A Night at the Opera (1935)

A Night at the Opera arrives from 1935, a year when the Marx Brothers were still permitted to be funny without a moral stapled to the proceedings. The plot concerns a wealthy widow, a fraudulent business manager, two young opera singers in love, and a pompous tenor who thoroughly deserves his comeuppance. The brothers sabotage an opening night of Il trovatore. That is the entire ethical program. Nobody learns anything. Nobody grows.

The film's targets are opera snobs, stuffed shirts, and the self-important. This is class resentment of a very old and very unserious kind, aimed at manners and pomposity, not at capital or its structures. The Italian characters exist as comic texture, played by white actors with broad accents, and the film has no thought to spare for what that might mean. Harpo's silence is a clown's silence, honed on the vaudeville circuit, not a statement about anything. A cross-dressing beat or two surfaces in the farcical machinery, present because disguise is funny, and for no other reason. There is no climate to speak of, no bodies to celebrate, no history to revise, and no sermon waiting at the end.

To watch it now is to observe a cultural artifact from a moment before the modern vocabulary of social instruction existed. The stateroom scene packs fifteen people into a closet and asks nothing of us but laughter. The contract scene turns a sanity clause into a punchline. This is comedy as pure verbal and physical assault, and it has no interest in our improvement. We classify it accordingly, with the sober recognition that some films simply predate the assignment.