Yesterday, a rainy day in Princeton, I finally got around to rewatching a Marx Brothers documentary I hadn’t seen in decades (“The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell,” 1982), kindly sent to me by a friend over Christmas. Naturally, among the clips were some from “A Night at the Opera,” which got me thinking about all the classical music used as grist for musical interludes and parody in the Marxes’ films – and soberingly, by extension, how far we’ve fallen as a culture that broader audiences today would likely not recognize some of these once indelible melodies.
Toward the end of the documentary, Dick Cavett remarks, prophetically, although perhaps not in the way he had hoped, “50 years from now, will the Marx Brothers be funny? Will the films live? I would have to say, I hope so, and I think so. Because if not, there’s something wrong with the people, not the films.”
At a time when so many are so easily offended at the first whiff of anything subversive (which, I would argue, is a substantial root of humor), and younger people such as my nephews claim never even to have heard of Groucho Marx, I’m not much encouraged to believe in the continued “life” of their films. It’s a source of amazement to me that the Marxes and the Universal monster movies of the 1930s still held such sway over all of us youngsters in the 1970s – 40 years later! I’d go further and say that Groucho Marx was one of my biggest, and perhaps least helpful, influences during my teens in the 1980s.
Hopefully, someday the pendulum will swing again – like Harpo through the painted backdrops of “Il trovatore” – but I can’t say that I think it is likely. How is it that, with everything seemingly spinning out of control, the world has become such an anodyne place? The Marxes were up against the Great Depression and World War II. Maybe a little inappropriate laughter, once in a while, would do us some good.
“I want my shirt” (“The Cocoanuts”)
“Il trovatore” (“A Night at the Opera”)
Earlier “Anvil Chorus” parody at 5:30 (“Animal Crackers”)
Rachmaninoff Prelude in C-sharp minor (“A Day at the Races”)
Harpo fantasy on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (“A Night in Casablanca”)
Medley of Chico Marx numbers, in which he references the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, the Pizzicato from Leo Delibes’ “Sylvia,” and more.
