The Marx Brothers' bushy-browed humor razes some high brows here: Verdi's Il Trovatore will never be the same. Their first film for MGM, A Night at the Opera lacks the unrestrained insanity of the earlier comedies, but it is filled with memorable gags-including the famous stateroom routine-that refuse to give over to the love interest and straight musical numbers inserted by the Studio. Margaret Dumont makes a great punching bag as a patron of the opera and stand-in for a whole class of people whose solid comfort the Brothers are bent on disrupting. But lines like "You big bully-why are you hitting that little bully?" reverberate beyond class consciousness to informed anarchy. "The history of American humor provides a long argument for the disorder of objective reality." (J. Bier)