Yes, Wonder Man, not Wonder Woman, a 1945 musical comedy with a dash of crime thriller starring Danny Kaye as Danny Kaye, or sailing so close to his public persona as makes no difference.
As happened quite often in Kaye’s career, he plays two roles, twin brothers, one of whom is a light, facetious, musical theatre type, the other a bookish stiff.
After big, brash, brassy musical opening credits with the word Technicolor prominent, a musical number right at the beginning showcases most of the Kaye skillset – corny songs delivered with a wink, tongue-twisting wordplay, goofing about, awful puns (dad jokes), silly dances and so on.
It looks like this version of Kaye, Buster, is going to be the focus of the film, especially as there’s a romantic subplot involving Buster’s engagement to co-star Midge (Vera-Ellen), with whom he shares the number.
But in fact Buster is soon dead, having got on the wrong side of a gangster he was about to testify against. Throwing the spotlight onto Edwin, the other Kaye character, the dweeby brother who has soon been mistaken for his twin, and is now also in trouble with the gangsters.
Spooky supernaturals involving Buster’s spirit returning from the dead to help shy Edwin win his version of Midge, a blonde librarian played by Virginia Mayo, and to help find Buster’s killer and put him behind bars, mean that double-exposure special effects are wheeled out big time. Kaye, meanwhile, plays with the two personas expertly, as he’d later do in the most famous example of this – The Court Jester.
The special effects were Oscar winning and, though obviously not as good as now, they are pretty good, best demonstrated in a scene where ghostly Buster tries to have a drink at a bar (and fails) that still has a “how the hell did they do that?” aspect to it.
The film develops a potential problem when Edwin, forced to pose as Buster, gets cosy with Midge, though he has a woman of his own, Ellen, to woo. Both blondes, both attractive. But when the crunch comes this is all put to one side with a shrug and a shake as if upcoming nuptials were just a detail in an otherwise busy life. That’s Hollywood.
It’s Kaye’s film and he’s brilliant and also irritating in the way Kaye was, too urgent, too desperate to please, yet still amazing, especially in the musical number where Edwin goes on stage in Buster’s place and is all at sea, until the spirit of Buster comes to Edwin’s rescue.
MGM’s in-house chorus line, the Goldwyn Girls, turn up at one point, largely to showcase the Technicolor process in a range of different-coloured gaudy outfits. In fact the entire film looks rich, lovely and entirely artificial and is just the sort of thing you’d want to watch on a wet Saturday afternoon while eating something hot and buttery.
The film belongs to Kaye, no surprise, and the songs and most of the routines were written by Sylvia Fine, Kaye’s wife and the source of much of his material. But Vera-Ellen holds her end up in her debut and is determined not to be outdone by the star. She isn’t, particularly when she’s dancing – she’s sensational. The same cannot quite be said about Mayo, who doesn’t have so much to do, though she’d go on to co-star with Kaye in another three films, so presumably there were no hard feelings.
There’s a bit of the Marx brothers in the anarchic zippety-zip of it all, with director Bruce Humberstone largely staying out of the way of Kaye, who needs full-screen compositions to take in the energy of his performance.
This is most obvious in the virtuosic finale, where Edwin is on stage, waiting for Buster to help him sing his way through an opera-style number, but plods on without him, forcing him to make up the music and words as he goes, while at the same time trying to signal to the cops watching the show from a box who the villain of the piece is.
It is both funny and a demonstration of Kaye at his best – his bumbling fish-out-of-water shtick done at lightning speed and with the reflexes of an athlete. Watch Alice Mock, who plays the operatic soprano he shares the scene with, and marvel at how she kept it all together.
Wonder Man – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
