THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY May Be a Funny Xmas Present.
Written: Dec 17 '00 (Updated Aug 15 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Danny Kaye at his best. An example of farce and satire successfully combined.
Cons: The movie needs one more fantasy in its third quarter.
The Bottom Line: A classic comic short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." is turned into an equally classic movie vehicle for the entertaining Danny Kaye.
macresarf1's Full Review: Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Himmelsweiss!! It's Valter Mitty!" cries a surprised German ace in the cockpit of his Heinkel. "I'm a dead man."
Indeed, RAF Wing Commander Mitty (Danny Kaye) swoops down, his graceful Spitfire going "topoketa-topoketa-topoketa," all guns flaring comic death, in Norman Z. McLeod's farcical version of THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (1947).
Based on James Thurber's lean, classic 2500 word short story (New Yorker: March 18, 1939), MGM's 110 minute adaptation by Ken Englund and Everett Freeman was strongly criticized by both Thurber and some critics. (Thurber is said to have offered producer Sam Goldwyn $10, 000 if he did NOT make the movie.) The original story was about a hen-pecked middle-aged man, who, while driving his wife to the beauty parlor in Waterbury, Connecticut, daydreams his way into embarrassing and very funny disasters. In his mind, he is commander of a Navy Dirigible going down in a storm, a brilliant consulting surgeon saving the World's richest man, etc. In his real life, he is almost rear-ending the car in front of him, only increasing the abuse he receives from his frustrated spouse. In the end, he goes to an imagined firing squad: "Walter Mitty -- indomitable to the last!"
Thurber and the critics objected to MGM's dramatization on several grounds. For one thing, a couple of Thurber's fantasies had been dropped. For another, several new ones had been added. And thirdly, the whole story was now held together with a farcical spy yarn.
As the film starts, Walter Mitty, portrayed by Danny Kaye at the zenith of his comic genius, appears a reasonably handsome, young editor for a pulp fiction publisher in New York City. It is early in World War II, and he is driving, with his dominating mother (Fay Bainter), to catch a train to work. She is goes on and on about all the purchases she wants him to make in town, and about an upcoming visit with his shallow fiancee and her mother that night. When he stops before a gigantic billboard advertising "Seadrift Soap Chips," his mind seeks relief in daydream:
"Somewhere off the South China coast, in the worst typhoon in 40 years . . . " Captain Walter Mitty is struggling with the wheel of his clipper ship, loaded full of half a million pounds of rare spices -- the pumps going "topoketa-topoketa-topoketa" -- when the beautiful girl of his dreams (Virginia Mayo) throws her arms around him and implores that he save her and the vessel!
Mitty almost has an accident.
On the train, the neurotic Mitty is accosted by a beautiful young blonde, Rosalind Van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo, again), who peremptorily kisses him (in an effort to throw off a man who is following her). When she lures him into sharing a cab with her in New York City, and makes an appeal that he go with her to meet a Dutch horticulturist on the docks, Mitty is so rattled that he leaves his briefcase beside her in the back seat as he leaps from the car.
And so is launched a spy plot involving the death of the horticulturist Marsden (Frank Reich), a black notebook slipped into Mitty's briefcase, plus a mysterious arch German agent "The Boot" and his top henchman, Dr Hugo Hollingshead (Boris Karloff). It is all about paintings by Dutch Masters hidden in Holland from the Nazis. The locations of the hidden paintings are contained in that elusive book. Mitty meets Rosalind's Uncle, Peter Van Hoorn (Konstantin Shayne), who is leading a Free Dutch group in keeping the information from the Nazi spies. It is not long before Mitty is crawling along building ledges and confronting assassins.
In between, he tries to convince his boss (the expansive Thurston Hall) that he is not nuts, while fending off spies and pitching ideas for Racy Detective Stories or Sensational Murder cases. He must also placate Mom, who is suspicious that his antics indicate something seriously wrong with him. And, when he is almost discovered toweling down the rain-soaked, gorgeous Rosalind in her black slip and underwear, he only just escapes the claws of his fiancee Gertrude Griswold (Ann Rutherford) and her formidable mother (Florence Bates).
