Disappointment for a huge fan!

Charming and brutal

Brilliant and touching

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

I know this film has gotten mostly good reviews. I will admit it is entertaining.But I also have to say I'm not a big fan of the borscht belt style of overacting and Danny Kaye who started in the Poconos takes mugging to a new level.For me it brought the movie down, but I know everyone's tastes are different.It's a well made movie and has a bunch of songs. It will keep you interested if there's nothing else available. But these days there's tons of stuff available.The Plot An illiterate stooge in a traveling medicine show wanders into a strange town and is picked up on a vagrancy charge. The town's corrupt officials mistake him for the inspector general whom they think is traveling in disguise. Fearing he will discover they've been pocketing tax money, they make several bungled attempts to kill him.

I had just finished reading the play by the Ukranian playwright Nicolae Gogol and I decided that I would have a look through Youtube to find out if somebody had uploaded a performance but what my search ended up throwing up me was, well, this movie (and I believe that it may be public domain since it is up of Youtube, and if a movie is not public domain, or not allowed on Youtube then I suspect that it will be pulled down pretty quickly). The play is about how a group of corrupt officials on a small Russian town in the 19th century hear that somebody is coming from St Petersburg (the then Russian capital) to perform a audit on the town's accounts, so they end up rushing about in a panic to try and cover up their nefarious deeds. Then enters a lowly clerk on a holiday and they immediately believe that he is the auditor and go out of their way to soften him up and offer him bribes.The movie differs from a play a little (and is a little be more slapstick, but then again I have not seen it performed so I cannot comment on that aspect of it) in that the clerk is replaced by an out of work con-man (because he does not like deceiving people) and the play has a much happier ending. In fact the clerk in this film is a much more honest individual than the original in the play (who scampers out of town quick fast when he is discovered). Also, the clerk (for want of a better word because in the movie he is actually homeless and destitute and wonders into the town having not eaten for two days).The movie is also set in some vague European Village in some vague empire because at one point it is suggested that the Emperor if Napoleon, and at another point it is said that the capital city is Budapest (which is a huge continuity error because Budapest was never the main capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Napoleon never had his capital in Budapest (he was French, so it was always going to be Paris). However, putting aside that minor problem, and the fact that the main character is much, much nicer in this movie than in the play, it is still a pretty good rendition, and enjoyable to watch.

Danny Kaye got one of his most enduring and funniest parts in this adaption of Gogol's The Inspector General. Kaye suited the part very well and Warner Brothers provided him with a generous cast of familiar character players. Kaye brings a lot of laughs as well as pathos to the part of the poor illiterate schnook who is a stooge for Walter Slezak, an itinerant peddler of snake oil known as Yakov's Elixir. After they get thrown out of one town due to Kaye's bumbling, Slezak cuts him adrift.But our Danny falls into a gold mine in the next town as he arrives there poor and hungry. It seems as though the city fathers have gotten word that The Inspector General, personal emissary of the Emperor is coming to town and he's been known to go places incognito and then reveal himself and all the fraud he uncovers.The paranoid city fathers of Brodny who include such people as Gene Lockhart, Alan Hale, Byron Foulger all start fawning all over Kaye who decides to just go with the flow. That policy is encouraged by Slezak who arrives in Brodny and sees the great possibilities here.The Inspector General is one of my favorite films with Danny Kaye, he's so right for the part. This was his first film away from Sam Goldwyn and Warner Brothers managed to give this film the same kind of production values you would find in a Goldwyn production. Mrs. Kaye, aka Sylvia Fine wrote the score for The Inspector General and gave her husband one of his best film songs, Happy Times which he sings to Barbara Bates who plays a serving girl at the local inn. Kaye also has to fend off the amorous advances of Elsa Lanchester who is Lockhart's wife and who is no slouch at getting a few laughs herself.The Inspector General is a timeless classic, taken from a classic and is one of the best showcases for the many talents of Danny Kaye.

It's a little difficult to grasp the notion of Danny Kaye, one of his era's premier farceurs, being the lead in a story from the 1840s by a Russian dramatist. We all know those Russian plays had more clouds of gray than any song by George Gershwin could guarantee. But, though I haven't read Gogol's story, he was one of those gloomy Russkies who happened to have a sense of humor, sarcastic and cynical though it might have been.It's the Napoleonic era in Middle Europe. Every town in the regime is corrupt in varying degrees and Napoleon has sent an Inspector General to clean things up. The Inspector General has Napoleon's power of attorney. He generally enters a town in some humble disguise -- a tinker, a salesman, an utter nobody -- then snoops around until he uncovers the miscreants, who he then promptly hangs. Nobody knows what he looks like.Kaye is a shill for a snake oil salesman, Walter Slezak in the most outrageously villainous bad-guy make up since Mack Swain, Chaplin's gorilla. When Kaye tries to stop an old lady from spending all her money on Slezak's cure-all to save her dying husband -- it's really furniture polish -- Slezak overhears the conversation and kicks Kaye out.Kaye then turns into a starving tramp. He wanders from town to town, trying to steal bits of food from dogs. But in the village of Brodny, misleading evidence comes to light that he is the Inspector General in disguise. So instead of being hanged for a thief, he's feted by the terrified corrupt town officials. He spends most of the movie strutting around in resplendent garb, trying to imitate a self-possessed pal of Napoleon or, alternatively, trying desperately to have his real identity hidden from the public. This spoiled identity becomes especially problematic after Slezak shows up, recognizes him for the buffoon he is, and manipulates him to extort bribes from the officials.Kaye handles the role pretty well, actually, as unlikely as it sounds. Well, why not? So it's a farce. I doubt that Gogol's original play had the fake Inspector General singing gibberish songs, but somehow it fits. Kaye's usual cowardly and neurotic persona is imposed on what I imagine to have been an amusing but relatively grounded story. If W. C. Fields could play Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield", why not Kaye as a jiggling and stuttering Inspector General? The plot is too logical to allow for many of Kaye's set pieces. The gibberish songs (by his then-wife, Sylvia Fine) aren't as funny as some of his earlier ones. The gags, though muted, are imposed on a narrative that is funny in itself and this makes up, to some extent, for our watching a Danny Kaye who is in harness to the plot.There isn't as much mindless sentiment as there were in some of Kaye's lesser vehicles -- no sick children or any of that crap. Barbara Bates as the housemaid is Kaye's love interest, such as it is. Bates, an exquisite young woman of modest talent, was the underhanded high-school girl Phoebe who shows up at the end of "All About Eve." Here, in period wardrobe, she's just another pretty face, but it doesn't matter because her part isn't particularly important.Anyway, I kind of enjoyed it. Kaye does a lot of jumping around and shuffling of objects and there are some laughs in it, desperately needed in these too-laughless times.