The Secret Life of Walter Mitty **** (1947, Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, Boris Karloff) – Classic Film Review 527

Director Norman Z McLeod’s 1947 comedy gem turned out to be one of Danny Kaye’s finest and most admired and enjoyed films. It’s simple humour from a different era, but it’s still sweet and charming.

In a brio turn, Kaye relishes his perfectly tailor-made role as the ultimate dreamer Walter Mitty, a publisher’s pulp-fiction proof reader with an overprotective mother (Fay Bainter). Mitty is a sad case and neither his fiancée Gertrude Griswold (Ann Rutherford) nor her mother (Florence Bates) nor his best friend Tubby Wadsworth (Gordon Jones) respects him.

Mitty, who pictures himself as a hero who has fantastic adventures, is diagnosed by Dr Hollingshead (Boris Karloff) as suffering from incessant day-dreaming fantasies. It’s his only way to escape his boring routine life, until he gets involved in a real adventure after he meets a mysterious woman who gives him a little black book containing the locations of the Dutch crown jewels hidden since World War II. Of course, Mitty finds that being a real hero brings its own problems.

Ken Englund’s and Everett Freeman’s fanciful screenplay is based distantly on a famous short story by James Thurber, though they really only use his central idea as a springboard for their own story. Though it might not please Thurber purists, the movie is nevertheless still extremely pleasing and enjoyable thanks to Kaye’s infectious sense of fun, his clever routines and impersonations (gunman, gambler, aviator etc), the script’s inventive ideas and witty lines and the movie’s entertaining fantasy sequences.

It helps a lot that it looks a treat too in Lee Garmes’s lovely Technicolor cinematography. And there’s a lot of boisterous work from a sterling support cast, headed by Virginia Mayo, who is charming as Kaye’s co-star, playing the gorgeous Rosalind van Hoorn, who uses Walter to escape from her pursuer.

Kaye’s wife Sylvia Fine wrote the lyrics to a song in which Mitty fantasizes he is the gay women’s hat designer Anatole of Paris, whose show he stumbles upon while escaping from villains in Stacey’s Department Store.

In an unused Mitty dream sequence, Karloff appears as the Frankenstein monster, which explains Mitty’s fear of Karloff’s character. There are test photos of Karloff in his famous makeup by Jack P. Pierce, as well as a letter from Universal Pictures to Goldwyn Pictures giving them permission to use the makeup design form the 1931 Frankenstein movie. It’s a shame all this came to nought.

Producer Samuel Goldwyn turned down the $10,000 Thurber offered him to not make the film.

Kaye died of heart failure on March 3 1987, aged 74. A liberal Democrat who opposed the Hollywood blacklist, he worked tirelessly for UNICEF as Goodwill Ambassador. Shirley MacLaine claims in her 2011 memoir I’m Over That And Other Confessions she had romance with him. He has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Recording, Motion Pictures and Radio.

Remade in 2013 by and with Ben Stiller.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 527

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