In 1955’s The Court Jester, Danny Kaye had a great recurring shtick with a tongue-twister he has to remember to keep from getting poisoned. I have a feeling the creative team behind 1961’s On the Double were aiming for similar comedy gold when Kaye’s spineless enlisted man finds a great many occasions to muse upon his “salt-free, fat-free, low-fat, low-cholesterol, high-protein”. I may not have the exact wording right, but that is how I remember it.
But it won’t be the kind of line that will be stuck in my head later, such as Jester’s “vessel with the pestle” bit. And this recurring line about the diet isn’t funny the first time he sputters it out and each additional time he says it only further proves how unfunny it is, and I soon found it chafing.
Alas, that gag is fairly representative of the picture overall. Set in WWII England on the cusp of the D-Day invasion, Kaye’s plays the American private with that curious dietary regimen, as well as a hard-drinking, womanizing British colonel. The private is Williams and the colonel is MacKenzie-Smith. For the sake of clarity, I will largely refer to Kaye in this writeup by which character he is at a particular time.
MacKenzie-Smith is known to be the target of assassination plots, so Williams is unknowingly recruited for a mysterious operation only revealed to him as Project 402. Behind his back, plan masterminds Wilfrid Hyde-White and Gregory Walcott call it Operation Dead Pigeon. Williams will be slow to realize it, but he is only a decoy, and he is very likely to be killed.
The first problem with the movie is Kaye’s age. When we first see him, he and fellow recruit Jesse White are of such advanced years as to beggar belief they could possibly be draftees, even given this is a comedy. For reasons I find hard to articulate, I found it easier to believe Bob Hope as an MP in Off Limits, and I believe he was older there than Kaye is here.
I suspect I feel this way partly because the film wants to be a wacky comedy without boundaries while simultaneously having a WWII plot with actual stakes not just for Williams, but for the world overall. Maybe (maybe) this would have worked if the villain had been a cartoonishly diabolical mastermind, but the Nazis were, and always will be, too real of a threat. My wife expressed similar opinions along these lines as we watched this, and she asked of the German element of the plot, “Too soon?”
It also doesn’t help that the ruse to have the private impersonate the colonel would fool absolutely nobody. William is seriously nearsighted in one eye, to an extent I doubt would have made him eligible for service—or, at least, not without corrective lenses. His good eye just happens to be the one covered by an eyepatch necessary for the ruse, though the colonel only wears one as an affectation. There is much business akin to Mr. Magoo in which Kaye has to fumble around nearly blind. These moments could have been funny but none of them land. Then there’s the matter of the eyepatch often being worn over the wrong eye, which characters who know the colonel very well immediately observe, until the plot conveniently makes them too stupid to not notice it.
Almost every role in this is thankless, though some of the actors fare better than others. I felt sorry for Dana Wynter as Mrs. MacKenzie-Smith. Tired of her husband’s many indiscretions, she seems to fall in love with Williams solely because he’s the most immediate option available. Another thankless role a sergeant played by Diana Dors, in yet another production where she seemingly brought her own soundtrack with her, a growing trumpet doing that suggestive “bwah-bwah-bwah-bwaaaaah” that seems to be the universal music sting for a supposedly desirable female.
Not even the men fare well, with Walcott’s American colonel having his voice crudely dubbed in. I don’t know if this is the actor’s actual voice, as I don’t recall seeing him in anything before, but what we hear fails to sync up in any way with the lip movements on the screen. Hyde-White is in the same role here as a wryly amused observer that he plays in everything else I’ve seen him in. He’s even narrating over the opening credits as he tells us to get on with it, that nobody knows these people whose names are on the screen or cares what they did on the production.
Those credits are strange, as they play out over a sustained POV shot out of the driver-side window of a car with a bullet hole in it. That hole was there because the driver tried to shoot MacKenszie-Smith through the raised window, which reeks of desperation and carelessness. As any fellow graduate of assassination school will tell you, you lower the window first. But now I’ve said too much, and I’ll have to kill you. Just continue reading and ignore any sounds you might hear behind you…right…now.
Anywho, those credits are animated in a way that got under my skin like my knife just got under yours. As you lay dying, consider how each of those slates of text flies in from the right, an animated mask making it appear they are outside the door frame, but then are somehow inside the window and in front of that bullet hole when they pause for a moment for us to read them. This surely seemed a minor thing to most, but it annoyed me in almost every way possible: it thinks it is clever when it really isn’t, and the execution is poor—not unlike my execution of you a minute ago.
And this whole set up with the car interior POV is done through shoddy bluescreen. I realize that was a nascent technology, but I feel the same way about that as I do about any other technology. Much like early attempts to incorporate CGI into live-action footage, it shouldn’t have been done if the technique wasn’t ripe yet. Another shot is a shot over the shoulder of Williams as he watches MacKenzie-Smith board a plane. It is clever having Kaye watching himself, but the awkwardness of the shot renders it moot.
Surprisingly for this kind of thing, there isn’t much twinning of Kaye. I am pleased to say there is on bit I can’t quite fully work out. One unbroken shot has MacKenzie-Smith at the left, seated on one side of a desk. Williams is standing to the right and on the opposite side. The colonel whacks the desk without a walk desk a few times to punctuate a point. I noticed that, when the stick was in the air, there was some waviness around it, which suggests a hand-cut travelling matte. Then Williams picks up what appears to be the exact same object and does a flawless impersonation of the man. This is kind of thing I most like about movies, and this effect is a puzzle which will occupy my thoughts for some time.
I could go and on for quite some length about the many, many problems with the deeply unfunny On the Double, but I forgot your time is short, what you lying there and bleeding all over the place. But I have some things to consider in your final moments. Things like why domestic violence back then was sometimes regarded in movies and TV shows as appropriate material for jokes. Things like Kaye doing impressions for his military friends, which would require him to carry an eyepatch, multiple false mustaches and God knows what else at all times. Things like Kaye speaking complete gobbledygook and Germans believing he is speaking their language. This is a far worse movie than I thought was possible, but I guess it at least won’t kill you. After all, I just killed you.
Dir: Melville Shavelson
Starring Danny Kaye, Dana Wynter, Wilfrid Hyde-White
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray