O Homem de 8 Vidas

First I have to admit that Danny Kaye was completely unheard of to me before I saw this movie. During the summer one year, the 'Morning Movie' featured 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.' A wonderful surprise for me was the actor Danny Kaye who I had never heard of before. Instead of another boring movie that I would have to watch because there is nothing else to watch. Danny Kaye became the actor I needed to see more of because I couldn't stop laughing. Unquestionably, this movie is full of characters that complement Danny Kaye, but he is the 'star' that makes this movie shine. The variety of the storyline is well written, but not just any actor could lead this cast. If you are looking to see what a real funny movie should look like, check this one out. The movie is good, but Danny Kaye is what makes it great.

In New York, the clumsy Walter Mitty (Danny Kaye) is the publisher of pulp fiction at the Pierce Publishing house owned by Bruce Pierce (Thurston Hall). He lives with his overprotective and abusive mother (Fay Bainter) and neither his fiancée Gertrude Griswold (Ann Rutherford) and her mother (Florence Bates) nor his best friend Tubby Wadsworth (Gordon Jones) respects him. Walter is an escapist and daydreams into a world of fantasy many times along the day. When Walter is commuting, he stumbles in the train with the gorgeous Rosalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo) that uses Walter to escape from her pursuer. Walter unintentionally gets involved with a dangerous ring of spies that are seeking a black book with notes about a hidden treasure.

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1947) is a hilarious comedy about a clumsy daydreamer that gets into a dangerous ring of spies. Last Saturday I watched the annoying "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (2013) with Ben Stiller and I decided to seek the original 1947 movie that is better and better, with many gags. Danny Kaye is very funny performing the clumsy and coward Walter Mitty. Forget the 2013 remake and prefer to see the original 1947 comedy. My vote is seven.

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Watching the Danny Kaye version after having watched the Ben Stiller remake is a fascinating experience. The modern remake has definite virtues - notably Stiller's little-boy-lost performance in a sophisticated world of New York advertising, as well as the subtext offering an elegy to LIFE magazine, now doomed to appear on the internet only. On the other hand Norman Z. Mcleod's Technicolor version of the Thurber story contains one of Danny Kaye's best performances on film. He was nothing short of a genius - a brilliant slapstick comedian, with an apparently limitless range of facial expressions, with a natural instinct for delivering comic songs full of verbal pyrotechnics. Structurally speaking, the film has a story of sorts, but is basically a star vehicle for Kaye to show off his talents, playing a distressed sea- captain, an English flying ace (complete with cut-glass RP accent), a brilliant card-sharper (complete with cheroot) and a cowboy storming into a studio-set bound western town. His wife Sylvia Fine provides the music and lyrics for two specialty tunes; in one of them he plays a mid- European professor impersonating most of the instruments of the orchestra. With all this verbal and visual wizardry going on, it's hard to concentrate on the plot; but it doesn't really matter, as Kaye is such an endearing performer that he can quite easily win his way into the audience's affections, especially when he plays direct to camera as if performing in the live theater. The film contains one or two good supporting performances, notably from Virginia Mayo as the love-interest playing several roles in Kaye/Mitty's fantastic dreams, and Boris Karloff as a crooked psychiatrist trying to push Kaye/Mitty out of the window of an upper-floor skyscraper, and then putting him under psychological influence in an attempt to extract vital information out of him. But basically the film belongs to Kaye, a superb star vehicle for a fantastically talented actor and performer, who was as much at home in front of a live audience as he was in front of a movie camera.

Whatever the setting, and there were many, Danny Kaye always played himself -- the hypochondriacal, stuttering, cowardly, nervously fiddling neurotic. That's pretty much what he is here, and if you haven't seen a Danny Kaye movie this is a pretty funny introduction.

The plot violates James Thurber's short story, the point of which was that Walter Mitty daydreamed so much because his own life was so dull. It's probably Thurber's most popular story, although "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomatox" has more outright laughs. Here Kaye is involved in one richly comic episode after another.

The famous fantasies are pretty much gotten out of the way before the movie is half over. The "real" scenes are at least as amusing. He's a copy editor at a pulp magazine in New York and Boris Karloff, he of the ominous lisp, is pitching him a story about a doctor who murders people without leaving a trace by pressing on a nerve at the base of the skull. "Oh, we've already used that in 'The Revenge of the Gland Specialist'," objects Kaye.

The plot is a mystery about the planned theft of the Dutch Crown Jewels. Something to do with a murder Kaye witnesses (nobody believes him), a black book, Kaye singing silly songs, a chief conspirator nicknamed "the Boot," and a dazzling innocent blond -- Virginia Mayo -- who has a pretty sassy figure.

Watching her and Kaye talking about corsets reminded me that when I was a teen, all women seemed to be wrapped up in inexplicable buckles, plastic straps, and clips that only a deranged mechanical engineer could design. Come to think of it, I'm still out of it. I don't know whether women leave body gel on or wash it off, or what bath beads are. And when did "lipstick" turn into "lip rouge," and "rouge" turn into "blush," and "mascara" into "kohl" -- or DID it? Somebody is pulling the wool over somebody's eyes around here.

You ought to see this if only for the costume design and hair styles. Wow -- what exotica! It's impossible to believe that women ever dressed like this, or hoped to, despite Fritz Feld's glutinous paean to a hat that, although it looks like something Calder might have dreamed up during a horrible hangover, can be disassembled into three -- count 'em -- three separate parts and then be piece together into yet another arrangement. Put a tiny quail under that feathery apparatus and you're talking a two-hundred dollar entree at a four-star Parisian restaurant.

There's a likable element of running gags in here too. On three occasions Kaye's blustery boss is holding important business meetings when Kaye enters unexpectedly -- once simply late, and twice more crawling backward in through the tenth floor window pursued by pigeons.

Kaye's decline was sad. He wound up singing "Thumbelina" to a nearly empty night club in later years. But he's at his peak here, and his peak was pretty good.

Danny Kaye at his best in a fantasy/comedy about a hen-pecked (by his mom and girlfriend) man who daydreams that he's a hero rescuing a damsel in distress (Virginia Mayo) from all sorts of perils. In real life he stumbles across her path and instantly becomes involved in an espionage plot involving villainous Boris Karloff. It's all played for laughs and Danny even gets to do a couple of his tongue-twisting musical routines.

Especially enjoyable in the supporting cast are Ann Rutherford as his silly girlfriend and Florence Bates as her overbearing mother. Thurston Hall has fun with his role as Kaye's harried, blustery boss who, while browbeating him, is nevertheless prone to borrowing ideas from Kaye for new sales angles in the pulp fiction market.

Kaye has a field day when his dreams take over, impersonating everyone from a sea captain to a riverboat gambler to a fashion designer--all with his own distinct flair for comic routines. A funny, witty, always entertaining little gem that has somehow been overlooked through the years. Virginia Mayo makes a delightful co-star.