Night at the Opera(1935), a musical comedy, is the sixth of thirteen Marx Brothers feature films. *A Night at the Opera is universally considered to be the Marx Brothers’ best and most popular film, and it received critical acclaim when released. The film also proved to be a tremendous financial success as the Comedy Sequences, Musical Numbers and the Plot Line(a love story) are upto very high Standards.
In homage to this film, the mid-70s raunchy, mock opera rock band Queen, with lead singer Freddie Mercury, named its fourth album after this film. [They also named their next album after another Marx Bros. film, A Day at the Races.]
The Screensplay of this Movie was written bu Geoge s .Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. Morrie Ryskind worked with Marx Brothers on The Cocoanuts(1929) and Animal Crackers(1930)
The Plot of this movie can be called as Less anarchic, Slapstick Comedy and Solidly believable.
Of course, this film again featured the three major members of the comedy team:
Groucho, a chattering swindler with thick eyebrows and mustache, and a moving cigar in his mouth Chico, the Italian piano player and rip-off scam-artist, and Harpo, the harp-playing, mute girl-chaser
The material was, in part, auditioned and pre-tested before live audiences during a road-show tour. As a result, the revised film script was more than just a number of improvised sketches patched together.
Rather, it consisted of many well refined, polished scenes of classic romantic comedy and dialogue, flowing together smoothly with the story and the characters of the brothers, and timed to take into account reaction time for laughs.
It was designed to appeal to female audiences, with less zany, surrealistic, and uninhibited behavior exhibited by the brothers.
The most famous of the comedy team’s routines are included here –
the crowded shipboard stateroom scene, the contract-tearing scene between Groucho and Chico, the rearranged furniture and bed-switching sequence to elude a private detective, the operatic finale(a lavish production number) with Harpo swinging Tarzan ape-like on stage flyropes in tune to Verdi’s music, and sprinkled throughout - Groucho’s zippy one-line insults and flirtations with his perennial nemesis - Margaret Dumont.