And every so often, when things get dull, or the future looks perilous, Walter finds himself drifting away to . . . an operating room where, as beautiful nurses look on in adoration, Dr Walter Mitty fixes with his fountain pen the respirator (which is malfunctioning: topoketa-topoketa-BEEP), and takes over brain surgery from a colleague who has lost his nerve.
Or Mitty imagines that he is an RAF fighter pilot, a riverboat gambler, a cowboy hero -- perhaps most strangely, a Parisian hat designer.
This last mentioned bit allows Kaye to perform his famous "I'm Anatole from Paris" comic song, written for him by his wife Sylvia Fine. He sang it first in The Straw Hat Review (1939), which led to night club gigs. He then took a featured role in the Kurt Weil/Ira Gershwin musical, Lady in the Dark, early in 1941, and a starring part in Cole Porter's Let's Face It, in the Fall of that year. Goldwyn signed him to a long-term contract shortly after.
Danny Kaye was at his best in THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. His gentle grace, comic timing, gift for patter, his handsome features (which could become contorted or fluttery in an instant) would put most modern comedians to shame. And (reinforced by the Hayes Office, of course) he never resorted to bad taste, as most comedians do today, coarsening our sensibilities. Unfortunately, his marriage to Sylvia Fine foundered, and it gradually became apparent that he needed her close collaboration to provide fresh material, tailored to his talents. After THE COURT JESTER (1956), his career film career declined, even though he continued to be popular in the public eye. He moved into Television, went to work for UNICEF, and became honored as a humanitarian.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY reunited Kaye with Virginia Mayo for the fourth and last time. She was just a Goldwyn Girl, posing in his first film, UP IN ARMS (Nugent, 1944), but she rose to co-star with him in WONDER MAN (Humberstone, 1945) and THE KID FROM BROOKLYN (McLeod, 1946). After that, she won important serious roles in such remembered films as THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (Wyler, 1949) and WHITE HEAT (Walsh, 1949), but in the minds of many, she is identified with the "peaches and cream" beauty she had in the Kaye pictures.
Veteran Director Norman Z. McLeod had been in Hollywood since the 1920's, where he began as an animator, then a screen writer (SKIPPY, 1931). When he turned to directing he showed his comic flair by directing two early Marx Brothers comedies, MONKEY BUSINESS (1931) and HORSE FEATHERS (1932); W. C. Fields' IT'S A GIFT (1934); followed by TOPPER (1938) and PANAMA HATTIE (1941), before Kaye's THE KID FROM BROOKLYN and THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. In his later career, he directed several Bob Hope vehicles.
The distinguished cinematographer Lee Garmes provides a lesson in bright Technicolor photography. It should be noted that most of the music, under the Musical Direction of Emil Newman, was really written by Sylvia Fine and David Raksin (LAURA, 1944).
The supporting cast are all fine farceurs and they keep the action light, satirical and flying along (although the third quarter slows a bit). Boris Karloff is particularly amusing, as he sends up his image the way he did on the stage in Arsenic and Old Lace (1941). The great Fritz Feld has a small role as the real Anatole, and the Goldwyn Girls appear to better advantage than usual, spoofing a craze in women's hats, so much part of the Post War fashion scene.
In fact, much of THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY deals hilariously with the pretensions or preoccupations, romantic and otherwise, which pertained in America at the time: plus our snobbish pursuit of fashion and wealth; an unrealistic admiration of epic heroism; a fear of "Momism" and women in general; the atrocious standards of popular magazines; an envy of professions such as those in Medicine; the absurdity of corporate politics; a yen for gambling; a prejudice against things European; and a yearning for simple means of problem solving like those fabled in the Old West. To the extent that these pretensions and preoccupations still exist (and many of them do), this adaptation remains a very funny movie.
If you want to know where so much of our modern comedy, especially TV comedy came from, explore THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY.
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