DVD Roundup

The Marx Brothers Collection

This long-overdue collection of seven classic (and not-so-classic) Marx Brothers films gathers up A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, A Night in Casablanca, Room Service, At the Circus, Go West, and The Big Store, which is as good an introduction to the cacophony of cinematic Dadaism that is the Marx Brothers as anything we can think of. No Duck Soup, which is a shame, but these five discs come loaded with extras, including Leonard Maltin's excellent commentary on Opera; a pair of all-new Marx documentaries; A Night at the Movies, one of Robert Benchley's best comic shorts; cartoons; Marx television appearances; and much more than we have room to list here. Granted, Go West and The Big Store are a portrait of Groucho and company in decline – by 1941, the trio was both looking and acting particularly long in the tooth – but the earlier works remain nothing short of masterpieces, having lost none of their anarchic hilarity nor their amazing verbal and visual dexterity. If Opera's justly famed stateroom scene doesn't make you do a natural spit-take, you've no business watching films in the first place.