Review – The Inspector General

True to the usual formula, Danny Kaye plays a good-hearted buffoon stuck in the middle of a comedy of errors. This time around he’s an illiterate performer recently fired from a medicine show, and through the usual series of unlikely twists he ends up mistaken for the Inspector General, a bureaucrat charged by Napoleon with rooting out corruption in town governments and thus much feared by the local potentates. The story is ostensibly borrowed from Gogol, but the main attraction here is – as usual – Kaye’s manic musical numbers and well-practiced physical comedy. The experience of watching this was marred by a couple of factors that had nothing directly to do with the production itself. First, years ago I saw the L.A. Connection do a voice-over version of this movie, and the scenes the comedy troupe used in its routines were somewhat altered by my memories of jokes about Michael Jackson and the Doobie Brothers. Worse than that, however, was the quality of the copy I watched. This thing looked like it had been telecined from a print that had been left out in the sun for a month or two. That notwithstanding, Kaye’s brilliance shone through and made this a reasonably worthwhile experience. Mildly amusing