The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)

Director:

Norman Z. McLeod

Writers:

James Thurber (story) and
Ken Englund (writer)

Release Date:

1 September 1947 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Fantasy | Romance

Plot:

Walter Mitty, a daydreaming pulp-fiction writer with an overprotective mother, likes to imagine that he is a hero who experiences fantastic adventures...

Plot Keywords:

Pulp Fiction | Murder | Lifting Person In Air | Daydream | Female Removes Her Dress

Cast

Danny Kaye	...	Walter Mitty
Virginia Mayo	...	Rosalind van Hoorn
Boris Karloff	...	Dr. Hugo Hollingshead
Fay Bainter	...	Mrs. Eunice Mitty
Ann Rutherford	...	Gertrude Griswald
Thurston Hall	...	Bruce Pierce
Gordon Jones	...	Tubby Wadsworth
Florence Bates	...	Mrs. Emma Griswald
Konstantin Shayne	...	Peter van Hoorn
Reginald Denny	...	Colonel
Henry Corden	...	Hendrick
Doris Lloyd	...	Mrs. Letitia Follinsbee
Fritz Feld	...	Anatole of Paris
Frank Reicher	...	Maasdam
Milton Parsons	...	Butler

Runtime:

110 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | French | German

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

Canada:PG (Ontario) | Australia:PG | Finland:S | Germany:12 | Sweden:11 (re-release) | Sweden:15 | USA:Approved (PCA #12017) | Australia:G

Company:

Samuel Goldwyn Company, The

Trivia:

In an unused Mitty dream sequence, Boris Karloff appears as the Frankenstein monster, which explains Mitty's fear of Karloff's character. Test photos of Karloff in makeup (by Jack P. Pierce) exist, as well as a letter from Universal Pictures to Goldwyn Pictures giving permission to use the makeup design.

Goofs:

Continuity: During the scene in the Mitty home's kitchen, after Rosalind van Hoorn has come in the middle of the night during a rain storm to ask for Walter's help, she removes her dress to dry it. As they are talking, Rosalind is shown putting her dress back on and buttoning it all the way to the neck. As the scene shifts and pans back, she is shown once again buttoning the top button of her dress.

Quotes:

Mrs. Mitty: The clock didn't strike. I definitely heard it not strike.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "Remington Steele: Cast in Steele (#3.9)" (1984)

Soundtrack:

Anatole of Paris

Danny Kaye Shines as Thurber Gets The Goldwyn Treatment

While WONDER MAN and THE COURT JESTER might be more consistently wacky, I thought THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (TSLoWM) brought out the vulnerable side of Danny Kaye, one of my faves since childhood (I never missed any of Kaye's movies on WPIX when I was growing up). It usually gets on my nerves when I see movie characters allowing themselves to be as put-upon and henpecked as Kaye's Walter is here, but there was a sweetness about him that made me root for him instead of merely growling, "Oh, tell 'em all to go to hell already" -- and as a result, it's that much more satisfying when Walter finally does tell off his obnoxious so-called friends and loved ones (unlike such "comedies of cruelty" as MADHOUSE, where the last 10 minutes of Revenge Against The Oppressors are the only entertaining parts of the movie)! Although James Thurber, another of my faves, reportedly tried to buy off producer Samuel Goldwyn to keep the film from being made and hated the finished product, I think perhaps Thurber wasn't being quite fair. First off, books and film have different storytelling requirements, and second, the first 10 minutes are almost straight from Thurber's story (except it's Walter and his nagging mom instead of a nagging wife :-), and it seemed to me that the characters and performances had very Thurberesque qualities about them. Boris Karloff and Konstantin Shayne are delightfully unctuous villains (Fun Fact: their henchman, Henry Corden, later became the voice of Fred Flintstone!). As Walter's literal and figurative dream girl Rosalind van Hoorn, frequent Kaye co-star Virginia Mayo was thoroughly beguiling and never looked lovelier (and hey, the radiant Mayo was a size 12 and nobody considered *her* a "plus size," thank you very much! :-). TSLoWM also contains two of my favorite Kaye/Sylvia Fine musical numbers: "Symphony for Unstrung Tongue" (am I the only one who finds the line "He gets so excited that he has a solo passage" to be subtly salacious? :-) and "Anatole of Paris." To top it all off, it takes place primarily in my hometown and favorite city, New York City, and is set in one of my favorite milieus, pulp magazine publishing! My hubby and I like to think that Uncle Peter's grand home must be located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where we used to live, since it looks like the kind of homes we used to see while walking around in the Fieldston area and it didn't seem to take horrifically long for Walter and Rosalind to drive there from the Flatiron district of Manhattan! :-) (Interestingly, the interior of the van Hoorn home looks a lot like the interior of evil Bruno Anthony's home in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN; anybody know if these scenes might have been shot in the same house/set?) I wish the DVD extras had included deleted scenes (there's a bit in the trailer with Karloff and Corden in a pub that I definitely don't recall seeing in the finished film), but it was nice to see Virginia Mayo still alive and well (and bigger than "size 12," but on her it's pleasant plumpness, in my opinion! :-) in the intro and outro, even though she only had time to say one line about most of her co-stars ("Ann Rutherford was delightful...Fay Bainter was a consummate actress...").