The Wall Street Journal article my father read aloud to me after breakfast at my parents' house was opportune. Its author had chosen words thoughtfully — for the purpose of warning moviegoers away from the third Pirates of the Caribbean. When watching a film to settle one's own opinion is expressed by a reviewer as something that the Lord should forfend, the value of the dollar, especially in clutches of eight to ten, rises precipitously.
Still, there are those who must say "One, please" on a Friday night, and won't request another picture simply because a newspaper critic told them to. From conversation I know half a dozen of them and wonder, as I did when my father had finished the article, whether modern cinema's thrill of sound and light is what they are after; and that the movie itself need not be a great one to be worth the time and expense.
A cup of coffee later, my father mentioned that one of several DVDs that he had borrowed from the library was the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. Was I interested? Yes, I said, although maybe only briefly, to sample the humor and performances and consider their longevity. The Marx Brothers I knew through quotation and transcription, hearing and seeing parts of their work. Why a Duck?, a collection of the comic act's screenplays and film stills — Al Hirschfeld's piquant caricatures of Groucho, Chico and Harpo on its mustard cover — sat on the family bookshelf immemorially, and I had occasionally taken it down to skim through. The Brothers were clever enough, yet I had not watched a movie recently, and never one in its entirety.
Would this be entertaining or quaint? Minutes after opening titles, I was roaring.
Groucho was as strong ironic, snubbing a steward ("Do you have two fives? Well, then, you don't need the ten cents I was going to give you"); as he was absurd, mocking a costumed primo ("How do you sleep on your stomach with such big buttons on your pajamas?"). Chico and Harpo, tramps as ever, played buffoons one moment and graceful musicians the next, their technique articulate extensions of slapstick. Harpo closed the obligatory interlude by reaching from behind his namesake instrument to merrily tap the nose of one of the applauding children surrounding him.
Plot? Aptly unelaborate. The Brothers turned a sedate impresario into an exasperated revenger, and but finally aided the exhausted German aristocrat by making stars out of a lovestruck tenor and soprano — though not before humiliating an imperious lead with Harpo's dash up and down a stage during Il Trovatore, releasing a backdrop of trolley cars, then one of a fruit stand, then sixteen-inch guns of a battleship. Earlier, for a sidesplitting ten seconds, the pit orchestra switched from Verdi to Chico's intercalation of "Take Me out to the Ballgame."
A Night at the Opera showed in 1935, but the stars' presence and delivery is sempiternal, leaving me unable to match to them a contemporary troupe. However few of us may be diverted from this summer's features, the legacy of the Marx Brothers is but a concern of the archivist's.