The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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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[citation needed] that Thurber got the idea for Walter Mitty from a book by a leading British crime-fiction writer, Anthony Berkeley Cox. Cox, writing as Francis Isles ten years earlier, in a book called 'Malice Aforethought' (Chapter 2), has a character named Dr. Bickleigh who, like Mitty, escapes from intolerable reality into fantasies markedly similar in character to those of Mitty.
Cox/Isles was closely associated with other writers of crime-fiction, such as Chesterton and Sayers, in the Detectives Club.[citation needed] Thurber, in The Macbeth Murder Mystery, demonstrated that he was an avid fan of British detective fiction of the period.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Movie version
| The Secret Life of Walter Mitty | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Norman Z. McLeod |
| Produced by | Samuel Goldwyn |
| Written by | Ken Englund Everett Freeman Philip Rapp James Thurber |
| Starring | Danny Kaye Virginia Mayo |
| Running time | 110 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The story 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 was filmed in Technicolor, a rarity at the time.
[edit] Synopsis
Walter Mitty is henpecked and harassed by everyone in his life: his bossy mother (Fay Bainter), his overbearing, idea-stealing boss (Thurston Hall), his childishly dimwitted fiancée (Ann Rutherford), her obnoxious would-be suitor (Gordon Jones) and her loud mother (Florence Bates).
His only escape from their incessant needlings is to imagine all sorts of exciting and impossible lives for himself, fueled perhaps by the pulp magazines he reads every day as an editor at the Pierce Publishing Company. But his dreams only seem to land him in more trouble.
In one scene, while 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 a red-hot poker under his arm -- only to burn a hole in his suit jacket.
Things become much more complicated when he runs into a mysterious woman, Rosalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo), who just so happens to perfectly resemble the girl of his dreams. Rosalind 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.
Caught up in a real-life adventure that seems unbelievable even to him, Walter attempts to hide his double life from his mundane in-laws and eventually acquires the courage to stand up to those who push him around.
[edit] Reaction
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.[citation needed]
The film includes many of Kaye's trademark patter-songs and one of his best remembered characters, "Anatole of Paris", a fey women's milliner whose inspiration for the ridiculous chapeaus he creates is in actuality his loathing of women. The Anatole character is based on "Antoine de Paris," a women's hair-salon professional of the era known for creating preposterous hairstyles. The lyrics to the song Anatole of Paris were written by Kaye's wife, Sylvia Fine.
[edit] Cast
- Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty
- Virginia Mayo as Rosalind van Hoorn
- Boris Karloff as Dr. Hollingshead
- Fay Bainter as Mrs. Eunice Mitty
[edit] 2007 film
The film is currently being remade and will be out in 2007. At first producer-directors Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg, with a host of screenwriters, and Kevin Anderson as Mitty, were going to re-do the film, but it has fallen through. Now over at Paramount Studios, producers Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., his brother John Goldwyn, and Richard Vane, with director Mark Waters and Owen Wilson cast as Mitty are working on the remake of the 1947 film with a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese. This new script is based more on the 1939 short story than the 1947 film, and is being made without the singing.
Probably owing to the production of this film, the DVD version was withdrawn from distribution and was momentarily an expensive collector's item.
[edit] Trivia
It was a major inspiration to the partially-animated show The Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty.
