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The Marx Brothers Collection: A Night at the Opera (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), Room Service (1938), At the Circus (1939), Go West (1940), The Big Store (1941), A Night in Casablanca (1946). Fullscreen (1.33:1), B&W, Dolby Digital 1.0 (mono). Short films, commentaries, featurettes. 5-disc. Warner.

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he Marx Brothers were the first great comedians of the sound-film era and the unwashed ids of Hollywood’s immigrant roots, specifically its Jewish-immigrant roots. The early studio tycoons strived to suppress their ethnicity, but the Marxes lit a cherry bomb with it, reveling in the attitude of the insouciant double-outcast—the merry anarchy, rapid wordplay, and brazen ridicule for all grim emblems of authority. They started out in vaudeville; their first films—The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers—were basically filmed stage plays. By the early 1930s, they were the most famous entertainers in the world and lured the cleverest writers. The films of this era—Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, and Monkey Business in particular—are wild classics of dispossessed (or, rather, giddily unpossessed) comedy, the models for generations of Jewish-American comics. It’s impossible to imagine Jerry Lewis, Lenny Bruce, Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Harold Ramis, Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Seinfeld, or the Coen Brothers without Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx. And the Marx Brothers at their best remain funnier than all of them.
      The seven films in this five-disc box-set—none of them ever before on DVD—marked a major shift in the brothers’ work, and ultimately a steep decline, but not before a spectacular peak. A Night at the Opera may be the most astonishing, head-swooning comedy ever—a remarkable feat, given that a third of the movie is dreadful. It was the brothers’ first film after moving from Paramount to MGM. The head of MGM, Irving Thalberg, didn’t care for the sheer mayhem of their earlier pictures; he insisted on encasing their new films in plots—musical romances, in which the Marx Brothers would play madcap Cupids. Yet Thalberg appreciated how the brothers worked. He let them go on the road to perform scenes from the script before live audiences, to see what worked and what didn’t, changing a word here and there to see which got the biggest laugh. The film’s director, Sam Wood, who had no experience in comedy, often held shots a couple extra seconds, to give the audience time to laugh. Thalberg cut the superfluous frames, and probably saved the movie.
      The brothers’ lines are so funny, their rhythm so tight, the pace so brisk, that the dreadful love story and musical numbers almost don’t matter. The same is true of their next film, A Day at the Races—though to a lesser extent because the songs are longer and one of them (“Who Dat Man?”) is embarrassingly racist. Still these two films rank, alongside Duck Soup and Monkey Business, as the Marx Brothers’ best.
      Then Thalberg died. The brothers moved to RKO, and the rest is sad history. They were given Room Service, a trite script based on a stage play, no improv allowed. The brothers look mortified throughout; Chico especially makes no effort to hide his boredom. The supporting cast is hold-your-breath terrible. It’s a freak of nature: a Marx Brothers movie without a single laugh.
      They rushed back to MGM, but the rules had changed. Scripts were to be followed, not fiddled with; out-of-town tryouts were scotched. Their first venture under the new regime, At the Circus, was a step up, but mid-level Marx Bros at best. You know something’s amiss when the plot’s lovebirds sing two songs before Groucho enters the picture. Still, it sports a few good scenes and one classic—Groucho singing “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” while Harpo swings from a chandelier and the circus troupe dances along.
      After the circus, the deluge. Go West is a groggily lame vehicle in the Wild West. The Big Store is a tortured piece of nothing, except for a few choice exchanges between Groucho and straight lady Margaret Dumont. At this point, in 1940, the brothers left the movies; they were bored and consumed with other problems; World War II wasn’t a great backdrop for their humor, in any case. Six years later, they tried once more, A Night in Casablanca, a dim take-off on Casablanca. They look almost as bored making it as the audience must have been watching it.
      Warner Home Video has done a wonderful job with these transfers. They’re freshly vivid with only occasional flutter, mainly on the later, lesser films. A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are must buys. At the Circus (on a flipper with Room Service) is worthwhile. Avoid the others.
      Meanwhile, Universal is restoring their earlier Paramount films. (A few years ago, they were briefly leased to Image, which released a box-set, now out of print.) Then the Marx Brothers home-theater library—an essential piece of American culture—will be complete.


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