Here's great news. May 4, you'll able to purchase The Marx Brothers Collection, a 5-DVD set featuring seven whole Marx Brothers movies…A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, At The Circus, Go West, Room Service, The Big Store and A Night in Casablanca. There are new "Making of…" documentaries for the first two, plus trailers and classic cartoons and shorts from the same year as each movie. List price will be sixty bucks, so you'll probably be able to pick it up for less than fifty…and I'm told these are new, wonderful transfers. Opera, Races and Casablanca will also be offered as individual releases. I'll post a link on this site when it's possible to order this.
For those of you scoring at home: This will mean that Love Happy is the only Marx Brothers movie that has never been released on DVD. This is not a huge loss since Love Happy is a Marx Brothers movie the way Sbarro's is an Italian restaurant.
The first five Marx movies (Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup) are controlled by Universal Home Video which released them some time ago but has allowed them to go outta-print. If you look around, you may still be able to find them…but you may not want to try too hard. Though Universal says they have no current plans for a reissue, they're doing a lot of boxed sets of old comedy series these days and since the Marx films are already transferred and popular, it's likely we will soon see them out in a collection. In the meantime, if you crave more Marx humor, I would like to again recommend the recently-released collection of You Bet Your Life: The Lost Episodes. It really is a marvelous package of eighteen episodes plus enough Groucho extras to make anyone's eyebrows go up and down. Click right here to order a copy if you don't have one. There are certain DVDs you love because someone did a decent transfer of a great piece of film and others that go beyond that, adding in wonderful bonuses and digging up rare material. This one's the latter and it sounds like the 5-DVD set will be, as well.
You will especially want the 5-DVD set because it includes At The Circus, which has Charlie Gemora in not one but two different gorilla suits. They had to change costumes in mid-shooting so the gorilla's appearance changes but it's reportedly Charlie in both skins. Name me an actor today who can perform so effectively in a gorilla costume. (Okay, besides Robert Duvall…)