Watch A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum For Free

Touches You

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

An Exercise In Nonsense

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The story is set in the ancient Rome.Pseudolys, a lazy slave wants nothing more than to be free.He gets that chance when he finds out that the young master has fell in love.The girl is Philia, a virgin in the house of Lycus, a slave dealer who sells beautiful women.If Pseudolys gets the two lovebirds together, he's free.A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a very funny musical comedy.Zero Mostel is brilliant in the lead.There's also the silent comedy legend Buster Keaton there.It's most hilarious when Senex meets the goddess Philia at the door.And they tell him she's the new maid.Or Lycus doing acrobatics.The chariot race is really something.The song heard in this movie is really catchy.Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone: a comedy tonight.

I remember back in the '70s, WLS-TV now commonly known as ABC 7 Chicago used to show this movie from time to time in their afternoon movie. They used to show movies at 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM with tons of commercials. The movies they show were hard to comprehend simply because they have been chopped so badly. This movie I remembered trying to watch a couple of times but it was so badly mangled it was hard to make head or tails. Finally I got to see the complete version and was not disappointed.The movie was a film adaptation of the Broadway hit of the same name. It's about Pseudonious a slave who's always scheming to get himself free. One day he finds the opportunity when his masters' son falls in love with one of the courtesan next door. She's a slave too having just arrived recently. He makes a deal with the son, his freedom in exchange for helping the son get his true love. What neither of them knew is that she's already been sold to a captain in the roman legion. The movie and the play was made for big belly laughs unfortunately many of the jokes has been ripped-off by inferior writers who used it on their own shows. I remember at least a couple of the jokes were used in "Three's Company" almost exactly as they were written here. Many of the jokes has that been there, done that feeling simply because it has been ripped off. Nevertheless what other writers and directors don't have are great comic actors who knows how to deliver a line properly.The performances are very good. Zero Mostel plays Pseudonious and he plays it with zeal. He's a schemer and he constantly try to find ways to make things work for him. Phil Silvers who played television's all time schemer 'Sgt. Bilko' plays the brothel owner next door. He played his character much more subdued at least for him. It makes you wonder how taking the 'Sgt. Bilko' persona to the role of Pseudonious would have work. Jack Gilford plays another slave and with his straight face you never expect a one liner coming form him and that's why his punchlines and one-liners worked so well. The others in the cast were very good also. The great Buster Keaton was also in the movie playing the role that became a trademark for him at this late stage in his career. He played the old man who basically runs around the movie for no good reason.Overall the movie was quickly pace and had more than a joke a minute but so many of those jokes had been ripped off that they were no longer as funny as hearing them for the first time, but the actors certainly knew how to deliver them.

In ancient Rome, a sloppy, lazy slave must unite his young master with a virginal courtesan just imported from Greece, but she has already been bought by a virile Captain. Richard Lester's New York/Jewish burlesque revue, a 'throw everything at the screen and see if it sticks' slapstick comedy based on the hit Broadway show. With Nicolas Roeg as his cinematographer, Lester (aided by the wizardry of his editors) stages one breathless, breakneck scene after another, not attempting to top himself with each one but rather trying for any laugh he can buy. The cast of old pros mug to the camera shamelessly, slinging those wisecracks home with gusto, but the film isn't a gut-buster. It works intermittently and has some nice musical sketches (and the Madrid locations were a fine visual choice), but the jokes don't connect with the audience in a human way. It's just a series of boffo vaudeville routines, some of which get hammered home and others that are handled gingerly, making a lilting comedic impression. **1/2 from ****

This is a piece written for theater. It deliberately takes classic forms from the Greek/Roman forms of drama, then turns them on their ear in the name of Vaudeville - which ends up making the point that Vaudeville and the Ancients were actually quite similar.Years - years - ago I heard Sondheim explain his score for this show: he said that during the composing of the score he really didn't have an idea of what was going on with the script (at least as much as he did in his later- composed shows). He said the two songs which ended up "working" were "Comedy Tonight" and "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid" - because they were closest to the style of the show.I don't know what the movie execs were thinking in terms of bringing this to the screen (the very essence of this show is the notion that it's live theater) - but, at the very least, it does capture Zero Mostel - of which there are too few recorded performances.