The Boys from Syracuse is a 1940 American musical film directed by A. Edward Sutherland, based on the 1938 stage musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, which in turn was loosely based on the play The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare.
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "a light-weight story of mistaken identities which brushes quickly over the more intriguing implications of bedroom farce and relies in the main for its humors upon familiar low-comedy mugging and anachronistic gags.
"[6] Harrison's Reports wrote that the film "should, for the most part, prove satisfying to the masses, for it has plentiful gags, a few good songs, and romance.
"[8] In a review for The New Yorker, Sally Benson reported that the film had revived the stage musical "not very successfully."
However, she wrote, "if you can stand seeing double, and don't mind hearing American slang in ancient Greece, and can even smile feebly over chariots equipped with taximeters, you may be able to totter out of your nearest air-cooled theater with a sultry sort of satisfaction.