Waste of time

A Disappointing Continuation

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I love this film. Zero Mostel is tirelessly hysterical as a slave longing for freedom, and the rest of the cast is terrific. The laughs never stop! I love corny and physical humor, so this film always puts me in a good mood. The ending is one joke after another that left me laughing my ass off. Phil Silvers is awesome as a brothel owner and Michael Crawford is so cute and clumsy. Buster Keaton, "old stone face" is the icing on the cake. The fact that he was dying when he made the film is astonishing. Great fun all around.

I rate every musical movie I saw before the age of 12 as a "9" or "10," since the songs are as familiar as smells from the childhood kitchen, but I'm well into adulthood seeing this for the first time. I notice a lot of the people rating FORUM as a "7" or higher are filling in the blanks in the movie with their memory of the play. The closest I was to FORUM before the movie was watching Phil Silvers as "Sgt. Bilko" a few times on TV. If you come to FORUM with fresh ears, you'll join me in noticing there are two real songs ("Comedy Tonight" and "Lovely") included in the film, plus a few scraps of incidental blather from Leon Greene as Captain Miles Gloriosus (which makes Franco Nero's posturing with Lancelot's "C'est Moi!" in the movie CAMELOT--based on a Broadway hit preceding FORUM--look like the performance of the decade). The dubbing on the DVD is EXTREMELY out-of-synch, even by 1960s or foreign movie standards. Coming to IMDb and reading that 75% of Stephen Sondheim's original Broadway score was deleted for the movie because "the producers thought musicals were blase" produces one giant yelp of "WTF!" Why bother even doing a cinema version, then? Evidently this is a travesty along the lines of doing MUSIC MAN without "76 Trombones," or GUYS & DOLLS sans "Luck Be a Lady Tonight." Apparently the Oscar voters felt so ashamed for their industry that they tried to cover up the misfire by giving this flick a statuette for "Best Score." Well, if I'm going to get a Reader's Digest version, I'd prefer something even shorter--perhaps a 60-second rendition by those five-minute Shakespeare guys--to this heartlessly amputated truncation.

It's ironic that just as Stephen Sondheim was establishing himself as both composer and lyricist on Broadway, musicals just stopped being made except on rare occasions. As a result most of Sondheim's work is sadly not filmed. In any event we don't have the musical stars on screen to do the roles justice.So in his first effort at writing both music and lyrics we're lucky indeed to have A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum on the big screen. A cut down version to be sure in terms of songs, but still a tribute to Sondheim in a fashion.The accent is more on comedy however and you cannot give enough praise to both Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford who were the only two from the Broadway cast to repeat their roles. In fact I can't conceive of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum being made without Mostel. He dominates the proceedings and that's not easy considering his main co-star is Phil Silvers. Phil Silvers was supposed to be on Broadway, but would not do the part on stage because he could not wear his glasses. Those were not just a comic prop, the man was terribly nearsighted. As a result his part was played by John Carradine. Who'd have ever thought those two would have been up for the same part?Another movie veteran the garrulous Raymond Walburn played the wandering Erronius and his part was played by the great stone face Buster Keaton in what turned out to be his farewell performance.Richard Lester the director comes in for a lot praise as well. The way he maximized the use of the screen you can hardly tell the stage origins of this show. Certainly that wild and crazy chariot race at the end could not have been done on stage. It's a great sequence even if the idea originated in the Eddie Cantor film, Roman Scandals.This movie was also the return of Zero Mostel to the screen after the blacklist. Mostel previously had done some really nice character parts, he stands out in those two Humphrey Bogart films, The Enforcer and Sirocco and was really good as Jack Palance's lapdog companion in Panic In The Streets. But when he could not get work in Hollywood, he returned to nightclubs and the theater where he obtained real stardom. One of the many Tony Awards A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum won was for Zero Mostel as Best Actor.On Broadway the show ran for 964 performances from 1962-1964 and also won a Tony for Best Musical. I haven't even described the plot because it's impossible. It revolves essentially around young Hiero, played by Michael Crawford to get the woman he loves who happens to work over at Phil Silvers's pleasure house and his family slave Zero Mostel to obtain his freedom. That's as far as I can go.As another movie icon expressed, fasten your seatbelts, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum is a wild and bumpy ride.

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.