Honorary Oscars: Danny Kaye

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/01/28/honorary-oscars-danny-kaye/

Like Donald Sutherland, who I covered a couple of days ago, Danny Kaye was one of those living legends who had never even been nominated for a competitive award at the Oscars. In searching for a reason, the first one that sticks out is the surprisingly short film resume he actually sports. Kaye appears to have had roles in just about seventeen feature films, with his career otherwise spread out in vaudeville, Catskills stand up, Broadway, radio, and television. This diversity in his entertainment career is pretty clearly illustrated by the fact that he has three (count ’em three) stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one each for radio, film, and music.

Kaye was a singular entertainer, with many of his performances accentuated by a broad pantomime style developed while he was playing in countries where English was not the primary language. Kaye was known for a Robin Williams-like delivery, falling in and out of a variety of characters and voices to deliver jokes and for his almost inhuman ability to perform ridiculous patter songs. His wife of almost fifty years, Sylvia Fine, was a true partner in developing his acts, writing gags and songs for him and actually being nominated for two Oscars herself (for writing the songs “The Moon is Blue” and “The Five Pennies”).

After making his name on stage and in a few comedic short films, Kaye saw some success with the movies Up In Arms and Wonder Man, with each film receiving Oscar nominations for music and technical elements. In response, an adaptation of James Thurber’s short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was created to match Kaye’s talents. The adaptation was loose enough to annoy Thurber and briefly motivate a change in the film’s title, but after objections by the writer’s fans, the studio changed it back. The story is focused on a young man with a boring job who spends most of his time daydreaming himself into different characters and scenarios. Do not adjust your television set…

This is gloriously ridiculous stuff that requires a level of skill and talent (and insanity) most simply don’t possess. It’s no wonder that film directors were often cautious about cutting to different shots during his big moments. Why rob the audience of seeing the fact that Kaye didn’t need camera trickery to perform these amazing extended one-man acts? It’s the third in four consecutive on screen pairings with actress Virginia Mayo. If you’re only familiar with the 2013 adaptation starring Ben Stiller, this is a severely different version. It was, in fact, a much more successful version with the audiences of the time and continued Kaye’s ascent as a popular star.

The next few years were trying for Kaye, with a seven month separation from Sylvia disrupting his remake of Ball of Fire called A Song is Born. Kaye refused to sing songs written by anyone else for the movie, and director Howard Hawks declared that Kaye was “as funny as a crutch” during production. A reunion with Sylvia and the mild success of The Inspector General (1949) appeared to get him back on track. 1951’s backstage musical On the Riviera was another mild hit and won Kaye a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical and nabbed Oscar nominations for its music and art direction.

I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise that a Danny Kaye musical comedy from the 1950s has a happy ending (by the way, the featured female dancer here is the great Gwen Verdon). The current members of the HFPA should probably be shown this on a yearly basis to remind them what a comedy or musical looks like. On the Riviera is one of several Kaye projects that has him playing multiple characters with one being mistaken or substituted for the other.

The very next year saw one of Kaye’s biggest hits with the musical celebration of famous poet and children’s author Hans Christian Andersen. I say “celebration,” because the film makes no claims at being biographically accurate, an approach that drew some protest from his home country of Denmark. This time the script was written by Moss Hart with song contributions by Frank Loesser and Walter Scharf, most famously the simple little mathematics-themed song “Inchworm.”

So simple, but so lovely, and it sticks in your brain like a real inchworm sticks to the plants it measures out. Strange that such a short little ditty would gain so much love, but “Inchworm” has been recorded over a dozen times by artists as diverse as Doris Day and David Bowie. My introduction to the song was most likely on an episode of The Muppet Show when Kaye was the guest host.

Hans Christian Andersen was the fourth highest grossing movie at the box office in 1952 and was nominated in six categories by the Academy the following year, mostly for its appealing design elements and music.