MovieMonday: A Night at the Opera

I watched this Marx Brothers movie for two reasons.  First, I wanted to see its hilarious stateroom scene (below.)  Second, I needed some laughs. 

The movie's very light plot opens in Italy and is held together by a story of frustrated love and opera.  A famous tenor, Rodolfo (Walter Woolf King) pursues a beautiful soprano, Rosa (Kitty Carlisle,) who loves another another tenor, Riccardo (Allan Jones,) whose fame and wealth are less. 

Around the edges we have Otis B. Driftwood (Groucho) alternately courting and insulting a rich widow named Mrs. Claypool (Margaret Dumont, of course) and encouraging her to donate money to his employer's organization, the New York Opera.  The pompous employer, for his part, wants the money to sign big-name Rodolfo (now clad in a Pagliacci clown costume, haha) to perform in America. 

The opera leader gets his money and hires the Famous Tenor and Rosa.  The other two scamps, Fiorello (Chico) and Tomasso (Harpo) arrive to rep the not-hired Riccardo and to act wacky, respectively and together.

The next morning the Famous Tenor, the soprano, Mrs. Claypool, the opera leader and Driftwood board a steamer headed for New York.  The Lesser Tenor, Chico and Harpo stow away in Driftwood's steamer trunk, and the crowding of Driftwood's tiny stateroom ensues shortly afterward.  Always a fun watch.

It's easy to see where the story is going, of course, but it includes many diversions: Groucho and Chico discussing and shredding contracts, Chico and Harpo amusing the steerage passengers with piano and harp performances, the three castaways passing themselves off as bearded aviators to debark the ship and then finding themselves being feted, falsely, by the mayor of New York and exposed as frauds by the NYPD.  The inventiveness of the story is impressive and always in the pursuit of broad humor. 

The tour de force comes in the film's final act when the Famous Tenor opens in a performance of Rigoletto for a black-tie-clad New York audience.  Chico and Harpo sabotage the enterprise in various ways:  Chico's violin bow -- baton duel with the orchestra conductor,  the orchestral diversion from the overture music to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," Chico and Harpo darting on and offstage during the "Anvil Chorus" while being chased by cops in opera costumes and, finally, Harpo's swinging like Tarzan on the backstage ropes and tearing up the scenery. 

Quite a production.  The viewer may not laugh at every moment -- and particularly the Groucho badinage, which has not aged well -- but distractions aplenty are on offer from beginning to end.

What more can be wished in a moment like this?


Notes

This film was one of the last produced by Irving Thalberg, the most lauded figure in film from 1921 until his early death in 1936 at the age of 37.

In preparation for A Night at the Opera, Thalberg urged the Marx Brothers, who got their comedy start in in vaudeville in 1905, to take many of the movie's set pieces on the road in live performances, which must have sharpened the timing and delivery.

In fact, the first two Marx Brothers movies were adapted from stage shows.  Their wordy dialog appealed in the early years of talkies, and their skewering of snotty elites also resonated during the Depression.

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The Marx Brothers' stock in trade was making fun of snooty upper-crusters, but in this show they come to the aid of impoverished opera singers, if not of opera audiences attired in evening clothes.  We associate opera with high-brow art now, but that may not have been so true in the last century.

In 1943, eight years after this movie was released, the New York City Opera was founded to provide an affordable alternative to the traditional Metropolitan Opera.  It was dubbed "the people's opera" by Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor at the time.

Over time, new genres competed for music audiences:  swing, jazz, rock, country, hip-hop and, always, pop.   The New York City Opera went bankrupt 2013.

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MovieMonday: Modern Times

None of the movies this weekend interested me (see below), and so I went to the local art house and saw "Modern Times."  Filmed in 1936, it is Charlie Chaplin's last silent movie and it is still fun to watch.  

Chaplin wrote and directed the piece, in which he plays his traditional Little Tramp character. His physical humor is on display throughout, from his characteristic splay-footed, tottering stride to the scene above, in which he roller-skates, blindfolded and blithely, around a floor with a big drop and no railing.  It would be simple now to create such a scene with clever photography, but it was not so simple 81 years ago when film was literal and actors performed their own stunts.  

(Yes, a smart set manager might have increased the apparent distance of the drop. Even so, Chaplin's skating is impressive.)

The two themes of "Modern Times" are factory innovation and survival during the Great Depression. The movie begins begins with Chaplin working on an assembly line and occasionally getting run through the machinery in a big factory.  The boss of the place bellows at workers from a screen in the odd moments when he is not working a jigsaw puzzle or reading the funny pages.  (CEOs were not popular in those days either.)

The hapless tramp loses his job and ends up in jail, then distinguishes himself assisting law enforcement and earns a comfy sinecure.  To his chagrin, he is released from jail and must find another job or, as it turns out, several of them.  

He meets up with a barefoot orphan, played by Paulette Godard.  She too is carted off to the hoosegow, in her case after stealing a loaf of bread, a clear Chaplin homage to the Victor Hugo novel, "Les Miserables."

Chaplin and Godard watch their luck rise and fall in the uncertain world of the times.  Every scene is a set piece for multiple humorous riffs. The audience in my theater laughed often and loudly.  The movie doesn't have much in the way of a resolution, but neither did the Great Depression in the mid 1930s.  Its two characters just keep trying; they are survivors.

This was the first time I had seen "Modern Times." What struck me was how many of its moments have been seen in other entertainments, including two scenes clearly inspired by "Horse Feathers," the 1932 Marx Brothers movie. The assembly line scene that opens "Modern Times" was rejiggered to good effect in the classic 1952 television episode where Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz work in the chocolate factory.  

There is even a scene in which a fellow jail inmate gets rid of "smuggled nose powder," and the Little Tramp ingests the stuff, unknowingly and with amusing results.  I hadn't known that cocaine jokes were a thing that long ago; I was surprised last year by what I considered a dated cocaine reference in a contemporary movie.

You don't have to go to a theater to see "Modern Times" these days, but if you get a chance, I say, do it.


Movies Today

The Idiosyncratist is now in Nashville, a city with a broad arts scene and more than a dozen colleges, set in a metropolitan area with a population of more than 2 million.

I believe this market would have supported a first-weekend release of  "The Big Sick" and/or "The Beguiled,"  so-called "small" films that were widely and favorably reviewed in the national media.  Neither was available on a single screen among the hundreds in the area.

Instead there were dozens of opportunities to see each of several mass-market rehashes:  the fifth Transformers movie, the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the third Cars movie and the third Despicable Me movie.  

Enough, I say.

In this era of multiple megaplexes, I wish theater operators would give moviegoers a little more credit and not so much more-of-the-same all the darn time.