Against the background of a return to flag-waving patriotism, demonically derisive movies like Richard Lester's Cuba … seem suddenly anachronistic in the very casualness of their anti-American assumptions…. Americans are not merely ugly, but grotesquely hideous. Certainly, [Lester did not] set out to make any overt political statements, to win over any hearts and minds, as it were. Cuba, though shot in Spain, treats Castro's triumphant entrance into Havana in 1959 as if it were t...

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 comed...

Intelligent reinterpretation is one thing; sensationalistic or smartass revisionism, quite another. [In Robin and Marian] we take Robin Hood, his merry men, and Maid Marian, but show them as middle-aged folk in an autumnal mood, at the end of their chivalric tether. We connect the story even more tightly than usual with Richard the Lionhearted by having Robin and Little John fight under him in the Third Crusade, and making the film begin at Châluz, where Richard meets his end…. That is revisio...

The good news is that Butch and Sundance: The Early Days can stand on its own four feet without making us sob longingly for the original. Lester has achieved a cooler and more distant tone for the material than did the redhot Hill before him…. Butch and Sundance: The Early Days is worth a look simply for its wit, humor, and expertise. It is such a relief to see a clever movie for a change that the absence of emotional explosions may not seem like such a dreadful handicap. A respected colleague sittin...

As far as theme is concerned, [Butch and Sundance: The Early Days] might as well be called The Deer Hunter: The Early Days. Once more we plunge into the primal American myth of male friendship: why this friendship and its adventures are the best things in life; how women are meant to watch and wait and understand, with a brave grave sigh, that men must be off on their manly doings. The fact that the doings in the case of B and S are outlawry—theft, violence, and, eventually, murder—matters lit...

Richard Lester is a competent farce director, whether he is directing farce or anything else. Yet [The Ritz] falls, unfarcically, flat…. [Farce], especially the kind that depends on a multiplicity of doors flying open and shut as ill-assorted people rush through them toward outrageous consequences, needs … stage space to play with. The buzzing human insects must describe bizarre trajectories, inscribe absurd patterns in their boxlike space, to illustrate the whims of that waggish demiurge vari...

[On the one hand, Lester's film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has] the framework of [Bert] Shevelove and [Larry] Gelbart's Broadway hit, its slow fuse Jewish-American humour, its carefully set up jokes about dithering middle-aged men and bullying wives let loose in Brooklyn-on-Tiber. This humour takes time: above all, time for the actors to build contact with the audience. On the other hand, there is Richard Lester's style, glancing, cool, nerveless, and dependent on pe...

[In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum] Richard Lester has painted on film a manic montage of vaudeville turns, girlie-book jokes, movie bits and gag cartoons that congeal, magically, into art…. With Designer Tony Walton he has built an ancient Rome noble only in its houses of debauchery and steeped everywhere else in a middle-class decay that could easily make it a First Century Watts. Within this he manages, quite improbably, to expand space to the point of infinity and suffuse it with ...

[Robin and Marian provides] a worldly, wise, and witty response to our eternal wonderment about how our heroes lived ever after, happily or not…. [It is] a story as satisfying as any that came before, and far, far richer in nuance, detail, and pertinence, thanks to two masters of the genre—screenwriter James Goldman … and director Richard Lester…. Both know the blend of anachronism and actuality that puts vitality into the past and resurrects the figures in long-ago landscapes; b...

Antic, frantic, mechanical but amusing anyhow, The Ritz is of particular interest because it is the first major movie about homosexuality that does not give a thought to redeeming social value. There is not a trace of seriousness in The Ritz. In both the traditional and contemporary meanings of the word, it is a gay movie. (p. 72) Richard Lester, who seems to work almost as fast as Googie Gomez talks … keeps the proceedings right on his customary sardonic course. Lester obeys the first law of this ki...