A Night at the Opera, which is, oddly enough, quite largely about a night at the opera, seems to be the best of all the Marx Brothers pictures so far… - C. A. Lejeune

The Cineguild director and producer, David Lean and Ronald Neame, have spared us nothing of the brutality of Oliver Twist.
All the ugliness is there: the filth and cold, humiliation and hunger; the thrashing of Oliver; the savage beating to death of Nancy; the special lust which Dickens describes in italics as "the passion for hunting something." All these things are realistically set out in the film in pictures as remorseless as a Cruikshank drawing. The producers have even added two special savageries of their own; an introduction in which Oliver's mother is seen battling through the storm in the last pangs of travail, and a climax in which the child is forced to climb to the chimney-stack and watch Bill Slkes hang himself. The introductory scene, as it happens, is magnificently done; the roof-tops sequence seems to me both distasteful and silly.

A book could be written if Harpo didn't eat it first, or Groucho and Chico tear it up page by page on the art of the Marxes. You could call it surrealism, or or dadaism, or what about that -ism that all depends on the use of staircases? You could analyse its clear cold illogic, entirely divorced from emotion. You could suggest that Harpo, with his motor horn, is in the direct line of the clowns of history. You could even argue that it represents the furthest manifestation of, pure comedy on the modern screen, and you wouldn't be far wrong.

Hitchcock had an artificial story and an artificial society to deal with here, but his treatment of them is not that of a director who matches artificiality of substance with artificiality of form, but of a man who has in himself so little reaction to flesh-and-blood truth that he is almost incapable of knowing the living from the dead. Hitchcock's blindness to the things that people do in expression of their real emotions is not a mannerism but a fact. In his work he thinks, and cannot feel. No director in England, and very few in America, can tell a screen story as cleverly as he—can narrate so subtly and simply to the eye, without a word written, using all the tricks of the camera and all the loquacity of silent things to carry his audience from point to point in perfect understanding and ease. But he will have to learn to know men as well as he knows the camera or, not knowing men, to turn his talents from the intimate to the impersonal kinema before he can become one of the great directors of the screen.