As Good As It Gets

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I love Danny Kaye, but this film is somewhat strained with few genuinely funny moments to sustain one's true interest for 102 minutes... quite a long running time for a 1949 comedy.Kaye's goofy singing grows tiresome really fast, though he does sing a love song ('Wish on the Moon') with that beautiful voice of his. Tune in just to hear that. Barbara Bates plays the girl he loves and she's cute, but Walter Slezak's 'Yakov' character ruins the fun because he's such a scumbag, and in the end, he doesn't even get kicked out of the picture, in fact, he gets to hang around and enjoy the show.Movie is too long without enough laughs, but it's Danny Kaye and if you're a Danny Kaye fan like me, you'll want to see it.

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.

Danny Kaye's musical comedy isn't something that has aged all that well. Back in the 40s and 50s, he was VERY popular and his films packed the theaters. However, I really believe that his style is something that will have a very mixed reaction today. Some, of course, probably still love Kaye and adore his antics and musical routines. And, others, like myself, will find him tedious. When he sings and makes his silly grimaces, it pains me--which is a shame, as the plot itself of "The Inspector General" is actually pretty good.Danny plays Georgi--a poor and slightly crooked man. He assists in a patent medicine show run by a seriously crooked guy (Walter Slezak). When he loses this job, he's very hungry and manages to get arrested--but not a meal. However, when the townspeople mistakenly believe that he's the Inspector General in disguise, suddenly they begin lavishing him with praise and gifts. But, the mayor and his officers know that they must do something else--they must kill the Inspector General to keep their thieving ways a secret. This isn't a problem for Kaye, as he's about to run out of town as soon as humanly possible--but he can't when his old boss shows up and insists that Kaye stay and milk the town for all it's worth.If the film was a bit more subtle, I would have loved it. It did have a lot of clever moments--but it also had Kaye hamming it up something awful at times as well. Overall, a mixed bag--worth seeing but lacking at the same time.

As I understand it, Henry Koster's movie version of "The Inspector General" is only a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's play. But even so, it's a really fun movie. Danny Kaye provides a lot of fun as a illiterate drifter who gets mistaken for a government inspector in a town overrun with corruption in Napoleon-era France. There are a couple of scenes in the movie that truly elicit a lot of humor, and the songs -- which Kaye's wife Sylvia wrote -- just go to show what one can do with a language. There are a few slow scenes, but mostly it's a really entertaining piece of work. I'm going to have to see if I can find a production of Gogol's original play (called "Revizor" in Russian, often called "The Government Inspector" in English).Also starring Walter Slezak (the Clock King on the 1960s "Batman" show), Gene Lockhart, Barbara Bates, Elsa Lanchester (the Bride of Frankenstein), Alan Hale Sr. (yes, the Skipper's father) and Rhys Williams.PS: Another one of Nikolai Gogol's notable stories is the horror short story "Viy", which Mario Bava filmed as "Black Sunday" starring Barbara Steele.