VAndolini 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.

grantss Has its moments but mostly quite silly. A farcical comedy, set in Roman times. Has some good one-liners but is mostly quite silly. Almost every plot development is merely an excuse for some pointless, mostly unfunny slapstick. It gets quite predictable after a while: you get some random detour and you can imagine how it is going to end up.To compound the misery, the movie is partly a musical! Yeah, you know, people randomly breaking into campy tunes. Not a recipe for a good movie.Zero Mostel is reasonably good in the lead role. His clowning around gives the movie some of its best moments. Cast also features Buster Keaton, though his performance is fairly subdued.

jdollak While I enjoy a lot of the classic musicals, I find that there are a lot of filler songs included. This is one of the instances that does not fit that category. The songs are excellent, and are performed in a definitive way. Zero Mostel is an incredible performer, and his antics here are spectacular. His supporting cast is equally memorable, but Zero steals the show. The direction and pacing of the show is also handled perfectly. It reminds me partly of Benny Hill, only a bit more fresh. It is surprising that this movie has not been held up as a watermark for both comedy and musicals. I place it in a category with Some Like It Hot.

nycruise-1 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.