A Night at the Opera: An overture

A Night at the Opera is a kind of optical illusion, a trick of the light. It's a film that seemed to announce the rebirth of the Marx Brothers as a permanent fixture in the Hollywood firmament yet it contains all the seeds of the precipitous descent that was just around the corner. Everything that went wrong with the Marx Brothers is to be found here. Yet somehow, it all came together this one last time.

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The man who must accept responsibility, both for the excellence of this one film and for laying the foundations of the team's almost instant decline thereafter, is of course Irving Thalberg.

The problems that Thalberg thought he identified with the Paramount films were a) a lack of sympathy in their characterisations verging on nihilism, and b) no serious attention to narrative structure.

The result of these supposed defects, he opined, was that the films were simply assemblies of jokes, joined by meaningless plots that hung between them like string, and because there were no plot arcs or emotional crescendos women did not warm to them.

But with his guidance they could make a film with fewer laughs but more audience appeal. The trick is to have a plot the audience becomes emotionally involved with (which they sort of had in Cocoanuts, and bothered with less and less in each subsequent film), something that the characters are striving for, cute young lovers, production numbers and plenty of MGM wallop.

Within this more solid structure, in strictly measured doses, the Brothers would then be free to carry on as usual, only slightly tamed and constrained by narrative realities and MGM's no absurdity policy.

And that's what happened and Thalberg was proved right, commercially and critically.

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But was he right?

Surely we can all agree that the film is indeed a beauty, but is it a beauty because of Thalberg's tampering or in spite of it?

Look at this way. Everything that he added to the Paramount template is still there in the later MGM features, and everything he took away is still absent. So the fact that Opera is manifestly better than At The Circus cannot be because of the Thalberg factor. The value is in how much was retained this time out, not in how much was substituted, jettisoned or tinkered with.

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I'm not sure any of Thalberg's ideas were good ones per se.

I love the anarchy, haphazard structure, relentlessness of gags and dismissal of Hollywood narrative conventions that he so deplored in their earlier films. I think that the romantic subplot, production gloss and sympathetic elements of Opera work simply because they happen, by sheer chance, to have been done extremely well.

A lazy imitation of the Paramount formula would always be watchable. A lazy imitation of the MGM formula, by contrast, is called Go West, and it's not a pretty sight. As formulae go, loads of jokes and to hell with the plot was always the more fruitful option.
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But Thalberg did two other things that are much more interesting.

First, he allowed the Brothers to tour, and hone the material before a live audience. All the books make much of this, but I always thought it was just me who considered The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, which were audience-tested, notably better than Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, which weren't.

If you think Duck Soup is their funniest film - and most of you do - then you have to ask yourself what the big deal about this tour was. Good material is good material: they also road-tested Go West, remember. In neither case, I suspect, did it make more than a superficial difference.

Where it probably did benefit them this time round was simply in helping them get back a little of their lost confidence, so that by the time they came to shoot they were sure of themselves and back to their full energy. But the main reason why the film is funny (despite the destructive innovations and distancing MGM fluffiness) is because it has a funny script.

And that's the really great thing Thalberg did: he brought back George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind to write it. Despite the disproportionately meagre commendation he receives for this - compared to all the attention that road-testing business gets - this is the single most important reason why A Night at the Opera is the last film of the Marx Brothers' untouchable period, and not the first film in their decline. Thalberg had stacked everything in favour of it being the latter; Kaufman and Ryskind, however, went away and wrote a series of beautiful jokes and sketches. The boys were back at their Broadway best again.

. In the long run, MGM was the worst possible studio at which to strand them. Nowhere understood comedy less. I suppose it's their own fault for not being their own writers. If they had control over their scripts they could have gone somewhere like Universal, who would've been thrilled to have them I'd have thought, and been no more creatively compromised there than WC Fields was.

Thalberg's showier additions probably made less of a difference to Opera's success than he thought, and did much long-term damage, as the format of the film was duplicated, with less and less invention, for subsequent MGM capers. All that glitz and gloss may or may not have brought newcomers to the fold, but surely a bit of glamour and a few nice tunes wouldn't have been enough to convert audiences who had previously had no time at all for the Marxes, while those who did love them would have needed no excuse to welcome them back. At best, Thalberg might have influenced a few fence-sitters with no strong feelings about the team either way to go for the big MGM programme (people went for a full bill of entertainment, don't forget) over what the other cinemas were offering that week. But what made the film a smash was word of mouth once those first audiences had reported back to their families, colleagues and friends. And we can thank the boys and their writers for that, not the set dressers or the director of photography.
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Part of the pleasure, too, must have been in the anticipation of the Marx Brothers taking on the world of MGM, and - far from being submerged into it - being let destructively loose there. This was a deliberate tactic. The very title carries this frisson, a brilliant juxtaposition: The Marx Brothers, promising wildness and chaos, and the deliberately classy, sober-sounding A Night at the Opera. Put the two together, and the result should be combustibility.

