ON THE DOUBLE

US, 1961, 92 minutes, Colour.
Dana Wynter, Wilfred Hyde -White, Margaret Rutherford, Diana Dors, Alan Cuthbertson, Gregory Walcott, Jesse White.
Directed by Melville Shavelson.

On the Double is an entertaining Danny Kaye vehicle. Once again he portrays something of a ninny who has a capacity for mimicry as well as a more serious role. Writer team Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose seem to have had an eye on The Man Who Never Was as well as I Was Monty’s Double in preparing this screenplay. While the character played by Danny Kaye as a weak-kneed ineffectual type is asked to impersonate a general, the general’s plane crashes and the private has to do the real thing. Of course, it is an opportunity to marvel at Danny Kaye’s mimicry as well as his verbal dexterity.

The film is very British in tone even though an American production. Shavelson had written the early Danny Kaye vehicles Wonder Man and The Kid From Brooklyn as well as the later film, The Five Pennies. Shavelson also wrote a number of films for Bob Hope including The Seven Little Foys and Beau James. In the mid-60s he was to write and direct the film about the formation of the State of Israel, Cast a Giant Shadow – an experience which left him somewhat shattered and about which he wrote a rather satiric book.

The film has Danny Kaye supported by a top English cast of character actors especially Margaret Rutherford and Wilfred Hyde -White. There is glamour with Dana Wynter as the leading lady and, of course, with Diana Dors.

One of the later Danny Kaye vehicles. He was to move into television and character roles by the mid-60s.

1. The success of the film as a Danny Kaye vehicle? The appeal of his personality and comedy? Danny Kaye character and their characteristics? His playing two characters and their contrast?

2. The humour in the title? The military overtones and the pun on the two characters? Typical of the kind of humour? The use of colour, English locations? The war setting and the parody on war films? The narrative comment and the humour in the commentary?

3. Danny Kaye's style in the Ernie Williams character? The qualities of this kind of simple characters simple, bungler, yet doing his job, not afraid to be afraid, enterprising, nice loving and tender? The defects of this character in cowardice, hypochondria? How the good qualities overcome the bad qualities? How heroic a comic character?

4. The contrast with the General MacKenzie? type? The parody of authority, the boorish Englishman, the womanizer and drinker etc.? The fact that he is a kind of villain in contrast with the Ernie Williams kind of character?

5. The quality of comedy in the impersonation by Ernie Williams? The humour of mistaken identities? The quality of the jokes and the situations? Ernie imitating as a joke, testing out the military, Lady Margaret? The humour of the party and the fight? The confrontation with his aunt? The Nazis not believing him? His final testing of Lady Margaret at the end? How does the comedy of mistaken identity interest audiences?

6, How could the film be seen as the growth of a personality and a nice person?

7. How attractive was Lady Margaret as a heroine? Her relationship to General MacKenzie? Her support of Ernie? The final love for him?

8. The satire on English military men in Somerset? The military type?

9. The satire in the Diana Dors kind of spy?

10. The quality of the spoof on war films, on the British for example, Williams' incomprehensible British talk to the Nazis, the spoof of spy stories, the details of the escape in Berlin, for example, the nightclub and Ernie's imitation of Marlene Dietrich etc.?

12. The value of this kind of comedy and spoof?