The Court Jester (1956, Norman Panama & Melvin Frank) (Patreon)

79/100

Umpteenth viewing, last seen sometime prior to 1996. Having since caught up with a bunch of lesser Danny Kaye vehicles (including Knock on Wood, made two years earlier by the same team), I feared having overrated this one in my youth, but apparently everyone involved happened to simultaneously achieve peak inspiration. You've got Sylvia Fine penning Sondheim-level internal rhymes like "Those who try to tangle with my derring-do / Wind up at the angle that herring do." You've got gags layered upon gags, e.g. Hawkins feigning deafness (plus a hilarious coughing fit) when disguised as an old man, while also having Maid Jean pretend to read his lips with her fingers (though he initially gets it the wrong way around), plus inept fake sign language that consists of her cycling randomly and frantically through two or three simple gestures. You've got a perfectly sturdy narrative premise—standard Kaye schlemiel must impersonate renowned jester in order to retrieve MacGuffin from castle—that's cleverly complicated (the jester's also a world-class assassin who's been hired to kill the king's advisers) and then cleverly complicated again by what would normally constitute a Kaye movie's primary plotline (hypnotized into toggling back and forth between haughty confidence and abject cowardice at every finger snap). And then they just went around hiring wildly overqualified actors for every key supporting role: Rathbone, Lansbury, Johns (whose creaky-breathy voice alone turns me to butter, I should confess), Natwick, Parker...even John Carradine for like 45 seconds as the real Giacomo. The fun rarely flags, but this cast can sell obligatory exposition whether or not it's festooned with jokes. 

Still, The Court Jester's a classic because it really seems as if the cast and crew's collective mantra was "How can we make it even funnier?" No bit is deemed good enough upon initial conception; everything's subject to improvement via additional goofiness. That's perhaps most clearly illustrated by Jester's most famous routine: Griselda and Jean teaching Hawkins the mnemonic phrase: "The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true." Kaye makes a three-course meal out of garbling the words, the sequence, the whole shebang, and that's what I remembered decades later; odds are that we'd still be celebrating his verbal gymnastics 65 years later even if that's all there were to it. That's not all there is to it, though. I'd forgotten that the vessel with the pestle gets broken, forcing the substitution of the flagon with the dragon (and for some reason moving the pellet with the poison to the chalice from the palace, which had previously held the brew that is true). Nice escalation. Insufficient! I'd also forgotten that Sir Griswold learns of the poison and receives a mnemonic phrase of his own; it's the two men trudging toward each other in alternating shots, both of them repeatedly muttering nonsense, that truly lifts the gag into the stratosphere. Except I'm wrong, because I'd also forgotten that Hawkins' armor gets magnetized by a lightning bolt, so that once he's marching beside Griswold, both of them still muttering their respective gobbledygook, he's also constantly clanging sideways into his rival, further impeding their concentration. And then the whole thing doesn't matter anyway, as the king gets annoyed and calls off the toast. Perfect. It pains me that nobody puts this degree of effort into gag construction anymore...though, again, it's not as if Kaye's other movies regularly reach these heights. Maybe Panama and Frank were extra-motivated by what was then apparently the largest budget ever for a studio comedy. (About $40 million adjusted for inflation; for comparison, Ghostbusters, with its rampant special effects, cost about $63 million in today's money.) It bombed, but at least they tried.

All of that's Ed, this is no longer my single favorite film of 1956*, because I'd also forgotten that the climax involves an army of little people coming to Hawkins' rescue (their existence having been previously set up by the "Never Outfox the Fox" number). They're treated with respect rather than as objects of ridicule, which is great, but the actual melee—culminating in villains getting bounced up a conveyor belt of feet to a waiting catapult that launches them into the sea—is still pretty silly, and not in the right kind of way for my taste. Kinda winced my way through the last few minutes, and those minutes tend to have an outsize influence on my overall opinion of a movie. Can I get away with a Deus ex midgeta joke, given that the troupe is billed onscreen as Hermine's Midgets? I'll chance it in this self-conscious, hedging-my-bets manner.

* Or of 1955, as the IMDb would now have it. Lotta it-opened-in-Japan-the-previous-December year shifts over there lately, none of them easily verifiable and most of them currently being ignored by me. I did independently confirm that The King of Comedy premiered in Iceland in late 1982, however...though now that I look, I find that the Iceland date is gone from IMDb, though they still have the year as '82 (despite their earliest date now being February '83). This is just a total fucking mess. That site needs some clear standards.