A Night at the Opera is a 1935 American comedy film starring the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo and Chico), and featuring Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones, Margaret Dumont, Sig Ruman, and Walter Woolf King.
It was the first of five films the Marx Brothers made under contract for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after their departure from Paramount Pictures, and the first after Zeppo left the act. The film was written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind from a story by James Kevin McGuinness, with additional uncredited dialogue by Al Boasberg. The film was directed by Sam Wood.
One of MGM's biggest hits at the 1935 box office, A Night at the Opera was selected in 1993 for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"."List of National Film Registry (1988-2003)". . It is also included in the 2007 update of AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, at number 85; and previously in AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs 2000 showing, at number 12.
Plot
At a restaurant in Milan, Italy, wealthy widow Mrs. Claypool has apparently been stood up for dinner by Otis B. Driftwood, her business manager. After she discovers him seated directly behind her and dining with another woman, Driftwood joins Mrs. Claypool and soon introduces her to Herman Gottlieb, director of the New York Opera Company, also dining at the restaurant. Driftwood has arranged for Mrs. Claypool to invest $200,000 in the opera company, allowing Gottlieb enough money to engage the famous Italian tenor Rodolfo Lassparri, "the greatest tenor since Caruso".
Backstage at the opera house, chorister Ricardo Baroni hires his best friend Fiorello to be his manager. Ricardo is in love with the soprano, Rosa Castaldi, who is also being courted by Lassparri. Driftwood arrives backstage and finds Lassparri attacking Tomasso, his dresser; Tomasso knocks Lassparri unconscious by hitting him over the head with a mallet. Fiorello appears and introduces himself to Driftwood as the manager of the "greatest tenor in the world". Driftwood believes Fiorello is referring to Lassparri (who is still lying unconscious at their feet) and unwittingly signs Ricardo to a contract.
Soon, Driftwood, Mrs. Claypool, Rosa, Lassparri and Gottlieb all set sail from Italy to New York aboard an ocean liner. After bidding farewell to Rosa at the pier, Ricardo, Fiorello, and Tomasso stow away inside Driftwood's steamer trunk. Discovering the three in his trunk, he asks them to leave before Mrs. Claypool arrives for a rendezvous. Fiorello refuses to leave until the trio have eaten and eventually Driftwood's very small stateroom is crowded with an assortment of people (see Stateroom scene below).
Later, Lassparri spots the three stowaways among the Italian immigrants on the ship, and they are caught and thrown into the brig. They escape with Driftwood's help and are able to sneak into the country by posing as three famous bearded aviators,The nationality of the aviators is never identified. In The Annotated Marx Brothers: A Filmgoer's Guide to In-Jokes, Obscure References and Sly Details (2015, McFarland, ), Matthew Coniam points out that the omission seems to have been intentional, in order to avoid an obvious lampoon of the Italian fascist aviator Italo Balbo, and that in the newspaper caption that follows they are identified as the "Santopoulos Brothers", suggesting that they may be Greek. (pp. 124–125) who are traveling aboard the ship. During a hero's welcome in New York, the stowaways are exposed as frauds and they flee, hiding out in Driftwood's hotel room while pursued by police sergeant Henderson.
Meanwhile, Rosa and Ricardo are reunited when he climbs through the window of her hotel room. Lassparri appears, and after a physical altercation with Ricardo, both Rosa and Driftwood are fired from the opera company by Gottlieb. Driftwood, Fiorello, and Tomasso decide to seek revenge by sabotaging the opera company's opening night performance of Il trovatore with various antics, climaxing with the abduction of Lassparri from the stage, forcing Gottlieb to substitute Ricardo in his place. Ricardo accepts on the condition Rosa substitutes for the female lead as well. Mrs. Claypool and the audience clearly prefer Ricardo over Lassparri, and the latter is booed and hit with an apple after he is untied and attempts to return to the stage. The film ends with Driftwood and Fiorello negotiating another contract as Rosa and Ricardo sing an encore.
Cast
Selected sequences
Stateroom This scene was written primarily by legendary gag man Al Boasberg. Famously eccentric, Boasberg 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.
Driftwood plans a rendezvous with Mrs. Claypool in his stateroom. Then he finds out how small it is (a third class cabin, about the size of a janitor's closet), and that he, his steamer trunk, and the bed barely fit in it. Driftwood discovers that Fiorello, Tomasso, and Ricardo have stowed away in his steamer trunk and discarded his clothes. Fiorello insists on eating ("We getta food or we don't go"). Driftwood calls a steward ("I say, Stew") and orders dinner.
This continues until Fiorello and Tomasso each have ordered about a dozen hard-boiled eggs and Driftwood has ordered about everything else – including coffee to sober up some stewed prunes. This sets up the "stateroom scene", in which a total of 15 people crowd into Driftwood's tiny cabin.
