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Exclusive Interview with “uncut” A NIGHT AT THE OPERA discoverer Thomas Racz

August 10th, 2008 by Scott Marks

I was in seventh grade when I first met the Marx Brothers proper. There were You Bet Your Life reruns and fuzzy memories of The Incredible Jewel Robbery, but it wasn’t until that fateful gathering of the Boone Booster Club that I first witnessed my first Marx Bros. feature.

The Booster Club was a perk for students attending Daniel Boone elementary school in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood. One Tuesday morning a month we were allowed to dispense with our studies and watch a real movie, not one of those crappy science documentaries, on school time.

The person responsible for curating the series should have been taken out and shot at sunrise. Instead of screening The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T or the original Babes in Toyland, they exposed impressionable minds to the insipid remake of the latter in addition to Blackbeard’s Ghost (another live-action Disney hellhole), the feature length version of Journey to the Beginning of Time (which worked better in 5 minute installments on Garfield Goose and Friends) and two episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. spliced together to form a feature. There was a Martin and Lewis film, but the clueless booker chose Taurog over Tashlin.

Classrooms full of kids congregated in the school’s assembly hall where uniform focus was unheard of, the sound system was just slightly better than a subway train and the tattered window shades allowed more light to come in than the Sistine Chapel. In spite of all of the hardships cast upon this budding young cinephile, the 107 minutes spent watching A Day at the Races was the single greatest learning experience in eight years of public school education.

As if preordained, WBKB-TV scheduled a 1 am screening of Races later that weekend and I pleaded with my parents that since it wasn’t a “school night” to let me stay up way past my bedtime. My mother, generally the softer touch of the pair, wanted nothing to do with the idea. My father actually stepped up to the plate and, after hearing my appeal, uncharacteristically ruled in my favor. He assured my mother that “the kid will be asleep ten minutes after it starts and we’ll never hear about it again.”

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Uncut NIGHT AT THE OPERA print found in Hungarian Film Archives?

August 2nd, 2008 by Scott Marks

Forget about the uncut Ambersons and Metropolis. Find me a print of A Night at the Opera that doesn’t have that huge, hairy splice after the director’s credit and I will die a happy man.

I’ve seen A Night at the Opera more times than most San Diegans have rain. Name it — 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, 1.33:1 and even a couple of 1.85:1 screenings (the theatres didn’t own the proper lenses) — and I’ve seen it. No matter what the format, the f$#@ing splice is eternal! It’s a form of madness, yet over the years, the jump cut to “Your man has not arrived yet?” is as much a part of the piece as Sam’s wooden direction. In spite of my adoration, it’s not even my favorite of the bunch. The Brothers’ final three for Paramount far outclass anything Thalberg did to for the boys.

Any Marx Bros. film, even Go West, is to be cherished and ardently inspected as many times as possible. When “Bushido” John DeCastanets sent me this link to the indispensable NitraveVille , I prit’ near had a conniption fit.

A 21-year-old student by the name of Racz Tamas is credited with finding the print. According to the article, originally published on Marx Brothers.org, “Racz Tamas in Hungary has done it again,” yet a Google search turned up a few stories about his recent discovery and little more. Here is Mr. Tamas’ own account of his recent archaeological dig:

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