Trivia / A Night at the Opera (1935)

• The Cast Showoff:
  • The scene on the boat where Chico plays the piano? That's not dubbed in. He was actually that good. (In the vaudeville days, he used to play the piano blindfolded.)
  • Kitty Carlisle had previously sung opera onstage for real, and Allan Jones, while not classically trained, was a genuinely talented singing star of the day. And of course, Harpo playing the harp.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Groucho Marx named this as the best film The Marx Brothers made.
• Deleted Scene: In Leonard Maltin's commentary on the current DVD release, he states that there was a longer opening sequence. Starting with a title card that places the movie in Milan, Italy, there was then a musical number in which people on the street were "passing along" the melody line of a song, as in the Maurice Chevalier vehicle Love Me Tonight (1932). The song was followed into the restaurant where Mrs. Claypool was waiting for Otis B. Driftwood. Maltin says the scene was cut during World War II to remove references to Italy, and unfortunately, the main negative was cut as well, so the scene is now lost. This was why the stated running time of the movie was three minutes longer than it is now.
• Distanced from Current Events: When the film was rereleased during World War II, several lines mentioning Italy were deleted from almost all surviving prints, leaving them unheard for several decades until a print with the offending material intact was discovered in Hungary in 2008.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: As usual, a few examples of this, such as the breakfast sketch in Groucho's apartment.
• Hostility on the Set: Groucho did not get along with director Sam Wood, calling him a "fascist" in a subsequent interview. One account states that at one point the two of them resorted to trading barbs on set:
  Wood: "You can't make an actor out of clay!"
  Groucho: "Nor a director out of Wood!"
• Missing Episode: An additional scene was cut from the picture in subsequent releases, and is now considered lost. The scene occurred just after the scene in the park when Rosa tells her friends she has been fired from the opera. The Marx Brothers, Rosa, and Ricardo hop on a passing fire engine, which takes them to the opera house. After lighting his cigar in the fire engine's smokestack, Groucho comments, "This is the first car I've ever been in where the cigarette lighter actually works!"
• No Stunt Double: Harpo did many of his own stunts. He later said it was a silly thing for a 47-year-old non-stuntman to have done. Also, because of Sam Woods' perfectionism, the scene in which Tomasso hangs from the rope was filmed so many times that Harpo's hands became cut and swollen from the rope.
• Non-Singing Voice: Walter Woolf King was a trained baritone but he portrayed a tenor in the film. His singing was dubbed by Metropolitan Opera tenor Tandy MacKenzie.
• Reality Subtext:
  • A few jokes and references to the ongoing Depression. Probably the most serious one is when, towards the end of the film, Groucho goes up in the elevator to his office—met with friendly or sycophantic reactions by the opera staff and the elevator attendant—only to find he's been fired, and then they all immediately turn on him.
  • They're not above using it as material, either.
    Mrs. Claypool: Six months ago you said you'd introduce me into society, and in all that time you've done nothing except draw a very handsome salary.
    Driftwood: You call that nothing? How many men do you think are drawing a handsome salary these days?
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film's first screenwriter was James Kevin McGuinness who concocted a plot based on Harpo Marx being the world's greatest tenor, who never sings or speaks throughout the film. Irving Thalberg rejected the idea, however, and McGuinness became the first in a long string of screenwriters to be dismissed from the film.
  • A rejected plot for the film circulated for more than three decades as a Broadway legend and popular backstage tale. The plot featured Groucho as a producer plotting to stage the worst opera in history so that the show would close quickly. The backers he had soaked for ten times the production costs would assume they had lost their money, and Groucho could escape to South America with the sizable profits. But his plans are thwarted when the opera becomes a huge hit and he is left owing ten times what the show actually brings in. Groucho loved the idea, but producer Irving Thalberg nixed it. He explained that he didn't want a funny story but a good, simple plot that the Marx Brothers could use as a springboard for their comic ideas. The basis of the plot floated around both Hollywood and Broadway for many years, before Mel Brooks filmed a version of the plot with The Producers. It is unclear which of the myriad writers for this film was responsible for suggesting the now-famous bogus play idea.

---