Rendering to Caesar

By JAY COCKS

TEN FROM YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS Directed by MAX LIEBMAN

Properly, this is not a movie. It is a compilation of kinescopes--crude and grainy in technical quality--from a madhouse landmark in TV comedy.

Your Show of Shows of the 1950s is remembered, along with Ernie Kovacs' excursions beyond the pale, as the best and funniest work ever done for TV. Yet memory is a fun-house mirror There is always a nagging doubt when gazing into it: Were things really that good? Yes, they certainly were, as this mini-anthology resoundingly proves.

The ten episodes here, selected from among sketches performed on 161 shows, not only reconfirm the warmest memories, but they revive the kind of deep, continuous and ultimately helpless laughter that is too rarely heard, the kind that makes the eyes water and the mouth slack at the edges from strain. It is laughter that for a time was always within Sid Caesar's power to give.

Caesar was like an unrefined piece of electronic equipment--a sensitive comic receptor who could be jolted into action by the slightest comic impulse. The impulses were provided by a crew of pleasantly deranged writers (Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen and the young Mel Brooks among them).

Caesar was a big man, broad of feature and seemingly clumsy, and his face was unremarkable in repose. Of course, it was almost never in repose, but was forever melting, cracking or erupting into some expression of comic extremity. His body, too, was surprisingly lithe, as if his physical dexterity defied his size. Caesar's comedy was a wild assault, with nothing especially cunning about it. As carefully planned as it must have been, Caesar and his wonderfully talented cronies (Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris) always gave it that crucial feeling of spontaneity, a hint that somehow everything might just break apart.

Max Liebman, who produced Your Show of Shows, has compiled this film with a craftsman's eye for pacing the laughter. It begins slowly, with a modest bit of domestic conflict in which Imogene Coca, looking, as ever, like your high-school dietician, must tell Caesar, her husband, that she has wrecked his beloved car. From there the film builds rapidly to an unlikely skirmish in a movie theater, a board meeting presided over by a chairman concerned only with his lunch, and a fond parody of a silent film called The Sewing Machine Girl. Finally there is a cli max of unsparing hilarity: a send-up of From Here to Eternity entitled From Here to Obscurity, starring Caesar as Montgomery Bugle; and a devastating reworking of a TV show called This Is Your Story, with Reiner as an impervious M.C., Caesar as an overwrought, reluctant guest, and Howard Morris as an absurdly lachrymose relative given to clutching convulsions of joy.

The affable madness circulated on Your Show of Shows and its successor, Caesar's Hour, was contagious. Other Caesar writers at one time or another included Neil Simon and Woody Allen.

Reiner and Mel Brooks have gone on, separately and together, to become two of the most important comic creators in film; Reiner's Where's Poppa? and Brooks' The Producers, with their free wheeling antic absurdity, still show the strong influence of their mutual apprenticeship.

For anyone who was devoted to Your Show of Shows, what was perhaps most valuable about the program was its brashness, the way it could so effectively ridicule and level the over wrought products of popular culture--a quality that currently appears to be in short supply. The only thing wrong with Ten from Your Show of Shows is that ten is not enough. The film, past due, is warmly welcome, but it would be even more cheering to know that it was the first of a series.

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