We are so familiar with this title now that we forget how clever and exciting it must have sounded, what a masterstroke it is. Their first film in two years, their first at MGM, and their first with a title that means something, and refers to the film itself... it just sounds so enticing, and new.

But had it been Go West or The Big Store audiences would have been right to predict the usual comic castration inflicted on just about every other comedian, however proven their track record, when they entered Leo's den. A Night at the Opera, on the other hand, carries a palpable tingle of anticipation, and that's because of the sense of epic comic collision promised by the combination of the Marx Brothers and opera. For that reason the title has rightly become iconic, and its power, like so much else that is great about the movie, was misunderstood when the formula was repeated. A Day at the Races and At The Circus are similar titles, but they carry no frisson. The Marx Brothers at a race track. So what?

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The only snag with this is that it can lead to the claim, made by Allen Eyles and others, that the film is anti-opera in its attitudes, and that the Brothers are attacking the rarefied, highbrow, non-populist form of art it represents. The fact that they are all for it once Allan Jones is doing the singing is then taken to be a flaw in the structure.

Not at all: it is Eyles's central premise that is wrong. The film dates from a time when opera was still widely popular, and the idea of a higher culture, into which it may prove edifying and pleasurable to dip occasionally, was not deemed oppressive. If there was such a thing as a forbidding high culture, it certainly wouldn't have been Verdi. As with the sniggering that accompanies the Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle solos today, we should resist the temptation to recast the Marx Brothers as cheerleaders for cultural philistinism: they are sophisticates at heart.

Gottlieb is a fraud, and draws the Marxian ire not because he appreciates opera but because he doesn't: he cannot recognise what (we are assured) is the excellence of Ricardo's voice even when he hears it, and is concerned only with reputations, status, and the superficial trappings of the opera world. The Marxes destroy Il Trovatore because Gottlieb and Laspari are not worthy of it. When the right singers are on stage they stand back and enjoy the show.

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Finally, there's the matter of Sam Wood.

He, too, was part of the Thalberg masterplan. After getting them the best screenwriters, Thalberg thought they would need a disciplined taskmaster for a director, to keep the ship securely on course and prevent any repetition of the supposed hi-jinx that had disrupted the Paramount shoots. (These stories were probably apocryphal publicity stories, but Irv was taking no chances.)

Wood was certainly a disciplinarian, but the popular view is that he had no sense of comedy, insisting on multiple retakes that drained the scenes of vitality. (Which scenes were they, then?) He certainly did not hit it off with the brothers: they resented his seriousness and he found their antics undignified. The story goes that, after several takes of a scene in Races, he said dismissively of Groucho, “You can’t make an actor out of clay.” Whereupon the comedian replied “Nor a director out of Wood.”

History has sided with Groucho, concluding that Wood’s many fondly-remembered hit films (among them Goodbye, Mr Chips [1939], Our Town [1940] and For Whom the Bell Tolls [1943]) were foolproof commercial movies that several of his contemporaries could have brought in equally well, and almost certainly with more personality. Gloria Swanson, who worked with him on many silent films, summed him up in her autobiography as “a real estate agent at heart”.
But good professional craftsmanship is hardly undeserving of praise, and there are a number of neglected gems in Wood’s filmography. Paid (1930) and Hold Your Man (1933) are sleazy delights from MGM’s pre-code days, with Joan Crawford running her customary emotional gamut in the former, Clark Gable and Jean Harlow striking sparks in the latter. Jean Arthur was never better than in The Devil and Miss Jones (1941); ditto Joan Fontaine in Ivy (1947), a fine slab of barnstorming melodrama; ditto Don Ameche in Guest Wife (1945), a late but effortless screwball comedy with Claudette Colbert giving the kind of relaxed, funny performance she usually reserved for Capra or Sturges, and hadn't delivered much for anyone since the end of the thirties. Nothing reveals an unsuitable director as cruelly as farce, and, loath as I am to argue with Groucho, Wood's a professional to his fingertips: he knows what to do, he just doesn't get all Leo McCareyish about it. In my book that's for the better.

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Up next: we track the influence of these factors, and identify those five kids up in Canada, in the annotated guide.