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freedom and the pleasures of uninhibited sex” (Malamud, 197). Even
when characters in the film present a morally upright attitude, which is
more often than not comically disingenuous, they draw attention to the
sexual adventure underlying the film’s narrative, as when Pseudolus asks
the naïve but hormonally charged Hero about the object of his affections:
“A common courtesan in the house of Lycus?” Hero replies with another
question to set up the joke: “Is that disgraceful?” And Pseudolus delivers:
“There’s no way to make it sound like an achievement.” The frolicking in
the brothel scene of several busty, bikini-clad, and racially diverse courtesans
with suggestive Playboy-playmate names like Tintinabula, Panacea, Vibrata,
and Gymnasia, would have appealed to the sophisticated tastes of “withit”
spectators in the midst of enjoying the new sexual revolution, for which
the decade of the “Swinging Sixties” was indeed well known.
For all of its manic appeal, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum was not an immediate hit with film critics. Most commentators writing
at the time decried the lack of complexity and refinement that were
evident in the Broadway show, and few could appreciate the cinematic
and social satire in the spectacle of the usually dignified and idealized
Romans stripped down to their seedy, silly nakedness (Cull, 180). One
contemporary critic, Hollis Alpert of the New York Saturday Review, was
ahead of his time in suggesting that A Funny Thing offered a critique of
earlier epic films: “The comic corruption of all levels of Roman society is
a welcome corrective to those noble Romans who have infested movies for
generations” (October 15, 1966). More recently, critics have agreed that
Lester’s film provided American audiences in the 1960s with some muchneeded
“comic relief ” from those highly polished and thus unrealistic
images of ancient Romans, and thereby helped to dismantle the persistent
Hollywood myth of the grandeur that was Rome (Malamud, 205). A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum makes an explicit connection
between ancient Rome and modern America, in all their comic brutality
and vulgar unruliness, and it is a measure of the film’s great success and
relevance as popular entertainment that the audience is still laughing.
CORE ISSUES
1 How does the film incorporate traditional elements of Roman comedy in its plot, characters,
and musical score?
2 How does the film present historical naturalism in the details of everyday Roman life, in
contrast to the stylization of earlier epic films like Ben-Hur and Cleopatra?
174 A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (1966)