TIME

August 18, 1967 12:00 AM GMT-4

Enter Laughing. Carl Reiner’s autobiographical novel about a stage-struck Jewish boy’s first taste of ham was one of the delights of Broadway in 1963, thanks to Joseph Stein’s knowing dramatization and to a winning performance by Alan Arkin as the fumbling hero. Now Reiner has directed a film version that sticks closely to the words of the play but destroys much of its sly insight into the dawning of awareness in darkest Bronx.

Arkin used the whole man to embody adolescent chutzpah; Newcomer Reni Santoni seems able to draw on only a pout here and a wiggled eyebrow there, which is far from enough. Shelley Winters and David Opatoshu contribute a pair of luridly overdrawn caricatures as the well-meaning parents who stand by helplessly while their son switches his ambitions from pharmacy to footlights. By contrast, Jose Ferrer and Elaine May seem almost drawn from life as the flamboyant impresario of a pass-the-hat theatrical workshop and his daffy Duse of a daughter. Their world of raucous flea-bitten theatrics seems, oddly enough, more wholesome than Mom’s chicken soup.

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