As Lansbury told Norman Gottfried, it’s the closest Kaye ever came to being an ensemble performer. Kaye acts with them, not in spite of them. Though he’s in the midst of it all, mugging and babbling all the way, he’s surrounded by a cast of supremely talented farceurs (Glynis Johns, Basil Rathbone and Cecil Parker, in addition to the aforementioned Lansbury and Natwick) whose deadpan delivery and droll comic timing is quite wonderful in and of itself. At five years old, I wanted to marry Danny Kaye when I grew up, and I haven’t entirely outgrown that crush.) If, however, you find Kaye’s manic persona a bit wearying, take heart: “The Court Jester” is in no way one of Kaye’s vanity pieces. You may consider all that to be good news if you are a devoted Kaye fan. (Although his spindly legs apparently didn’t look so good in tights his calves and thighs were amplified with prosthetics to give him a more dashing appearance.) His derring-do and swordplay techniques in his swashbuckler scenes are especially impressive. Appearing in all but one scene, he is undeniably the star and center of attention, and the film’s script and songs play directly to his trademark style: rapid patter song lyrics, “double talk” (sputtering nonsense in a variety of foreign accents), and near-athletic feats of physical comedy. You can thank the writing/directing team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank for this inspired tomfoolery, although Kaye’s personality is indelibly stamped all over the film as well. It’s a sublimely silly spectacle, made all the more so by the sight of Kaye being dragged helplessly through it while his tights become ever droopier and baggier. It culminates in a revved -up knighthood ceremony which amounts to little more than a nonsensical drill team routine performed by the king’s guards in triple, maybe even quadruple, time. (“Find that nincompoop and knight that nincompoop by noon!”).
To do battle requires that he be a knight, and so the king orders his elevation to knighthood to proceed in record speed.
Kaye manages the lightning transitions from swashbuckler to sap with marvelous comic agility.Īnother wonderful scene comes later in the film when Hubert must fight to the death for Lansbury’s hand against her intended fiancée (the “grisly, grimy, gruesome Griswold”). And unfortunately for him, there’s a whole lot of finger snapping going on in that castle, with nearly everyone needing to underscore a point by adding the phrase “like that!” accompanied by a snap.
With a snap of her fingers, Hubert is instantly transformed into a dashing swashbuckler, full of comic bravado and given to ridiculous proclamations like “Caution? Caution is for poppinjays and cockatoos!” But with a another finger snap, Hubert is reduced again to a sniveling coward. One of the best recurring bits comes out of that witch’s spell. The king’s daughter (a wonderfully petulant Angela Lansbury) falls for him, treasonous members of the king’s circle embroil him in assassination plots, and a witch named Griselda (Mildred Natwick) casts a spell on him to make him courageous – it’s a lot of story to keep track of, but the jokes keep coming so fast you hardly need to Through various fast and furious plot twists, he is able to infiltrate the king’s court by impersonating a renowned jester known as Giacomo the Incomparable. The crack-bang comic timing is such a marked characteristic of “The Court Jester” that Norman Gottfried, in his biography of the film’s star, Danny Kaye, aptly noted “Often there is such meter and balance in the exchanges that the rhythm alone seems to be getting the laughs.”Ī send-up of medieval swashbuckling films in the “Robin Hood” mode, “The Court Jester” features Kaye as an erstwhile carnival performer, Hubert Hawkins, who joins an outlaw band in their quest to unseat an evil king. Had I been given the assignment to write the DVD cover copy – and the option of adding a few words – I think I’d have described it thus: “Comedy Faster than the Speed of Sound!”īecause, honestly, the lingering impression you’re left with at the end of “The Court Jester” is not of the music (although some of it is quite good and the opening ditty, “Life Could Not Better Be” has been stuck in my head for days.) No rather, it’s the dizzying sensation of fast-flying one liners, sight gags, non-sequiturs and comic wordplay, much of which whizzes by too quickly to be comprehended in one viewing. So reads the tagline on my DVD of “The Court Jester,” an apparent effort to encapsulate the film’s many charms in just three words.