Their breakthrough came in a series of Broadway revues, two of which, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, were written for them by George S Kaufman, America's premier satirical comedy king. The Marx brothers worked to a preconceived relationship between characters honed on the vaudeville stage for 20 years before they made their first film in 1929. Everything seems to click, in performance, text and design, and yet it is typical Hollywood in quite another sense, having been in reality cobbled together from a succession of scripts by disparate writers. Thalberg's track record ensured that the Marxes treated him with respect, despite their impatience at joining the queue waiting outside his office for hours, until the day they wangled their way into the sanctum and roasted potatoes in the fireplace till he returned.Ī Night at the Opera appears to be the quintessential Hollywood product, all of a piece in its machine-tooled dynamic. Now there were only Groucho, Chico and Harpo (or Julius, Leonard and Arthur, if you prefer), and young Irving was in Chico's bridge-playing circle.
Aged only 35 in 1934, he was younger than any of the Marx brothers apart from Zeppo, who had quit acting after Duck Soup. Thalberg was the formidable man who, uncredited, produced many of MGM's greatest hits after 1922. They were said to have done this to Thalberg, which was certainly untrue. The brothers were well known as the most formidable negotiating team in Hollywood, due partly to their habit of ganging up on soft targets - directors, studio producers and so on - and literally tearing their pants off. Thalberg was central to the success of A Night at the Opera, the first film the Marx brothers made after their departure from Paramount studios, which had produced all their previous five films, from The Cocoanuts to Duck Soup. The film was shut down and resumed three months later, under the aegis of Louis B Mayer. Both were produced by MGM's wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, or rather the second would have been produced by Thalberg, had he not died suddenly on September 15 1936, barely two weeks after shooting began. This could also mark a premature anniversary, although the subject of it would not care two hoots - 25 years since Groucho's death, on August 19 1977.īoth A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races were lavish productions, directed by Sam Wood, who was later to turn into Hollywood's most rabid anti-communist. W ell, who do you believe, me or the evidence of your own eyes? The Marx brothers are on the warpath again, in a re- release of their first two MGM classics, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races.