YMMV / A Night at the Opera (1935)

• Awesome Music:
  • Harpo's solo performance of "Alone". A lovely song, and perhaps Harpo's best performance in any of the movies.
  • The Marx Brothers picked exactly the right opera to send up. The plot of Il trovatore makes very little sense anyway (partly due to the librettist chopping out more than half of the story in between acts), but the music can stand up to anything.
• Badass Decay: In a sense that Driftwood being fired from the Opera Company is the first time that Groucho isn't on top of things.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Driftwood's rude, abusive, screwy, cheap and thieving schemes are hilariously despicable...or despicably hilarious! Choose one. Better still, take two and call me in the morning!
• Designated Villain: Lasspari is at least unpleasant enough that the audience wants to see him eat humble pie, but Gottleib is never portrayed as anything but a decent man looking out for his opera and his investors. Sure, he doesn't like Driftwood, thinking him a cheat, a hustler, and a fortune hunter... but Driftwood is all of those things, and he has no particular grudge against Tomasso and Fiorello until they break into his business and start ruining his show and repeatedly injuring his head. On the other side Gottleib was absolutely ok with helping Lasspari ruin Rosa's career because she rejected his advances and only gave Ricardo a chance when he was literally his only hope.
• Genius Bonus: During the contract scene, Driftwood reassures Fiorello that he doesn't have to review Driftwood's copy of the contract because they're duplicates; Fiorello repeats the word "duplicates" uncomprehendingly. Finally Driftwood asks Fiorello if he knows what duplicates are and Fiorello responds, "Sure. Those five kids up in Canada." Contemporary audiences would have recognized this as a reference to the Dionne children, the first recorded set of quintuplets to survive past infancy.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • True, Driftwood is a rude, screwy, cheap, swindler. But it's adorable watching how kind and sweet he is towards Rosa.
  • A real life one: Jerry Stiller chose the movie when he was a guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies and described seeing it on its release at eight years old, and being awestruck at how everyone in the theater who were going through such hard times due to the Great Depression were able to forget their troubles for a short while and share a good laugh, which played a big role in his own decision to go into comedy. Decades later, he was actually able to watch it with Groucho himself, and told him afterward "You made poor people rich."
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Roger Ebert admitted that, while the film "contains some of their best work", he "fast-forward[ed] over the sappy interludes involving Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones."
• Signature Scene: The "sanity clause" scene and the crowded room scene.
• Spiritual Successor: To the earlier Monkey Business, which also put the Marx Brothers on an ocean liner. Additionally, the following Marx Brothers film, A Day at the Races (1937), shares a similar plot but with different characters and scenery (a rest home in need of rescue and a horse race to be won).

---