"Alone," the song Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle sing and Groucho plays on the harp, became one of the top hits of 1936. It was written by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, who went on to become the head of MGM's musical production in the 1940s - the unit responsible for such hits as Singin' in the Rain (1952) and On the Town (1949).
The rock group Queen released an album in 1975 titled A Night at the Opera, containing one of their most famous songs, "Bohemian Rhapsody." A year later, they released the album A Day at the Races, which, like the 1937 Marx Brothers film of the same name, was judged by critics to be not as good as its predecessor.
A totally unrelated animated film with the same title was made in The Netherlands in 1998.
In the ocean liner sequence, Chico and Harpo slip away from the elegant upper decks to party with the immigrant steerage passengers below. The poor masses are shown to be more fun loving and lively than their superiors, a scene reminiscent of a very similar one in Titanic (1997).
MGM continued to make a bundle on the movie by reissuing it a few years later on a double bill with the Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy-Jeanette MacDonald film San Francisco (1936). It turned out to be a popular combination: Jeanette MacDonald singing opera as the city fell to rubble around her, and the Marx Brothers reducing Verdi's Il Trovatore to virtual rubble.
by Rob Nixon
