Oh, Kaye

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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