Richard Lester (1966)
Richard Lester’s breakneck direction ruins this adaptation of the Broadway hit musical by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, with songs by Stephen Sondheim. Lester had recently enjoyed critical and commercial success with The Knack and the two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, where his hyperactive camera style supplied an apt cartoon tempo (and, in effect, built up the slender material). Both the choice of Lester to direct A Funny Thing Happened and the end product assume that, since this is a farce (inspired by Plautus), it must be frenetic – and that, if it’s frenetic, it’s bound to be funny. The incontinent camera movement and editing aren’t just redundant: they distract attention – Lester’s as well as the audience’s – from the plot and, much worse, break up the actors’ rhythm. No one can take a couple of steps without being spliced or speak more than two consecutive lines without breaking off into a mugging grimace to camera.
This doesn’t stop you liking or recognising the talents of the likes of Zero Mostel, Buster Keaton, Michael Hordern and Jack Gilford but you feel frustrated for them. Keaton (as Erronius), Hordern (Senex) and Gilford (Hysterium) give definitely American or British personalities to their toga-ed characters; Mostel’s hysterical, jowly cupidity as ‘the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all of Rome’ transcends nationality in a satisfyingly eccentric way. Phil Silvers is less confidently incongruous in the antique setting: he sometimes sounds to be sending up the vaguely exoticised American accent familiar from Hollywood biblical or classical world epics – surely the wrong note of parody here. The most successful performance is Leon Greene’s as the massively self-admiring soldier, Miles Gloriosus. (He had also played the role on Broadway.) Greene’s square-jawed handsomeness is amusingly impervious to the impatient camera: the effortful, minimal changes of facial expression achieve a virtually slow-motion effect. His commanding baritone makes his jolly entrance song a musical highlight as well as a comic one. Greene’s vocal power cuts through the jumpy mess of accompanying images and lets you enjoy the wit of Stephen Sondheim’s words and music.
A Funny Thing Happened includes an odd assortment of elements of big film genres of the 1950s and 1960s: the dancing slave girls belong to the opening credits of a James Bond movie; the lashings of desperate ‘action’ recall abortive attempts to ‘open up’ screen versions of more conventional stage musicals; the forced zaniness of a climactic chariot chase is unfunny in the style of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The film also anticipates subsequent BBC sitcom successes: not only the obvious offshoot, Up Pompeii! (in which the cheap, static studio setting and the mostly lame acting were – as he might himself have said – ambrosia and nectar to Frankie Howerd) but also Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Michael Crawford’s juvenile lead, Hero, with his daft, nervous giggle and acrobatics, seems in retrospect a try-out for Frank Spencer.
The large cast also includes Beatrix Lehmann, Roy Kinnear, Alfie Bass, Jon Pertwee, Peter Butterworth (indistinguishable from his Carry On persona), Jack May and Janet Webb (the fat lady who always interrupted the finale of The Morecambe and Wise Show). The ‘virgin’ babes in A Funny Thing Happened probably found secure employment in The Benny Hill Show in the twilight of their voluptuous years. Screenplay by Melvin Frank and Michael Pertwee; musical direction and (poor) incidental music by Ken Thorne; photographed by Nicolas Roeg; sets and costumes designed by Tony Walton. Richard Williams’s titles are a dazzling, slick recycling of Ancient Roman imagery: this pop mosaic is wittily stylised like nothing else in the film.
[1990s]
