On the Double (Paramount). Danny Kaye is one of a precious clutch of performers who can still appear alone on a bare stage and hold audiences from riffraff to royalty rapt for hours. Yet Hollywood insists on ballooning his Pied Piper image with Panavision, or multiple-tracking his slap-happy sounds, or painting simple comedy in exotic new colors. His recent films, including this one, have added enough gimmicks and gewgaws to throttle Danny’s vintage gitgatgittle. What was once A-OK is now beginning to seem just Oh, Kaye.
Double was suggested by a trick played by British intelligence in World War II, when it prevailed upon a smalltime character actor to impersonate Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery during a “secret tour” of North Africa—to convince the Germans that an Allied invasion would be launched from that area. Danny starts out as a U.S. private lent to the British army “to show them how to open Spam.” Being on a fat-free, salt-free, low-calorie, highprotein, low-cholesterol diet, Danny skips meals, and passes the time impersonating “Satchmo,” Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Intelligence catches his act, notes a resemblance to General Lawrence MacKenzie-Smith (played by—well, who else?), gets him the assignment of impersonating the general, who soon becomes the object of several assassination attempts.
As such, Kaye might be expected to drink like a general, inspect the troops, and woo the old man’s beautiful wife (Dana Wynter). Instead, he just seems to be longing wistfully—with the audience—for the fun that used to be. The script offers only an occasional chuckle. General: “Hurry up; General Eisenhower is waiting.” Danny: “Well, tell him not to. I don’t do him.” When he is captured, Danny gets a reel and a half of pantomime in which to play a Gestapo agent, a Luftwaffe pilot, a fur-wrapped matron and Marlene Dietrich (singing Cocktails for Zwei). It’s funny—but it seems to have been lobbed in because the script was getting just too dull for words.
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