Michael Darvell reviews new DVD release, The Best of the Danny Kaye Show.
Danny Kaye (1911-87) was born David Daniel Kaminsky in New York of Ukrainian Jewish parents who had left Russia two years before their son’s birth. He was a performer from childhood. After his mother’s death when he was a teenager, he left home with a friend and they started working, Kaye as a singer, friend Louis as a guitarist, initially in Florida and later in the Catskills and the Borscht Belt where Kaye learned his trade as a performer. In the early 1930s he was part of a vaudeville dance act in New York and on tour. He entered films in 1935, appearing in a series of shorts, and then went back to Broadway where he met his future wife Sylvia Fine in a revue. He was discovered in a New York nightclub by playwright and screenwriter Moss Hart who put him into the Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin show Lady in the Dark in 1941 where he scored a personal triumph in the comic patter song ‘Tchaikovsky’. Hollywood beckoned with Samuel Goldwyn’s Up in Arms, then he had his own radio show on CBS. He toured after the war in a USO show and was the first American actor to visit post-war Tokyo.
More films followed including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Inspector General, Knock On Wood, The Court Jester, Merry Andrew, On the Riviera, Me and the Colonel, Hans Christian Andersen, White Christmas and The Five Pennies. He played the London Palladium to great success and appeared at the Royal Variety Performance in 1948. As his film career dwindled, he became popular on his weekly CBS television programme The Danny Kaye Show which ran for four years from 1963 with 120 episodes. Wienerworld and MVD Visual have issued for the first time a selection of six of these TV shows from 1963 to 1966, three in black and white and three in colour.
The Danny Kaye Show followed a basic pattern of stand-up reminiscences by Kaye, who also sang and danced, plus guest stars with whom he sang and took part in sketches and musical pastiches. He also had a regular company of comic actors and a chorus of dancers. He drew a remarkable cast of guest artists including Vikki Carr, Mary Tyler Moore, Eddie Albert, Vincent Price, Peter Falk, Nancy Wilson, Shirley Jones, Louis Armstrong, José Ferrer, Nancy Walker, Tony Bennett, Benny Goodman, Dinah Shore, Peggy Lee, Robert Vaughn, Pearl Bailey, Clint Eastwood, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Peter Ustinov, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Williams, Lucille Ball, Jean Simmons, Angela Lansbury, Petula Clark, Liberace, Robert Morley, Jo Stafford and her husband Paul Weston, who was musical director on some of the shows – virtually the whole of showbusiness appeared – as well as Kaye’s regular company of Harvey Korman, Joyce Van Patten and John Gary.
The six shows on this DVD have Jackie Cooper, Gene Kelly, Nana Mouskouri (her first US TV appearance), Art Carney, Rod (Twilight Zone) Serling, Michelle Lee, Lovelady Powell, Joe & Eddie, The Clinger Sisters, Harry Belafonte, Liza Minnelli, Alan Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Greco and Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. Certainly the songs are the best parts of the shows and they stand up well, the sketches less so. They tend to go on far too long, such as the one with Jackie Cooper on a plane in which Kaye plays a man on his first flight, or the wordless beach sketch with Harvey Korman as a lifeguard, or the laundrette sketch with Alan Young. Kaye even gets into drag for a beauty sketch but the element of slapstick is overdone and it gradually ceases to be funny, just predictable.
Elsewhere Kaye imagines what a baseball scene between a manager and his worst player might be if handled in the US, Great Britain, Japan and Germany. For a man who was an international ambassador for UNESCO, this material comes close to being labelled racist, reminding one of the worst excesses of Benny Hill. What fares better are versions of Broadway shows given a baseball setting, such as My Fair Umpire, Horse Side Story and The Baseball Man (i.e. The Music Man) which Kaye parodies with Belafonte who here demonstrates a fine talent for comedy.
There is also no denying the talents that Kaye had too – he was a good stand-up comedian, a great mover in dance and mime, with an attractive, easy-going speaking and singing voice that could put over a number with consummate ease, a charming raconteur and a very good ad-libber, as is witnessed when his guests often break up laughing at the unexpected. Yes, there was a lot of fooling about and falling about with Kaye around. Light on his feet, he reckoned he was born to be a dancer and he ends each show by skipping off to the song ‘Life Could Not Better Be’, from the film The Court Jester. The dance is reminiscent of the Morecambe and Wise finale to their TV shows, although Kaye comes across as rather a camp mover. He had a very graceful way of dancing, more Fred Astaire than, say, Gene Kelly.
If the sketches are questionable some 50 years on, then the musical elements are spot-on. Who would not respond to Kaye and Belafonte in duets of ‘Who Will Buy?’ from Oliver! and ‘Gonna Build a Mountain’ from Stop the World… I Want to Get Off? He also does medleys with Ella Fitzgerald and Buddy Greco encompassing ‘Mood Indigo’, ‘September in the Rain’, ‘A Great Day’, ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’. ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘We Like Each Other’ and ‘Where or When’ and sings and dances with a 19-year-old Liza Minnelli for ‘Let’s Talk It Over’, while Minnelli also does ‘Maybe This Time’, the Kander and Ebb song from 1964 that eventually appeared in the 1972 film of Cabaret, which she then made her very own.
Other musical highlights include a medley duet with Gene Kelly in many of his hit songs such as ‘I Could Write a Book’, from Pal Joey, ‘New York, New York’ from On the Town, ‘Long Ago and Far Away’ from Cover Girl, ‘’S Wonderful’ from An American in Paris and – natch – ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. Kaye and Kelly also do ‘Ballin’ the Jack’ which both performers sang in their earlier film careers – Kelly with Garland in For Me and My Gal (1942) and Kaye in On the Riviera (1951).
This is certainly a marvellous collection that shows what variety was like 50 years ago on television, pointing up how meagre the genre is on our current home screens. Even the recent return of Sunday Night At the London Palladium doesn’t make up for what we have lost in the once-popular television variety show.
* The Best of the Danny Kaye Show is released by Wienerworld/MVD Visual
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