The movie’s musical centerpiece is “The Maladjusted Jester,” which Hawkins performs for King Roderick.
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During those Court Jester screenings, I was also learning how to be a father. Meanwhile, I would try to figure out how Panama and Frank had advanced the plot. Kaye might as well have been singing directly to my daughter. At the behest of the Black Fox, Hawkins exposes the royal birthmark, the purple pimpernel, on the infant king’s rump (Rebecca roared most young children are attuned to butt jokes) and later sings the king a lullaby. She was tickled by the early scene in which Hawkins dances with a troupe of little people. Instead, we were both mesmerized by the opening sequence in which Kaye, in jester costume, appears to be throwing the credits across the screen. The story is as complicated as any by Sir Walter Scott, but I’m not sure Rebecca cared about that. Hawkins does so by impersonating a jester known as the Great Giacomo, who discreetly moonlights as an assassin. But the Black Fox, Roderick’s most feared nemesis, knows Hawkins is better suited to gentler arts, so he assigns him to smuggle the rightful king, an infant, into the palace. Kaye plays Hubert Hawkins, a carnival entertainer in 12th-century England who longs to be in the thick of it, “steel to steel,” against the usurper King Roderick.
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Written and directed by the veteran comedy team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, The Court Jester was shot in VistaVision, Paramount’s widescreen attempt to lure television viewers back into movie theatres. After a rental VHS copy of The Court Jester first appeared in our house, Rebecca was engrossed - so much so that we subsequently bought a copy. She was no more than three, but already aware of Danny Kaye because her maternal grandmother had a mint 10-inch vinyl copy of Danny at the Palace (1957). I didn’t discover his masterwork, The Court Jester (1955), until my daughter, Rebecca, born 30 years after the film was released, was old enough to watch with me. For the next three decades, I forgot about Kaye. Of one of his movie appearances, Pauline Kael wrote, “If he uses that Irish impersonation again, even the infants may crawl out for a cigarette.” At camp, my bunkmates were now singing Allan Sherman’s and Tom Lehrer’s timelier parodies.
He then went to Hollywood, where he specialized in playing lovable dreamers - schlemiels with rich fantasy lives.ĭuring my adolescence, I began to wince at Kaye’s patented awestruck expressions and foreign accents. Born Daniel David Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1913, he’d gone from musical revues in New York and London, where he dazzled audiences with rapid-patter songs written for him by his wife Sylvia Fine, to Broadway musicals. In fact, Kaye had been a star since my parents’ childhood. At summer camp, if I heard a bunkmate wail, “Mommy, gimme a drinka water,” I knew that we owned the same Danny Kaye record. My classmates and I knew the songs from Hans Christian Andersen (1952), even if we boys didn’t always admit it. When I was growing up in the 1960s, the entertainer Danny Kaye seemed to be everywhere - today traveling the world on behalf of UNICEF, tonight hosting his own CBS variety show.
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