[With] the premiere of [United States] …, it should be clear that a TV breakthrough has occurred worthy of heavy study…. Yet no one seems to be noticing. On paper, it's a simple proposition. United States is about marriage…. Familiar as it may sound, though, Larry Gelbart has given us a show that violates all the rules of sitcom, a game as rigid as pinochle.

Movie Movie is a dum-dum title for a pair of skillful parodies that were written by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller under the provisional title Double Feature. The idea is to stir up our happy memories of early talkies—especially the Warners fight pictures and musicals, with their tenement-born heroes and heroines who conquered the big city…. The lines are stylized, cryptic: the dialogue of the thirties has been compacted into its essential clichés, which the characters innocently mism...

Be warned. A man might die laughing at "Sly Fox." What Larry Gelbart once helped do for Plautus in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," he has now done for Ben Jonson in "Sly Fox."… Mr. Gelbart has resuscitated the great Elizabethan, modernized him, given him a new set of clothes and married him off to the old traditions of American vaudeville. There is little point in comparing Mr. Jonson with Mr. Gelbart; the original play, "Volpone,�...

Attempting to categorize NBC's "United States" is like trying to imagine Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" rewritten by Neil Simon and staged as a prime-time soap opera. Suffice it to say that this half-hour series … is unlike anything ever presented on TV…. "United States" sets out to examine contemporary wedlock—the state of being united—without resort to standard sitcom conventions. No audience attended the taping...

The ancient and hoary myth that the American Serviceman is somehow more virile than his Old-World counterparts: a myth which sustained Hollywood successfully during and immediately after the war years, when the implication was firmly rooted in the minds of the mass audiences that fighting with lethal weapons was rather a lark anyway, and that in any case it was only engaged in if there weren't any girls around to chase at that particular moment—this myth served to enhance the spurious glamour ...

The Preston Sturges movie, "Hail the Conquering Hero," may have been fun, but the new musical based on it is a dud. "The Conquering Hero" … has the usual components of a routine assembly job. There are songs, dances, a few jokes and a lot of plot….

It struck me, watching Movie, Movie, that a parody is rewarding roughly in proportion to the pleasure originally conveyed by the model. This film, as everyone must know by now, is a double feature such as you might have seen at any neighborhood house some forty-five years ago. The first movie, "Dynamite Hands," is a sentimental prize-fight melodrama; the second, "Baxter's Beauties of 1933," is a sentimental backstage musical romance. Both are only slight exaggerations of t...

There's a lot wrong with The Wrong Box, and a lot that's right, too…. The script by Larry Gelbart and Bert Shevelove (would that the former had labored alone) is much too smarty-pants. It begins with a wholesale bumping off, one by one, of British eccentrics, a la Kind Hearts and Coronets, but sans that fine film's wit….

["Sly Fox"] is billed as an adaptation of Ben Jonson's "Volpone," but it is welcomely much more than that. The adapter, Larry Gelbart, is temperamentally closer to the Marx Brothers than he is to Jonson; his dialogue has the nervous quickness of early Groucho, with Groucho's unpredictable free-associational asides and his bent for the reasonable-outrageous…. Gelbart has caused the classical shapeliness of Jonson's plot to explode into harum-scarum twen...

Some of Gelbart's dialogue [in Sly Fox] is good trapeze work, some of it is only moderately clever…. [Most] of the time I just watched the patterns being made, pretty decently, and didn't laugh. Partly this is because Jonson's comic morality play has been thinned into farce. It just isn't a farce plot, it's the scaffolding for a savage indictment. More, farce has to be believable in its own landscape in order to be funny, and I just couldn't believe that thes...

[The Wrong Box is a] slice of Victorian gingerbread…. Some of the gags crumble on impact, others are stretched out like taffy, but there is enough fun left over to leave most moviegoers happily wallowing in greed, sex, homicide, body snatching and other nefarious diversions…. Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove … dress hip gags in a graceful English manner, and their wayward humor brightens train wrecks, horse-and-buggy chase scenes and a hearse-to-hearse search for missing bodies…....

The angle in [Not With My Wife, You Don't!], as it happens, is pretty obtuse: the Air Farce, according to the script [by Gelbart, Norman Panama, and Peter Barnes], is a gland-based gang of joy-stick jockeys who do almost nothing but make low-level attacks on garters of opportunity. As a result, the triangle in this picture is anything but acute. But it's cute, real cute. (p. 107) [The film is an] airy nothing whooshing along so briskly that audiences may fail to notice how much of the ho ho is...

["The Conquering Hero" is an] utterly charming, fast-moving and unpretentious musical—happily in the old tradition, and offering the rarity of a good, workable little book…. Larry Gelbart has done a creditable job of adapting the story from a Preston Sturges movie. I believe it should persevere….