect the script by taking it on the road and timing each laugh with a stopwatch. Licking their wounds and watching fourth brother Zeppo retreat from performing, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo hung their shingle at MGM, where Irving Thalberg had a vision for their future success.
In the mid-1930s, the Marx Brothers flopped hard with their Paramount comedy Duck Soup (later named by the American Film Institute the fifth-funniest film ever made). The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection (1933)
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