There is a sequence of a girl dancing in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but the director, Richard Lester, breaks it up so much with camera and editing that we can't see the dance, only flashes of parts of her body, and we can't even tell if the girl can dance because the movement is almost totally supplied by his means. This technique is a good one for concealing the ineptitude of performers, but Lester's short-term camera magic keeps cutting into and away from the comedians …, who never get a chance to develop a routine or to bring off a number. What are we being distracted from?…
[Seeing] the result, we get the sense that Lester thinks it would be too banal just to let us see a dance or a pair of comedians singing a duet. Yet if they're good, they're a lot less banal than camera movement designed to cover emptiness. We go to see great clowns precisely for the way they move, for the grace and lightness of their style. The marvel of burlesque is that those lewd men become beautiful: their timing and skill transform the lowest forms of comedy. When Lester supplies the rhythms for them by film editing he takes away the one great asset of burlesque: that triumph of style which converts leering into art. He takes away their beauty and they become ugly and gross; he turns artists back into mugging low comics. (He also uses the women execrably: they are blank-faced bodies or witless viragos.) (p. 138)
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