The rest of the articles, I think, were written about Danny Kaye rather than by
him. I have only begun transcribing them, but I will share them as time allows
me to transcribe... Many have to do with his life or his work with UNICEF, some
have to do with his show or movies. Hopefully all of them will be of some
interest.

This one is short, from 1954, and is a critique about the movie Knock On Wood.

Dan

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Color, Comedy - and Kaye



Saturday Review, April 10, 1954, page 36



Not even Danny Kaye's most avid admirers, legion though this number be, have
been able to applaud wholeheartedly their favorite comedian's more recent films.
To be sure, there were always moments they would point to, moments when Kaye
managed to break free from the constraints of plot and character that shackled
his extraordinary talents and to soar into the realms of controlled hysteria,
where he has no peer. For what stood out in films like "Walter Mitty", "The
Inspector General", or even "Hans Christian Andersen" were the isolated
interludes in which Kaye, generally working with material supplied by his wife,
Sylvia Fine, stopped acting out a role and slipped into a song or dance that
hadn't the remotest connection with what had been going on a moment or two
earlier.



The good news in "Knock on Wood" (Paramount) is that the clever writer-director
team of Norman Frank and Melvin Panama have hit upon a story and a character
that permit their star to be consistently funny as the plot unfold, while at the
same time introducing Kaye's specialty numbers (again written by Sylvia Fine)
easily and logically. The result, inevitably, is one of the finest comedies to
hit the screen in a long time. It builds slowly, taking as its point of
departure a situation strangely reminiscent of Michael Redgrave's problem in
"Dead of Night" a few years ago. Kaye, a nightclub ventriloquist jittering on
the verge of schizophrenia, agrees to go to Switzerland for psychiatric care
because his dummies keep talking back at him. Just before he leaves, however, a
spy stuffs some stolen blueprints for a super-weapon inside his two dolls.
Immediately, albeit unwittingly, Kaye finds himself catapulted into the middle
of an international situation as rival gangs attempt to snatch papers from him.



Although the psychiatric aspects of their story are played straight (at one
point the dialogue seems to have been lifted verbatim from a college text),
fortunately nothing else is. As the scene shifts from Paris to Zurich to
London, both spies and story become increasingly opera bouffe. Since the spies
not only foil easily but are also highly expendable, soon Kaye has Scotland Yard
after him on a multiple murder charge. The ensuing chase finds him posing
successively as an Irish tenor in a London pub, the staid salesman of a
gadget-ridden British hot rod, and a premier danseur in a Russian ballet - all
hilarious and wonderful to behold. It might be added that the ballet, staged by
Michael Kidd, contrives to look like a real ballet even when Kaye is whirling
like a dervish or intercepting ballerina Diana Adams in the midst of a grande
jeté. In fact, there is at all times a keen awareness of just how far to push
the farcical and when to keep one foot on the ground. Mai Zetterling is
attractive and intelligent as the psychiatrist, David Burns deft and amusing as
Kaye's manager and side-kick. But from start to finish "Knock on Wood" is Danny
Kaye - and it's grand having him around in a picture that uses him so well.


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