- Very good.
This is the type of film that the phrase “glorious technicolor” was invented for - look at the richness of the colours!
To say nothing of a phrase that gets used in this house a bit too often…
ok so this is The Court Jester with Danny Kaye and it is the best fucking movie i swear. It’s a comedy musical robin hood parody thing about an incompetent moron and his extremely competent ass-kicking girlfriend taking down a tyrannical king and restoring the throne to the rightful heir
-the rightful heir is a baby and they can tell it’s the right baby because of a giant birthmark on his asscheek
-the main character’s only talent is singing and the rest of the pseudo robin-hood group just kinda tolerate him because he repeatedly fucks up
-he gets hypnotized into believing he is this amazing swashbuckling sword fighting hero along the lines of Wesley from the Princess Bride and ends up fighting the villain while snapping in and out of hypnosis
-the vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison, the chalice with the palace has the brew that is true “what”
-he stumbles his way through the entire plot and never knows what the hell is going on
-Danny Kaye is the funniest motherfucker you’ve never heard of
-seriously go watch it you wan’t regret it
#yea verily yea ( @lessthansix)
And a fun tidbit from the filming was that Danny Kaye had never fenced before this film, so he was trained by Basil Rathbone’s stunt double who was also the fight coordinator. Kaye got so proficient so quickly, that Rathbone himself had to do most of the duel scenes between them as the fight coordinator eventually couldnt keep up with him on the more technical parts of the fight. If you watch closely, you can see that Rathbone stays on camera doing the fencing for a much larger percentage of time than he normally did by that point in his career, and Kaye does all but a couple of shots of his own fencing, because HIS double couldnt keep up and make it believable.
I need everyone in this thread to know that it is my belief that the post escaped containment in a drastic way because my Texan stepfather, a lovely man who is the least On Tumblr of anyone any of us has ever met, put this movie on for us to watch yesterday because “The Internet says it’s great and underrated, and apparently there’s a fight scene we need to watch.”
He chortled his way through it and pronounced you all correct and then lost his shit when I showed him my favorite backstage photograph:



























