by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1945 Danny Kaye
vehicle Wonder Man, a marvelous film directed
by (Harry) Bruce Humberstone — he was just credited as “Bruce Humberstone” here
but usually he was “H. Bruce Humberstone” and Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton got
out of him what the “H” stood for — from a committee-written script. The
original story was by former Marx Brothers writer Arthur Sheekman with
“adaptation” by Jack Jevne and Eddie Moran and screenplay by Don Hartman,
Melville Shavelson (one of Bob Hope’s major contributors) and Philip Rapp, and
there was one other major contributor: Mrs. Danny Kaye, Sylvia Fine, who wrote
three of the marvelous patter songs that became Kaye’s trademark: “Bali
Boogie,” a great send-up of self-consciously “exotic” big production numbers
(like Busby Berkeley’s “I Wanna Go Back to Bali” routine in Gold Diggers in
Paris) that showcases Kaye’s and
Vera-Ellen’s (in her first film) dancing (Vera-Ellen could dance but couldn’t
sing, so June Hutton, Betty’s and Marion’s sister and wife of Frank Sinatra’s
arranger Axel Stordahl, doubled her); a version of “Dark Eyes” in which Kaye
plays a Russian “classical” singer who gets hay fever from the large bouquet
next to him on stage; and a closing opera number that’s probably the second-best
spoof of opera ever put in a mainstream Hollywood movie (next, of course, to
the final scene of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera). I remember mentioning Wonder Man when I watched the film Smokin’ Aces at one of the Bears San Diego screenings, since
the two films are both about wild, crazy entertainers who are also key
witnesses against gangsters, but Smokin’ Aces was so relentlessly terrible on all counts that I
wrote in a review for imdb.com, “If you want to see a good movie with this
premise, check out the 1945 Danny Kaye vehicle Wonder Man, also about an entertainer targeted by gangsters
but made with qualities like wit, compassion, creativity and humor that totally
eluded the makers of Smokin’ Aces.”
Wonder Man is a
ghost story that casts Kaye as nightclub entertainer Buzzy Ballew, who thinks
nothing of keeping his audience waiting for an hour and a half and has a
long-running series of broken engagements and strandings at the altar with his
co-star Midge Mallon (Vera-Ellen) and his identical twin brother Edwin Dingle, a bookworm who hangs out at
libraries researching a book he’s writing on the knowledge of everything (an
interesting precursor to Kaye’s role as the lead professor in A Song Is Born, the remake of Ball of Fire in which Kaye was far more suited to the role than Gary Cooper, even
though the rest of the elements were inferior in the remake — from Barbara
Stanwyck to Virginia Mayo in the female lead? That’s hardly a step up!) and who
has the interesting knack of being able to write right- and left-handed
simultaneously. He’s also got a crush on the head librarian, Ellen Shanley
(Virginia Mayo, who according to Easton got her contract largely because she
resembled Goldwyn’s wife Frances when she was young). The supernatural element occurs when Ballew’s nemesis “Ten
Grand” Jackson (Steve Cochran, also anticipating his role in A Song Is Born), a gangster whom Ballew’s testimony could send to
prison for a long time, orders two hit men, Torso (Edward Brophy) and the
hard-of-hearing Chimp (a marvelous performance by Allen Jenkins, even drier
than usual), to knock him off. They do so, only Ballew’s spirit escapes and
starts inhabiting Edwin’s body at awkward times, steering him away from his
long-sought date with Ellen and leaving him doing weird things like asking
delicatessen owner Schmidt (S. Z. Sakall) — where he’s gone for potato salad
for his dinner date — “I’d like a pint of Prospect Park.” (Prospect Park is
where Torso and Chimp knocked off Ballew and dumped his body in a lake.) When Ballew
is inside Edwin’s body, Edwin is a brilliant entertainer as well as possessor
of the key piece of information — Jackson had his former girlfriend, stripper
“Choo Choo” Laverne, killed so she couldn’t reveal the information against him
concealed in a safe-deposit box she’d rented under her real name, Minnie Smith
— the district attorney (Otto Kruger) and his assistant (Richard Lane) are
after. When Ballew isn’t inside
Edwin’s body, he’s totally hapless on stage and he hasn’t the slightest clue
what the D.A. and his assistant are asking him about.
The film is 99 minutes of
comedy, music (in addition to the Sylvia Fine parodies there’s a relatively
serious production number called “So in Love” — not the song of that title by Cole Porter, which hadn’t been written yet, but one by Dave Rose, Judy
Garland’s first husband, and Leo Robin) and overall outrageousness —
highlighted by a scene in which Edwin’s conversation with Ballew in the park
(needless to say, when Ballew materializes Edwin can see and hear him but no
one else can) attracts the attention of a police officer and gets in the way of
a sailor (an almost unrecognizable Huntz Hall) and his girlfriend (Virginia
Gilmore) trying to neck. In the finale, Edwin — on the run from both the
gangsters and the cops — crashes an opera performance which the D.A. is
attending, disguises himself as the tenor lead and, while the rest of the
singers (including the star soprano, Alice Mock) are trying to keep the opera
going, he sings his testimony against the
gangsters so the D.A. can hear and get the key information he and the police
need to bust the gang. It’s an obvious knock-off of the ending to On Your
Toes (in which the male lead —
Ray Bolger in the stage version and Eddie Albert in the movie — is a dancer who
has to keep going because as soon as his performance ends, gangsters in the
theatre are ready to knock him off) and it was already done even more
outrageously at the end of the 1942 movie Ship Ahoy (Eleanor Powell, a dupe for enemy spies,
communicates the information against them to the good guys during a dance
routine by tapping it out in Morse code!) — but it’s still a lot of fun,
especially when the prima donna tries to keep things going and gets in the way. Wonder Man isn’t a great movie — Kaye would be discovered by
Sam Goldwyn and showcased by him in elaborate color features with lush
production values, while competing comedians like Abbott and Costello and Bob
Hope were generally filmed on the cheap, but he’d make his best films, The
Inspector General and The Court Jester, after his contract with Goldwyn expired and he
left in 1948 (returning for one film as a free-lancer, Hans Christian
Andersen, in 1952 and making nine
times his old contract salary for it) — but it’s still an engaging showcase for
Kaye, and though the plot device used to “split” Kaye’s character is
supernatural instead of scientific I couldn’t help thinking it was, shall we
say, an inspiration to Jerry
Lewis for The Nutty Professor.
