At one point the sly authors arrange a situation around him that threatens to bludgeon him into breaking his golden silence. There is his superbly demoniac pantomime at the breakfast table, where he puts the food and crockery to curious uses and winds up by making a sandwich with Groucho's cigar. The whimsical little fellow, half pagan and half innocent child, manages to be in the approximate centre of all the film's best moments. Here the comedy bursts its shackles and spatters into magnificent fragments as the brothers, with the police and the opera management hard on their heels, pop in and out of the performance and transform Verdi into low buffoonery.Among other things 'A Night at the Opera' finally does justice to Harpo, whose pantomimic genius sometimes has a habit of getting lost behind Groucho's machine-gun patter. Their adventures as impostors, stowaways and hunted madmen progress to a delirious climax at a performance of 'Il Trovatore' in what is evidently intended to be the Metropolitan. Harpo, the mischievous pixie, is up to his old habit of getting in everybody's way. Chico is managing an ambitious Italian tenor against the tenor's will and better judgment. Groucho, you see, is a phony musical impresario who has attached himself to a dignified lady in the hope of separating her from a portion of her $8,000,000. You will discover the answer at the Capitol: the Marx Brothers weren't in them.The Marxist assault on grand opera makes a shambles of that comparatively sacred institution. You may have wondered what the trouble has been with the operatic films. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind have given them a resounding slapstick to play with and they wield it with maniacal delight.Even when their gags sound as if they were carved out of Wheeler and Woolsey with an axe, the boys continue to be rapturously mad. If 'A Night at the Opera' is a trifle below their best, it is also considerably above the standard of laughter that has been our portion since they quit the screen.

The merry Marx boys, whittled down from a quartet to a trio, have arrived in town with the loudest and funniest screen comedy of the Winter season.

Marx brothers a night at the opera 1935