Marrying the Marx brothers’ nonsensical knockabout with the highfalutin opera scenery, Sam Wood’s A NIGHT AT THE OPERA is an earnest bid to gratify both audience’s eyes and ears, while the narrative is largely inconsequential, ceding its primacy to various skits of the brothers’ trademark drollness and virtuosity.
Off the top of this reviewer’s head (or frankly any viewer’s), the most memorable set piece is the cockamamie 15-people-crammed-inside-a-pokey-stateroom lunacy that flat throws any vestigial concern about logic into the oblivion, typifies the brothers’ comic style and mass appeal that espouses a “the more the merrier” tenet and unlike antecedents like Chaplin or Keaton, trenchant social or political commentary can find no room in the brothers’ schticks, even if political schism is alluded to during the 3 impersonating aviators’ public address, the moniker of that elephant-in-the-room is eschewed entirely.
Among the three brothers (the film is their first movie made in MGM and without a fourth brother Zeppo), Groucho plays a caddish (Dumont, as a minted New York dowager, takes the short end of the stick with profuse poise and grievance) and pesky business manager of and proves that infallible adage - empty vessel makes the most noise, and his painted mustache becomes a requisite distraction from his witticism-lite rodomontade; Chico comports himself comparatively better, although as a general rule, to see middle-age men act like petulant, puerile beings is something not everyone can suffer gladly, but credit when credit is due, Chico and Groucho’s two-hander of signing a contract is a total gas; and Harpo, in a wordless, buffoonish role, who has the privilege to show off his unassuming sleight of hand with musical instruments and threads through an awesome scrim-scaling caper in the climatic opera of IL TROVATORE (during which Ruman also does a Sisyphean job as the ponderous antagonist, huffing and puffing in vain), emerges as the real deal as Yours Truly sees it.
A threadbare romance between soprano Rosa (Carlisle) and Ricardo (Jones), an unknown tenor, has little to savor apart from their sonic contribution, but the overall auditory impression is muted and inarticulate, hurt for an overhaul from the able hands of film restorers. That said, still a fairly impressive vintage comedy from the top-drawer assembly line of the escapism mill.
referential entries: Ernst Lubitsch’s ONE HOUR WITH YOU (1932, 7.1/10); Arthur Lubin’s HOLD THAT GHOST (1941, 7.1/10); Sam Wood’s THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES (1941, 7.2/10).
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