#DUCK SOUP MARX BROTHERS STREAM MOVIE#
The best that could be said about A Night At The Opera-and this is no small achievement, because the movie is very good, if not quite up to its vaunted reputation-is that Groucho, Chico, and Harpo squeeze in all the inspired antics the story will allow. The gambit worked in the short term, but crippled them in the long run. In other words, they would act as supporting characters in their own movie, but get billed as the Main Event. His solution? To craft a story that would have the brothers helping other people-beautiful, talented MGM people-achieve happiness and success. Thalberg’s theory was that Groucho, Chico, and Harpo’s assault on propriety in all its forms-“Whatever it is, I’m against it,” goes one of my favorite Groucho songs-was a turn-off to audiences, who yearn for more sympathetic characters. Thalberg more than resurrected the Marx brothers after they were left for dead he brought them to MGM, the classiest of the major studios, home to a stable of big stars and production values that dwarfed what the troupe got at Paramount. The Marx brothers were the Marx brothers: That wasn’t going to change, so the movies had to change around them.Įnter Irving Thalberg, “The Boy Wonder,” who rose to head of production at MGM in the mid-20s, married the glamorous Norma Shearer shortly thereafter, and died of pneumonia in the middle of producing A Day At The Races at age 37. They weren’t writers or directors, and they weren’t character actors, either. The anarchy that so delighted audiences annually from 1929 to 1932-starting with The Cocoanuts and continuing with Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers-had unaccountably soured, and it didn’t seem likely that the vaudevillian mischief-makers could transition into doing another schtick onscreen. (It’s my favorite comedy of all time, and one of my five favorite movies, period.) It was tepidly received at the time, attacked for its politics and poor timing in a period of national and global upheaval, and the brothers went their separate ways, with Chico and Groucho retreating to radio and Harpo performing in the Soviet Union after the revolution. Two years earlier, the Marx brothers completed their wondrous five-year run at Paramount Pictures with Duck Soup, but only history would later judge it a triumph.
Then again, at least it was the beginning of something. It was also the beginning of the end for the Marx brothers. A Night At The Opera was a huge critical and commercial hit, and no less reputable a source than Groucho himself considered it and its follow-up, A Day At The Races, the best films they ever did. It contains a few of the Marx brothers’ most celebrated sequences, like the brilliant stateroom scene, which piles 15 people and a steamer trunk into the smallest cabin on a transatlantic ship, and Groucho and Chico’s contract negotiation, a masterpiece of tangled legalese and ripped clauses. (Incidentally, the other three, along with such stone-cold classics as The Lady Eve and It’s A Gift, rank below Arthur, so take that with several grains of salt.) It was selected for preservation in the fourth year of the National Film Registry, in the same wave that included the screwball standards It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday. 5), among the five Marx brothers movies on the list. On AFI’s list of the 100 funniest comedies of all time, 1935’s A Night At The Opera ranks 12th, second only to its predecessor, 1933’s Duck Soup ( No.
“Whatever it is, I’m against it.” -Groucho Marx, Horse Feathers
0 kommentar(er)
