Word: ionesco
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...Imagine Ionesco's Rhinoceros cut, cramped, revved up and staged on a go-go dancer's platform in a roadhouse discothèque. That gives a hint of the kind of upbeat, frantic vulgarization done here by Julian Barry and Tom O'Horgan in another of eight filmed plays mounted by the American Film Theater. O'Horgan and Barry collaborated on Lenny, the Broadway biography of Lenny Bruce, and this film contains the same sort of trendy stunts, the same kind of empty, aggressive energy...
...Ionesco is a logician of the absurd. His ironies are cool and geometric, his surrealism couched in subtle refractions of the ordinary. His work benefits from a naturalistic approach that reinforces the absurdity by contrasting it. Instead, O'Horgan clobbers the play with a bladder of tacky tricks, like shaking the camera to represent a rhino's point of view, staging a coy, clumsy dream sequence, and including a score by Gait MacDermot (Hair) suitable for rebroadcast in office elevators...
...this, of course, there are distinct political analogies, particularly to Ionesco's experience just before he left Rumania in 1938, when many of his friends were throwing in with the Fascists. O'Horgan and Barry have removed not only the politics but the resonance as well. What remains is a squeaky sermon on the virtues of nonconformity...
...musical within the movie. The real producers decided that just wouldn't sell. This very funny movie was the first film with Mostel and Wilder. Their most recent has Zero Mostel hilariously and violently turning into a rhinoceros. But he was so funny there that he helped turn Ionesco into a travesty and a sham. He's never quite so funny in The Producers, but Mel Brooks's film contains no pachyderms...
...books for some secret that would explain his legerdemain, but Glistrup insists that there is no secret. "My yearly accounts are always negative," he boasts. "I explain this to the tax people. They agree. As a lawyer, I should welcome this absurd theater, so absurd that it beats Ionesco completely, but what I want to do is show how unreasonable these tax laws...