By A.D. Amorosi

A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, A Night in Casablanca, Room Service, At the Circus, Go West, The Big Store

Warner Home Video

It's bizarre to think of the Marx Brothers as anything less than monumental. They were vaudeville comedians whose family-built shtick was laced with the Algonquin witticisms and twisted linguistics of George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Bert Kalmar; slovenly dressed, fast-talking heels (except for a honking, squeaking Harpo) whose ribald anarchy, authoritarian dismissiveness and high-toned double-speak would aid Hollywood in creating the screwball comedy.

What made the Marx Brothers and their ethnically wack caricatures—Chico's as a leering Italian with tight suits and pointy hats, Groucho's as a soliloquizing wiseass Jew, with grease-paint mustache and tattered tails—most effective throughout their televised revolution, at first, was that they were dangerous.

The haste of berating phrases and anxious motion, even at its slowest pace, guided you through the misanthropic eccentricity and anti-establishmentarian babble of their first five films—all made for Paramount. That last note is important. After Paramount, the wind left their sails. Perhaps the sight of a man with a fake mustache quoting from Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude or the prickly puppet regimes rife throughout their satirical comedies finally became unsettling to the mass public. So, it was "Hello, I Must be Going." Not really. Instead the dynasty that was MGM under wunderkind Irving Thalberg resuscitated the flagging careers of the vaudevillian duo by imbuing their anarchy with gentler, kindler musical bits (not of their own devising, as their previous comedies benefited greatly by songs like "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It") and easy-to-follow segues and young-love subplots of which Groucho, Chico and Harpo could approve rather than gangbang through.

The result of MGM's meddling (and Warner's and United Artists') is the comedies before you. The brilliant but tamed A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are blasts from veterans nearing their sunset—films still full of fire and wicked dialogue and the deliriously choreographed sight gags of yore. After that, the quality and the Marx's twisted sense of mayhem and rhythm was left to languish. Though the characters they created still shined throughout the occasionally barbed quips, it's as if the Rolling Stones decided to tour one last bad time, only using Goats Head Soup as a template.

Still, what the latter DVDs lack in spritzy comedy, they make up for in bawdy extras, like interviews with Groucho, a slew of documentaries and valuable shorts that prove that even as lions in winter, the Brothers could bite your head off.

A.D. Amorosi