Movies - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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	Movies - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a short story by James Thurber. It was made into a 1947 movie of the same name, with Danny Kaye in the title role.

The short story deals with an absent-minded man who drives his wife to the hairdressers, and then must run an errand while she is there. During this time he has four heroic daydream episodes. The first is as a pilot of a U.S. Navy flying boat in a horrific storm, then he is a magnificent surgeon performing a one-of-a-kind surgery, then as a cool assassin testifying in a courtroom, and finally as a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot volunteering for a daring, secret, suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump.

It has been suggested that Thurber got the idea for Walter Mitty from a book by a leading British crime-ficition writer, Anthony Berkeley Cox. Cox, writing as Francis Isles, in a book called 'Malice Aforethought' (Chapter 2), has a character Dr. Bickleigh who, like Mitty, escapes from intolerable reality into fantasies markedly similar in character to those of Mitty. It was published 10 years before Mitty.

Cox/Isles was closely associated with other writers of crime-fiction - such as Chesterton and Sayers - in the Detectives Club. Thurber, in The Macbeth Murder Mystery, demonstrated that he was an avid fan of British detective fiction of the period.

Movie version

It was made into a 1947 movie, that stars Danny Kaye as a young daydreaming editor for a book publishing firm. The film was adapted for the screen by Ken Englund, Everett Freeman, and Philip Rapp, and directed by Norman Z. McLeod. It is enhanced by being in color, which was relatively rare for that era. Henpecked and harassed by his bossy mother, his overbearing, idea-stealing boss, his childishly dimwitted fiancée, her obnoxious would-be suitor and her loud mother, Walter Mitty imagines all sorts of exciting things he would rather be doing. In one set of scenes, whilst stoking the heating boiler, he dreams what it would be like to be an RAF fighter pilot. He is awoken from this daydream by his mother, who orders him to come to dinner. Believing he is still a British fighter pilot, he salutes, and places the red-hot poker under his arm -- only to burn a hole in his suit jacket.

His daydreaming gets even more complicated when he meets a mysterious woman, Rosalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo), who is working with her uncle, Peter van Hoorn (Konstantin Shayne), to help secure some Dutch crown jewels hidden from the Nazis during World War II. He becomes caught up in this real-life adventure, as a result of which he saves the girl from kidnap, survives attacks by several would-be killers, including one known only as The Boot. All these events gives him the courage to stand up to those who push him around. At the end he predictably ditches his fiancée and marries the girl.

However, his patter-song ("ta-pocketa-ta-pocketa-ta-pocketa") that really goes through the roof is his playing a women's milliner, or professional hat-designer, named "Anatole of Paris." This is based on "Antoine de Paris," a women's hair-salon professional of that era, who became known to the general audience through being seen in The March of Time newsreel with many examples of the preposterous hairstyles he was able to get women to pay him to set up for them. Danny Kaye plays this character as fey and bubbly as he shows off absurd hats on models. The song, the lyrics of which were written by Kaye's wife, Sylvia Fine, is an example of the ridicule that gays would have received, though the last words in the song are "I hate women!" So it could have been a vindictive notion that the Walter Mitty character was acting out in his daydream.

Thurber did not want Samuel Goldwyn and MGM to make this film, he offered Goldwyn $10,000 not to, and was very unhappy with the final result. Goldwyn had the writers customize the film to showcase Kaye's talents, altering the original story. The studio was more interested in making a financial success for Kaye's singing and comedic abilities, rather than what Thurber had intended.

Main cast:

Danny Kaye
as Walter Mitty
Virginia Mayo
as Rosalind van Hoorn
Boris Karloff
as Dr. Hollingshead
Fay Bainter
as Mrs. Eunice Mitty

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