Money on Your Life

This is the fourth of four shorts that Danny Kaye was in at the start of his film career. Kaye isn't in the lead role, but steals all the scenes he's in. Again, this is a film that has a good idea for a plot. The antics are good, and there's plenty of those. Unfortunately, the script just doesn't have much humor in the dialog.

Charles Kemper has the lead as Charlie Kemp, an accident insurance agent. The best humor has to do with his company and its insurance policies. Charlie sells a policy to Nikolai Nikolayevich, and when two foreign Russian agents try to kill Nikolai, Charlie does everything he can to try to keep him alive.

The name of the insurance company is, Look Before You Leap Accident Insurance Co. It's slogan is, "Your broken neck is our loss."

Here's the best exchange of dialog in film. Charlie Kemp says, "You have no idea how much money you'd get if you broke both arms, both legs, 15 ribs, drowned and suffocated." Nikolai Nikolayevich, "I couldn't be that lucky."

This is one of several shorts a young Danny Kaye made with Educational Pictures just before the low-budget comedy studio went out of business. Here he plays a very unlucky Russian who is chased by two huge-bearded would-be assassins into an insurance office, where an eager salesman pushes a policy on him, only to have to protect his life afterward. The rest of this two-reeler is just as delightfully absurdist and bizarre as that.

You can tell it's a cheap, quick production (the sets wobble constantly) and Charles Kemper, sharing the billing with Kaye, doesn't make too much of an impression, but I love the short's wild, unreal sense of humor. It's almost like a series of blackouts that don't actually black out, building on the absurdity of the premise, with plenty of great one-liners ("Haven't I seen you before?" "Well, I've been somewhere before.") impossible sight gags (the window-washer's clothes leak after he has been shot at), and increasingly silly dramatic-irony gags on the safeness of Nikolai Nikolayevich.

Danny Kaye's over-the-top exaggeration of a heel-clicking Russian works great in the over-the-top exaggeration of a comedy movie. I haven't loved him in everything I've seen, and I don't know if that character could support a whole series of shorts well, but here his shtick fits the piece perfectly. If you like free-form, goofy comedy and don't mind plenty of non-sequitors and impossible gags this is well worth a look.