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The dynamic acting talents of the two baggy-pants veterans Silvers
and Gilford energize the film with a heady dose of Jewish-American vaudevillian
flair and punchy one-liners that were so evident in the stage play
(Malamud, 197–201). Even the film’s title, A Funny Thing Happened on
the Way to the Forum, plays on the vaudeville tradition of stand-up comedy,
echoing a typical line a comedian would use to open his act and
invite his local audience into his comic world of travels and travails: “A
funny thing happened to me on my way here to the Catskills tonight . . .”
Most delightful in the film is Mostel, reprising his manic stage role as
the self-promoting Pseudolus (“Cheater”), the wily slave who can win
his freedom if he succeeds in pairing his innocent young master with the
beloved virgin-courtesan next door. In his opening monologue for the
film, Mostel describes the setting and sets the mood for the outrageous
comedy that is to follow:
Our principal characters live on this street – in a less fashionable suburb of
Rome – in these three houses. First, the house of Erronius, a befuddled old
man, abroad now in search of his children stolen in infancy by pirates.
Second, the house of Lycus, a buyer and seller of the flesh of beautiful
women: that’s for those of you who have absolutely no interest in pirates!
And finally, the house of Senex, who lives here with his wife and son. Also
in this house dwells Pseudolus, slave to his son. Pseudolus is probably my
favorite character in the piece, a role of enormous variety and nuance, and
played by an actor of such versatility, such magnificent range, such . . . let
me put it this way: I play the part.
Lester, an American expatriate living in London in the 1960s, was
familiar with the comedy traditions of both his native and adopted lands
(Sinyard, 39–47). First and foremost, he wanted his film to evoke the
physical-comedy traditions of early American cinematic farce, and so he
cast Buster Keaton, one of his childhood idols, as the doddering, halfblind
old man, Erronius (“Wanderer”), who is always bumping into things
and people in his futile search for his lost children. There is a whiff of
nostalgic, silent-movie humor in the many sight gags that fill in between
the film’s dialogue: a horse sweating in a steam bath, or soldiers tossing
grapes into a courtesan’s generous cleavage. At the same time, Lester was
also acquiring a fast-growing reputation as a cinematic innovator of the
Mod decade, and his use of multiple cameras and edgy, unconventional
editorial technique had already appeared in his earlier directorial efforts,
the popular Beatles movies Help! (1965) and A Hard Day’s Night (1964).
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (1966) 169