Review – Up in Arms

Danny Kaye turns in his first starring performance in this extremely uneven World War Two musical. When the film-makers just sit back and let Kaye do the manic musical comedy routines he perfected in front of Catskill audiences, this is a reasonably entertaining show. Trouble is, there’s a lot of plot and other nonsense woven around the routines, and almost none of it works. Much of it is that awful comedy-of-errors crud in which the characters end up in elaborate, tedious fixes from which even the smallest exercise of honesty or wit would have bailed them out. Then toward the end the flow of the story is interrupted by a dream sequence that turns into a blend of zoot suits, chorus girls and the “forest of suicides” passage from Dante’s Inferno. Oh, and Kaye singing scat with Dinah Shore. But the worst part of the production was the handling of Kaye’s character. One minute he’s a nerdy, nervous hypochondriac. And then the next thing we know he’s performing smooth, elaborate routines in front of audiences. And then he ends up being a war hero. I know the sudden advent of the war created some strange situations in Hollywood, but this has to be one of the strangest. Mildly amusing