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Here is the film where Danny Kaye’s career begins to transition away from near shapeless excuses for his typical bag of tricks and towards something that gives him more character and structure. While The Secret Life of Walter Mitty still finds plenty of time, a bit too much in my estimation, to hit pause and provide leeway for lunacy, it also adds a strongly defined character that keeps Kaye in a more interesting performative mode. He must find a way to make his fantastical bits work within the confines of a character, and he manages to do that splendidly.
Where Walter Mitty gets into trouble is in Virginia Mayo and Boris Karloff’s subplot involving the mild-mannered Kaye wandering into a theist thriller. It doesn’t entirely jive with James Thurber’s original text, a paean to middle-class wish fulfillment and yearning. These bits feel like the studio demanding a stricter adherence to basic movie structure and payoff instead of just letting the thing breathe.
We get the full range of Kaye’s talents here, such as Kaye imaging himself as a French hat designer with a deep misogynistic streak or a RAF pilot. These exaggerated archetypes still contain a recognizable Walter buried underneath their exterior bravado. It’s a joy to watch Kaye’s skills develop up to this point and the films form a better structure instead of just strung together bits. While The Secret Life of Walter Mitty still has some problems with halting the narrative for excess, it’s the most satisfying film up to this point in Kaye’s career.
