A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Richard Lester is everybody's favorite director. For those to whom movies are "cinema" he provides endless hours of coffee chitchat about stills, shots, frames, ad infinitum. For the rest, he provides terribly bright, fresh, and--guess what--funny comedies. He helped make the Beatles more than teenage idols, Rita Tushingham a comedienne with the word "rape," and English films the prime examples of that ye-ye renaissance. When he turned his hand to filming a Broadway musical that smacked of burlesque that chitchat became more intense than ever. Now it appears he can do no wrong. A funny thing does happen on the way to that damn paper-maiche Forum and Lester's given us the funniest film of the season.

It's not subtle humor, mind you. The film, like the play, is one for bellylaughs, lewd asides, slapstick, and caricatures. The plot races from absurdity to absurdity until you really don't follow what's happening--and couldn't care less. Lester realized that it's the momentum of gags that keeps the whole thing going and never has his rapid camera style been put to better use. He manipulates the slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, whores, and patricians in a stylish frenzy, bringing them together for the well chosen musical numbers. These, one might add, are among the best moments in the film and the ones where Lester's style is most impressive. Who else, for instance, would put Zero Mostel, Jack Glifford, and Phil Silvers in a toga kickline atop an aqueduct singing "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid"?

The acting, of course, is superb. Zero Mostel, who played the main role in the original, is the sometime narrator slave whose desire to buy his own freedom starts the whole thing rolling. Nearly every Kerrish adjective in the book has been ascribed to him--sufficeth to say he deserves them all and more. Phil Silvers is still Bilko, but why not Bilko as a Roman whoremaster? Jack Glifford as the servile slave ("I live to grovel") would steal the picture were it not for the fact that Mostel so overshadows everything. He becomes Mostel's accomplice in a far-fetched scheme when Mostel reveals he knows about his collection of pornographic pottery ("None of us is perfect"). Standing out among the numerous other good roles is Buster Keaton as the old Roman who's been searching for his long lost children and keeps running through the film at the oddest moments. His face is almost as comically expressive as Mostel's. When, not hearing correctly, he says Yiddish fashion, "My daughter--a eunuch?" it becomes the best line in the film.

In all fairness to those who study such things, it should be said that all is not rosy in Lester's old Rome. The climactic chariot race, for instance, goes into excess, both of slapstick and length, and it does not do to play any joke too long. But as Mostel says, none of us is perfect, and Lester here is about as close as anybody has a right to expect. The opening number promises "A Comedy Tonight." And there is.