My thirteen-year-old daughter, for reasons she can’t fully articulate, hates The Incredible Mr. Limpet.
I stare at her baffled. What’s not to love about what is arguably Don Knotts’ best film, his Citizen Kane?
“It’s…stupid,” she says. “Stupid” is uttered in that dismissive, non-specific way teenagers assign to certain words these days. “Stupid” could mean anything; but in this case, I think she’s really saying, “Mr. Limpet doesn’t have the emotional resonance of Monsters, Inc. nor the Shakespearean scope of The Lion King.”
Fair enough. The 1964 movie, which combines live action and animation, might seem a bit creaky and treacly by today’s standards—so much celluloid has passed under the bridge since then—but there’s still something downright charming about the milquetoast bookkeeper who turns into a fish after falling off a Coney Island pier, then winds up becoming the Navy’s secret weapon in the fight against German U-boats (which, if the movie is to be believed, were cruising the waters just off Long Island in 1941).
Sure, hold The Incredible Mr. Limpet up against Who Framed Roger Rabbit and its early attempt at marrying animation with live action tends to resemble a fourth-grade art project. Then again, compare Roger Rabbit to Monsters, Inc. and R-r-roger looks like finger-paints dabbed on the screen. It’s all a matter of perspective.
And when I first saw The Incredible Mr. Limpet back in the late 1960s, I was sucked into its artistry as wholly as someone standing in front of a Vermeer canvas for the first time. At the time, I could relate to the nervous, gawky Henry Limpet who was so obsessed with his tropical fish the insults of his hen-pecking wife (Carole Cook) just rolled off him like water off a fin. I was thin, high-strung and obsessed with dogs, but otherwise a carbon copy of Don Knotts. I knew all about bullies like Henry’s friend George Stickel (Jack Weston) who comes home on shore leave and intrudes on the Limpet household, making not-so-subtle googly eyes at Henry’s wife. My childhood was filled with bruisers like George trying to take away things I owned. When Henry falls into the ocean and transmogrifies into a Charlie the Tuna look-a-like, my heart thumped with joy, my breath caught in my throat—now, I thought, he can escape the humdrum world of oxygen and dirt and finally be happy swimming in the ocean. I, too, longed to escape the small town I lived in. Then, when Henry-the-Fish falls in love with a pink-finned beauty named Ladyfish (voiced by Elizabeth MacRae), I nearly swooned and passed out right there on the living room floor in front of our console Zenith TV. My heart, too, had been robbed by a brown-haired girl in first grade.
I was Henry, Henry was me. Such is the power of movies.
So why, when I pop the new Limpet DVD into my player and sit down with a bowl of cheese popcorn thirty-plus years later, does the movie seem so dated, so carefully cute, as cheddary as the coating on my popcorn?
The simple explanation is that in those thirty years, I’ve lost my virginity, tasted liquor, smoked cigarettes, read Catcher in the Rye, witnessed both Watergate and Lewinskygate, watched The Last Tango in Paris, Trainspotting and Waterworld, and suffered insults from my teenage children. My skin has grown thicker, my belly flabbier and my tongue more cynical. The years have not always been kind and they’ve left The Incredible Mr. Limpet in the shallow end of the pool.
Still, there is much to love (or at least fondly admire) in these brisk 102 minutes. For one thing, the colors are as bright as a load of laundry just run through a cycle of All-Tempa-Cheer. Even the live-action sequences—in Henry’s apartment, at the Coney Island wharf, on board the Navy ships—have the vibrancy of a well-inked cartoon. Maybe it’s just the crispness of the DVD, but The Incredible Mr. Limpet at times resembles a tankful of exotic tropical fish. The seams between animation and live-action aren’t always perfect—it’s less clunky than the Gene Kelly-Jerry the Mouse dance duet in Anchors Aweigh nineteen years earlier, and a far cry from Roger Rabbit’s mind-boggling effects twenty-four years later—but the combination is believable enough for any kid’s imagination circa 1969.
Second, I’ve got to admire the way director Arthur Lubin and writer Jameson Brewster push the envelope with a children’s movie that so boldly flaunts the tenth commandment. George gleefully covets his neighbor’s wife and Weston plays it to the hilt, giggling lasciviously and wiggling his eyebrows at Bessie. The adultery innuendo went right over my head thirty years ago, but something still felt wrong about the whole triangular situation. It’s an odd dynamic because George eventually turns into a character you like in spite of his caddish behavior. He remains Henry’s best friend, even as he’s cozying up to his “widow.”
Another reason to like the movie is the restraint shown when it comes time to deliver the obligatory songs. The Sammy Fain-Harold Adamson tunes are mercifully short (two verses of Don Knotts warbling “I wish…I wish…I wish I were a fish” is enough for even the most tin-eared viewer) and come few and far between, leaving more time for the comedic misadventures of the fish who leads the naval attack against the nasty Nazi fleet.
But of course the main reason to cuddle up to The Incredible Mr. Limpet is the one and only Mr. Knotts. With his memorable features—resembling a pruney Ichabod Crane strung-out on caffeine—Knotts has made a career out of rubber-legged comedy. His Barney Fife remains in a class by himself—the world will never see another drawling, impetuous deputy like that again—but we shouldn’t underestimate his other, big-screen work.
He’s at his best here as the piscatorial Walter Mitty, flat-footed on the surface but fleet-finned underwater. “I’ve got faulty equilibrium,” the gee-whiz patriot explains with an embarrassed laugh when asked why the Navy wouldn’t take him. You know he’s just dying inside; anyone who’s ever been picked last when choosing sides for basketball can relate. We don’t see nearly enough of the non-animated Knotts before he plunges into his cartoon version, but it’s enough to establish his wistful, stammering loser-loner as a champion for the rest of us—a model Everynerd.
“But,” you ask, “if Limpet is his Kane, where does that leave films like The Apple Dumpling Gang or The Shakiest Gun in the West?” Of course it’s all a matter of taste and discretion, but I’d say those are his Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil.
Cue the close-up of a pair of fish-lips whispering: “Lim-pet.”
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