BEFORE: I'm back from 2 days in Atlantic City, and ready to carry on with the Marx Brothers films. I had very little luck with the slot machines, and better luck with the buffets, even though that meant going off my diet, undoing about a week's worth of progress (I'm guessing). But hey, stuff you eat on vacation doesn't count, or at least it shouldn't.
This is the second of two Marx Brothers films that somehow stole titles from a couple of rock albums by Queen that were released in the 1970's. (Wait a second, that can't be right...)
THE PLOT: A sly business manager and two wacky friends of two opera singers help them achieve success while humiliating their stuffy and snobbish enemies.
AFTER: This was the first film made under the Marx Brothers contract at MGM, after they left Paramount and Zeppo quit to become a talent agent. When famed producer Irving Thalberg learned that the new contract covered three brothers instead of four, he reportedly asked if this would save him money, and Groucho allegedly quipped, "Are you kidding? Without Zeppo, we're worth twice as much!" That seems like something one of his shyster lawyer characters would say.
The best humor here pokes fun at agents, the kind that sign opera singers (not comedians, but I'm sure the same rules apply) and keep 10% for themselves, of course. Watching Groucho's agent character, Otis P. Driftwood, negotiate with Chico's manager character, tearing the contract to shreds every time there's a clause they can't agree on is a routine I've seen before, but it still holds up. I'd rather watch that kind of humor than see another extended chase scene, this time through the area behind the opera stage. Harpo swinging from ropes, causing random bits of scenery to raise and lower while the opera is going on - well, that got a little tiresome. To me, a long chase scene at the end of a film implies that the screenwriter just gave up at some point.
The other great visual humor here, though, comes when Driftwood books passage on a ship to New York, and opens his giant steamer trunk to reveal some stowaways (you didn't think one character would go on a trip without the others, did you?). This leads to the classic bit where the four leads are joined in a tiny cabin by a couple of maids, some cabin stewards, an engineer, a woman looking for her aunt, forcing Groucho to pick up the phone and say, "Hello, room service? Send up a larger room..."
When the stowaways are caught and thrown in the brig, they escape and disguise themselves as three famous European bearded aviators, and then are forced to speak at a reception in New York, and I found this somewhat less funny. (By that point, wouldn't the real aviators have been found on the ship and untied?) Same with trying to fool the police sergeant by moving beds from room to room - it's comical, sure, but since it's tangential to the plot, it feels sort of non-essential, really just like a time-killer.
Things picked up a bit when the three leads set out to sabotage the big opera performance, but there's just a little too much of hitting singers on the heads with mallets - a time-tested way of knocking people out in movies, but it starts to feel unrealistic after a while. And it's nice to think that you can make an orchestra play "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" just by inserting a sheet of music, but I'm assuming that a group of professional musicians would notice the switch.
But I did like some of the wordplay, which seemed to be largely absent in some of their later films - the best here are lines like: "Could he sail tomorrow?" "You pay him enough money, he could sail yesterday." And when Groucho yells at his carriage driver: "I told you to slow that nag down. On account of you, I almost heard the opera."
Also starring Kitty Carlisle, Allan Jones (last seen in "A Day at the Races"), Margaret Dumont (ditto), Sig Ruman (ditto), Walter Woolf King (last seen in "Go West").
RATING: 4 out of 10 hard-boiled eggs
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