The three stowaways have to hide out in the room while a parade of people walk in, asking to either use the cabin, or to perform their regular duties. Crammed into this little space at the end of the scene are Driftwood, Fiorello, Tomasso, Ricardo, two cleaning ladies who make up the bed, a manicurist (Manicurist: "Do you want your nails long or short?" Driftwood: "You better make them short, it's getting kind of crowded in here!"), a ship's engineer and his portly assistant, a young woman passenger using the phone to call her Aunt Minnie, a maid (Maid: "I come to mop up." Driftwood: "You'll have to start on the ceiling.") and four waiters with trays of hard-boiled eggs. (Driftwood: "Tell Aunt Minnie to send up a bigger room.") All of the foregoing tumble out into the hallway when Mrs. Claypool opens the door.
Contract The contract scene between Driftwood and Fiorello ("the party of the first part ..."):
Opera True to its title, the film includes adaptations of some real opera scenes from Pagliacci and Il trovatore, featuring the Miserere duet sung by Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones. The opera setting also allowed MGM to add big production song numbers (which were one of this studio's specialties), such as the song "Alone", with the departure of the steamship, and the song "Cosi Cosa" with the Italian buffet and dancing.
Carlisle and Jones were both trained in operatic singing and provided their own singing voices in the film. Walter Woolf King was a trained baritone, but he portrayed a tenor in the film. His singing was dubbed by Hawaiian Metropolitan Opera tenor .
Hidden material In the scene where the three stowaways are impersonating "the three greatest aviators in the world", Driftwood seems to talk gibberish with the dignitaries. Actually it is English; if played backwards, it can be heard what they are saying ("This man is accusing you of being impostors", etc.). It was recorded normally, then reversed and dubbed over the scene in post-production.
Musical numbers "Alone" (Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed) "Santa Lucia" "Garibaldi Hymn" "All I Do Is Dream of You" "Cosi-Cosa" (Bronisław Kaper and Walter Jurmann) "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" "Stridono lassù" (from Pagliacci) Prelude to Il trovatore "Anvil Chorus" (from Il trovatore) "Stride la vampa" (from Il trovatore) "Di quella pira" (from Il trovatore) "Miserere", (From Il trovatore)
Production In an interview with Richard J. Anobile in The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, Groucho said he was so appalled by an early draft of the script—which was apparently written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby—that he shouted, "Why fuck around with second-rate talent, get Kaufman and Ryskind [to write the screenplay]!"
At the suggestion of producer Irving Thalberg, the film marked a change of direction in the brothers' career. In their Paramount films, the brothers' characters were much more anarchic: they attacked almost anybody who was so unfortunate as to cross their paths whether they deserved it or not, albeit comically. Thalberg, however, felt that this made the brothers unsympathetic, particularly to female filmgoers. So in the MGM films, the brothers were recast as more helpful characters, saving most of their comic attacks for the villains.
Though some Marx Brothers fans disliked these changes, Thalberg was vindicated when the film became a solid hit. It helped that the film contained some of what fans consider to be among the brothers' funniest and most memorable routines. These routines were carefully honed in a series of live stage performances, as the brothers took to the road and performed the new material around the country before filming began.
However, according to Oscar Levant, the first preview of the finished film in Long Beach was a "disaster", with "hardly a laugh" as was the second. Thalberg and George S. Kaufman spent days in the editing room, adjusting the timing to match the rhythm of a stage performance. About nine minutes was cut from the running time, and the result was a hit.
Subsequent re-editing The film originally was to have begun with each of the Marx Brothers taking turns roaring instead of Leo the Lion (MGM's iconic mascot); Harpo was to have honked his horn. This unique opening was created, but not used in the released film because MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer felt the parody would cheapen the respected trademark. It turned up years later, however, in a re-release trailer for the film."A Night at the Opera, trivia". IMDb.
According to MGM's dialogue cutting continuity and Leonard Maltin's audio commentary on the DVD release, the film originally began (after the opening credits) with the image of a "boat on canal". A superimposed title read, "Italy – Where They Sing All Day and Go to the Opera at Night", and was followed by a musical number featuring bits and pieces from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci performed by "everyday" Italians: a street sweeper sings part of the prologue ("Un nido di memorie...") as he greets a man who then hands out opera tickets to a group of children emerging from a store; the children respond with "la-la-la-la-la, verso un paese strano" (from "Stridono lassù"); a "captain" comes down a set of steps, salutes a sentry, then bursts into "Vesti la giubba"; then, a lap dissolve into a hotel lobby, where a "baggage man" is rolling a trunk and crooning about "nettare divino" ("divine nectar"); a waiter joins the baggage man in song, enters the dining room, and sings as he serves a man who for a few notes also sings; the waiter then crosses the dining room to speak to Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont), marking the beginning of the film in existing copies.
In his commentary, Maltin repeats an assertion originally made by Glenn Mitchell in The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia that the scene was cut during World War II to remove references to Italy. However, according to MPAA records, the film was re-edited by MGM in 1938, prior to the war, because of complaints from the Italian government that it "made fun of Italian people". Unfortunately, the edits were made to MGM's master negative, and no prints of the original uncut version are known to survive. This notable cut, with several other small ones made at about the same time, is why the stated running time of the film (95 minutes) was three minutes longer than that of existing prints.