A Night at the Opera (film) DVD commentary. But this could not have occurred, because Sam Marx had died in 1933, during pre-production of "Duck Soup", two years before "A Night at the Opera" was released. The rumor arose because Frenchy had had such a cameo appearance in the Marx Brothers' earlier "Monkey Business". There is, however, a reference to the Marx Brothers' mother, Minnie Marx, during the stateroom scene, in which a woman asks, "Is my Aunt Minnie in here?" Part of the concept of casting the Marx Brothers as stowaways on a ship was recycled from "Monkey Business". As Groucho's and Margaret Dumont's characters
Marx Brothers The first Marx Brothers/Thalberg film was "A Night at the Opera" (1935), a satire on the world of opera, where the brothers help two young singers in love by throwing a production of "Il Trovatore" into chaos. The film—including its famous scene where an absurd number of people crowd into a tiny stateroom on a ship—was a great success, and was followed two years later by an even bigger hit, "A Day at the Races" (1937), in which the brothers cause mayhem in a sanitarium and at a horse race. The film features Groucho and Chico's famous "Tootsie Frootsie Ice