BEFORE: OK, so apparently whatever connection I once saw between "Stella Dallas" and my next film, I no longer remember. I must have had a reason for using that film as my lead-in to the next topic, but that was months ago, and I can no longer remember it. It certainly wasn't direct linking, because it doesn't share any stars with my planned film for tonight - but scanning the filmographies of a few stars shows that I can create a link by adding tonight's film to the line-up, and sort of skooching all my April films down the line-up by one. Yes, this changes what film I'll watch on April Fool's Day, but I think things will still be OK. Alan Hale carries over again from "Stella Dallas", and order is restored.
No, it's not in my collection and TCM hasn't run it lately, but it was available on YouTube, so I watched it on my iPad. It seems kind of strange for me to watch an old film on a new device, but that's the world we're living in.
THE PLOT: An illiterate stooge in a traveling medicine show wanders into a strange town and is picked up on a vagrancy charge. The town's corrupt officials mistake him for the inspector general whom they think is traveling in disguise.
AFTER: I never really "got" Danny Kaye, in sort of the same way I never really "got" W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers, either. But most of my experiences with these comedic people came from watching their films on the Boston UHF stations on Sunday mornings after church, and maybe I didn't really have good concentration skills as a kid, or maybe my mother would call us in for lunch, and this was well before she gave up and let us all watch our meals in front of the TV. As a result I may have seen half of one Danny Kaye film or part of another Abbott & Costello film, and they all kind of run together in my memory.
Then I went to college, and the focus in film appreciation class was on films like "Duck Amuck" instead of "Duck Soup", or Buster Keaton's "The General" instead of something like "The Inspector General". Hey, I don't make the syllabus for film school, so I followed their guidelines and watched the films they wanted me to. There's just no list of films anywhere that can be completely comprehensive, because everything's based on some person's or committee's opinion about THIS one being better than THAT one.
The general consensus seems to be that something like this is just a bit of silly fluff, and I'm not saying that's wrong, but it must have been entertaining to someone at some point, no? It's a bit of a tough sell to pitch this film as an adaptation of a Russian satrical play by Nikolai Gogol, or a bracing investigation of political corruption in Napoleonic Europe, when it comes off as more of just a vehicle for Kaye to make funny expressions, do some gymnastics and sing some silly rhyming songs.
I found a lot of the gags just went on too long, like having to do stunt after stunt in the training room, while the guy with the eyepatch keeps getting incrementally closer and closer to getting a good look at Georgi, or the dinner scene where a starving Georgi keeps getting denied food, again and again, because he gets distracted by someone next to him and his plate gets taken away. Enough already, let the guy eat. And the payoff for the gag - watching him finally eat in sped-up fashion - just wasn't worth waiting for.
Would anyone really believe that a head on a platter that can move, talk and drink was really a decapitated head without a body? Seems like that's the most transparent con, if you can't imagine someone's body hidden under the table, then you probably deserve to get fooled. And what's the sense of trying to bribe the guy who you think has come to your town to stop corruption? Even from a comic standpoint, that doesn't make much sense.
Still, I can kind of see where this fits into the history of films poking fun at politics and dictators and such, somewhere in between Chaplin's "The Dictator", and a more modern film like, say, "Dave" or that one with Sacha Baron Cohen. They all sort of rely on mistaken identity to make a larger point about the type of people who work in government, and the type that don't.
Also starring Danny Kaye, Walter Slezak (last seen in "Lifeboat"), Gene Lockhart (last seen in "His Girl Friday"), Elsa Lanchester (last seen in "Witness for the Prosecution"), Barbara Bates (last seen in "All About Eve"), Rhys Williams.
RATING: 4 out of 10 bribes
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