Music

Part of the charm and humor of the songs in Forum, is that there is no warning or build-up to the musical numbers. Nowadays, in musicals such at Mamma Mia, the producing is so seamless you’d think that Lady Gaga’s producer cut and spliced the recordings. In Forum, there is palpable dissidence between the recordings of the musical numbers and the talking lines. The humor of the songs in Forum is how out of place they are, like someone super-glued a recording of Zero Mostel singing in the shower onto the film. The disconnect between speech and music is humorous because it’s the opposite of what would be in a serious epic toga film.

In Spartacus(1960) Antoninus recites a song to a group of slaves in the dim twilight. The song is stark and impresses the crowd with because of it’s desperate longing (a feeling the slaves sympathize with).

When the blazing sun hangs low in the western sky,


when the wind dies away on the mountain,


when the song of the meadowlark turns still,


when the field locust clicks no more in the field, 


and the sea foam sleeps like a maiden at rest,


and twilight touches the shape of the wandering earth,


I turn home. 


Through blue shadows and purple woods 


I turn home. 


I turn to the place that I was born

to the mother who bore me and the father who taught me

long ago, long ago... 
long ago. 


Alone am l now, lost and alone, in a far, wide, wandering world. 


Yet still when the blazing sun hangs low,

when the wind dies away and the sea foam sleeps, 


and twilight touches the wandering earth


I turn home.

It is a very powerful scene and a good example of how a song would be used in a toga movie. Forum does not try to woo it’s audience with moving lyrics. This is an excerpt from the song ‘Everybody Ought to Have a Maid’:

Everybody ought to have a maid,

Someone who you hire when you're short of help

To offer you the sort of help

You never get from a spouse:

Fluttering up the stairway,

Shuttering up the windows,

Cluttering up the bedroom,

Buttering up the master,

Puttering all around the house!

Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delicious,

Tidying up the dishes,

Neat as a pin.

Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delightful,

Sweeping out, Sleeping in.

The context for this song is that Senex comes home to find a confused prostitute asking him to go to bed with her and he is told by Pseudolus that she’s just the new maid. The song if full of innuendoes, dirty little jokes and foolish dancing.

The song itself is funny, but it is also used as an excuse to watch three middle-aged men traipse across aqueducts, stack on each other’s shoulders and do other arbitrary things, all the while singing and dancing in unison. The song does nothing to move the plot forward, is awkwardly choreographed and certain moves of Mostel’s seem to be completely improvised. The unpolished quality of the musical numbers is what makes it a brilliant parody of toga movie music. Firstly, any singing or dancing in a toga movie is calculated and serious. Secondly, the soundtracks from toga movies are in general very grandiose, full of horns and crashing cymbals. The soundtracks tend to garner great accolades, such as Ben Hur(1959), which won Best Sound and Best Music in the 1960 Academy Awards. There is nothing grandiose about ‘Everybody Ought to Have a Maid’, aside from being grandiosely funny.


Full version of 'Everybody Ought to Have a Maid':