The New Pictures

The Inspector General (Warner) is a Danny Kaye comedy based--a long way off base--on Nicolay Gogol's satiric Russian classic about the impostor who helps some corrupt officials outsmart themselves. Watered down and gagged up as it is, Gogol's idea is still engaging, and Comic Kaye is man enough to make even thin material look nervously good.

The film places the action in a sort of opera-bouffe Dogpatch in central Europe, in Napoleonic times. Kaye is not the knave of Gogol's play but a good-hearted rube. A half-starved outcast from a medicine show, he is mistaken by the crooked mayor (Gene Lockhart) and his henchmen-relatives for Napoleon's feared inspector general traveling incognito. Then, hardly grown into his splendid Techncolored uniform and the hungry affections of the mayor's wife (Elsa Lanchester), Kaye becomes a cat's-paw and fall guy for the scoundrelly medicine-show boss (Walter Slezak).

In the course of Kaye's antic fun with this plot, he makes an entrance with his head on a platter, gorges himself in fast motion at a feast, keeps a roomful of conspirators hidden from one another, tugs frantically at a sword that refuses to come out of its scabbard.

Funny as it is, the movie would be funnier if the scripters had not overworked their incidental gags at the expense of the best one: Kaye never really gets a chance to exploit the comic notion of the tramp who feels his oats as a big shot. The trouble may be that the picture tries too hard to keep Kaye sympathetic.

With all its faults, The Inspector General gives free play to Danny's superbly controlled mugging and his triphammer tongue, which rattles through some first-rate lyrics by his wife, Associate Producer Sylvia Fine.

Whirlpool (20th Century-Fox). "WARNING!" cry the ads for this picture. "If you are easily hypnotized, don't see it alone." The copywriter must have confused the hypnotic with the soporific. As the latest case history in five-reel psychiatry, with some Mesmer thrown in, the movie is a Freudian slip.

Heroine Gene Tierney is married to a cracker jack psychiatrist (Richard Conte), who never suspects that she is a kleptomaniac who can't sleep. Fearful of losing his high opinion, she goes for help to an unctuous hypnotist (Jose Ferrer). One night, while Svengali Ferrer is off setting up an alibi by having his gall bladder out, she wakes out of a trance to find herself a first-class murder suspect.

Whirlpool's one bright spot is Broadway Actor Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac), playing his second movie role. As a glib, impossibly clever rogue, he steals every scene. But it is only petty larceny. Miss Tierney's vacuous look (not a new look) makes it hard to tell when she is hypnotized and when she isn't.

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