The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty(480P)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)

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. Title (Brazil): Not Available

I gave this film a '4' for Technicolor. Otherwise, it would be a '3.' Danny Kaye, like Jerry Lewis, has never been a favorite of mine; same with The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, etc. I don't care for slapstick. Had the antics of Danny Kaye been eliminated from the film it would have been improved upon. Author, James Thurber didn't like Kaye nor the music. Thurber's short story is void of music and Kaye isn't a good songster. I saw this film when it opened in 1947. I was barely six years old, fell asleep toward the end and missed the part where Walter actually was NOT fantasizing; no big deal - I still hate the film 66 years later. I also daytime and nighttime dream but write them down and turn them into narrative. I sell enough to supplement my measly social security benefit which I paid for during 45 years of an internal audit career. With a college degree, CPA/CIA, I get $18,000 a year on social security with a recent 1.5% increase for 2014. Throw a dog a bone. Back then, we sent our kids to college, vacationed, bought new cars and spent our money enjoying life. Social security and a small pension was supposed to be enough. Dream on, Walter Mitty.

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.

Being someone who could always identify with the fictional "Walter Mitty," I was anxious to watch this film years ago. Sadly, it wasn't anywhere as good as I had hoped it to be. Some of the slapstick humor is just plain stupid and, of course by now, much of that humor is very dated. Also, I don't care to hear Danny Kaye sing, even if he's a decent singer. There are two or three songs in this movie and one of them goes on forever. On the "good" side, I loved the look to this film, from the great automobiles to the overall '40s look and interesting color in this film. Also, some of the scenes were genuinely funny. Not everything was corny or stupid. Virginia Mayo played an interesting character in here, too, and it's always fun to see Boris Karloff. The coming attractions to this movie make it look like it's a riot, with dreamer "Walter Mitty" fantasizing about being all these glamorous characters....but those previews highlight most of the good parts.

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.

James Thurber's original short story was just wonderful: modest, simple, clear, understandable, straightforward. The movie bears not the slightest resemblance to it. What a pity. Seeing this movie, there's nothing that would send one to Thurber's original lovely and very funny story. Pauline Kael, in "5001 Nights at the Movies," says this: "Worse than there's any excuse for." Ah, yes, Pauline. And the three biggest problems are Danny Kaye, Samuel Goldwyn (shame on him for blowing this little story up to such an unwieldy state) and the inexplicable presence of Virginia Mayo.

It is generally known that this, the best known film made from a purely James Thurber story (THE MALE ANIMAL was a collaborated play) was not liked by Thurber. One can understand why. The actual short story is not at all like the film, except that the central figure (Mr. Mitty) keeps having extremely odd day dreams where he does all kinds of heroic things that are totally at odd with his humdrum life. He is married, and obviously is hen-pecked. Every incident of the story sets off one of his day dreams, and (in the conclusion) he is heroically facing a firing squad. A sort of perfect conclusion as his fantasy life mirrors the deadly control of his real life by his wife. The movie's Walter Mitty (Danny Kaye) is not married, but he lives with his bossy mother, works for an overbearing boss who steals his ideas (Thurston Hall - he publishes Mitty's dime store adventure stories), has an overbearing girlfriend with an overbearing mother, and has a male "friend" (Gordon Jones - "Mike the Cop" on Abbott& Costello's television show) who is a loud mouth and overbearing. Mitty tunes them all out to make his life bearable. He sees himself as a great surgeon, a captain of a ship rounding Cape Horn in a typhoon (and steering with a broken arm), as a Mississippi gambler, and as the great Parisian couturier "Anatol of Paris". Then one day he runs into a blonde woman (Virginia Mayo) who is trying to flee from a gang of desperate men, including Boris Karloff (as the head of an asylum). They are trying to get her to reveal a valuable secret that will net them all millions. Mitty is dragged into this, and finds himself being pursued by the gang, and trying to fend off the interference or criticism of his mother, boss, girl friend, etc. One can understand Thurber's anguish, as the Goldwyn film mangles the mood conciseness of the original story. It is really a comic mood piece, commenting on the living hell Mitty has that only his imagination can free him from. The movie altered this into an adventure film dealing with a milquetoast who finds his level of real bravery. As a real artist, Thurber could only regret the changes in the story. But the film was first rate entertainment, and is among the best movies in Kaye's comedy career. To find out how Walter finds his guts at the end, and what the "poketa, poketa" machine and sound is all about, watch this delightful comedy. Then reach for the Library of America volume on Thurber, and read the original, to see how the material was originally put down on paper.

Being a big fan of James Thurber and not a big fan of Danny Kaye, I have some reservations on this movie. While Danny Kaye tries to be a Walter Mitty, he does not succeed. He does the same Danny Kaye stuff he does in all of his movies and it gets boring seeing the same actor doing the same gags in all of his movies. It is like one big never ending story. While the movie was based lightly on the James Thurber work, it does not transfer the Thurber energy, the slant which Thurber puts on his stories. It's always fun seeing Boris Karloff in some roll besides being a monster. It is also fun to see the Goldwynn Girls. If RKO would have stayed a little more true to the story it would have helped the movie. I did however enjoy the remake of Walter Mitty a couple of years ago and it seemed to follow the authors intentions a little better.