Melvin Frank, Norman Panama (1955)
In the opening titles sequence of this brightly-coloured and bizarre concoction, Danny Kaye, in jester costume, performs a gently jolly song called ‘Life Could Not Better Be’ and the credits share the screen with him. The name of Basil Rathbone appears repeatedly and waggishly; Kaye keeps batting it out of view. Rathbone, almost needless to say, plays the villain of the piece – or one of them. The other is King Roderick, a usurper to the throne in the fictional medieval England in which The Court Jester takes place. This piece of casting is more unexpected than Rathbone’s (as Lord Ravenhurst, Roderick’s chief adviser). The monarch is Cecil Parker, a nearly peerless interpreter of the ineffectual man in charge for whom the responsibility of high office is all too much. The idea of Parker having the nerve or energy to seize power is the best joke in Melvin Frank and Norman Panama’s musical comedy. The co-directors also did the screenplay. The rather few and musically unremarkable songs are by Sammy Cahn and Danny Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine.
Kaye plays Hubert Hawkins, a former carnival entertainer and now minstrel to the Black Fox (Edward Ashley), the leader of a forest-based band of rebels whose aim is to restore the throne to its rightful heir, a baby with a distinguishing purple birthmark on his backside. Hawkins’s previous work experience comes in handy when he’s required to impersonate the King’s new jester. (The moderately complicated plot isn’t worth summarising beyond this.) The Black Fox doesn’t get much screen time: the Robin Hood-ish element is strengthened more by the presence of Rathbone, who’d played Guy of Gisbourne in The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938 and whose role here is a synthesis of Guy and the Sheriff of Nottingham (as Parker’s King Roderick is very vaguely King John). The Court Jester looks set from its opening to be an exuberant medieval movie parody. It turns out to be a more curious mélange of styles and tones. While the lyrics of ‘Life Could Not Better Be’ are arch and knowing[1], plenty of what follows isn’t frankly ridiculous and anachronistic (in the way that, say, the historical Carry Ons, at a dafter level, would be). The acolytes of goodies and baddies alike are played by actors in just the wooden style you’d expect in a ‘straight’ historical adventure picture of the period. Although the film is essentially a spoof swashbuckler, the climactic swordfight between Kaye and Rathbone looked to this non-expert eye much more complex than the average knights-of-old combat on screen.
Danny Kaye’s performing skills are many and impressive but too showcased by Frank and Panama, especially the physical comedy. As a result, I found Kaye’s charm wearing thin quite soon although his tongue-twister dialogues are enjoyable. The first is with Cecil Parker (‘the Doge did his duty and the Duke didn’t, that’s when the Duchess did the dirt to the Duke with the Doge’, and so on). The second, more famous exchange is with Mildred Natwick as Griselda, a royal maid with a sideline in witchcraft. Natwick, a fine comic actress who has a funny, anxious urgency throughout The Court Jester, holds her own against Kaye: ‘The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon; the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true …’ Glynis Johns is Jean, a sort of Maid Marian equivalent; Angela Lansbury is Roderick’s daughter, Princess Gwendolyn. Both are more proficient than they seem comfortable. The cast also includes John Carradine, as Giacomo, the jester Hawkins pretends to be. The Hermine’s Midgets ensemble adds to the bewildering mix. A box-office failure on its original release, The Court Jester was, in 2004, selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry, for reasons that largely escape this viewer. On second thoughts, I suppose the film is ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically, significant’ – or, at least, different.
10 December 2018
[1] For example:
‘You’ll see as you suspect/Maidens fair in silks bedecked./Each proud and true effect/For the umpteenth time we resurrect.
‘We did research./Authenticity was a must!/Zooks! Did we search!/And what did we find? A lotta dust!
‘After the dust had cleared,/Half the cast had a beard …’
