Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Movie review - "On the Double" (1961) **1/2

I liked this a lot as a kid - less so as the years have gone on. Maybe I outgrew Danny Kaye. The film does make it seem awfully easy to escape Berlin in World War Two.

The story is a riff on I Was Monty's Double/The Prisoner of Zenda. Some of its fun especially when Kaye goes off on a tear - dancing a Scottish jig to confuse Margaret Rutherford, impersonating a Marlene Dietrich style entertainer in Berlin.

Dana Wynter is beautiful as the love interest but she never seems that into him - Kaye of course is sexless. Diana Dors pops up as Kaye's mistress who is revealed to be a spy - I wish she and Wynter had swapped roles, I think Dors was more warm on screen, it would have worked.

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