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Reviews
Little Friend (1934)
Nova's Felicity merits a Restoration!
With apologies to every child actress who ever stepped onto the screen, I hereby state that the best performance ever given my one was that of a now virtually forgotten British youngster, Nova Pilbeam. The picture "Little Friend," and most of her others have long been mostly unavailable.
Americans saw Nova Pilbeam only three times as a child. Of the few pictures she made as a young leading woman, only one-Hitchcock's "The Girl Was Young/Young & Innocent"-is worth mentioning in any review of her performances.
She was fourteen when she played Felicity in "Little Friend." It's the story of divorce told through the eyes of a youngster, old enough to grasp what is happening, too young to comprehend the circumstances. She was a remarkably plain little girl in an era when screen children were all curls and dimples. But in her desperate anguish which drove her to the brink of suicide, she was almost beautiful.
She gave another superb performance two years later as Lady Jane Grey, the pawn of royal intrigue, in "Nine Days a Queen/Tudor Rose," certainly one of the most distinguished historical dramas ever filmed. And she appeared for Hitchcock twice-as the kidnapped child in the first version of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and in "The Girl Was Young," the most underrated of his British thrillers.
Nova Pilbeam is just an odd name to movie fans today, but I'll wager that nobody who saw "Little Friend," or "Nine Days a Queen" has ever forgotten her.
The Court Jester (1955)
This Movie Just Couldn't Better Be!!!
This is the best movie Danny Kaye ever made; the most stylish, the cleverest, the most smoothly and tightly written. While he is unmistakably its star (there is only one scene in which he is not the center of attention), this is not the mere star vehicle that his other movies were. In this picture, he works WITH the actors instead of IN FRONT OF THEM. Along with the seasoned British stage actors, he came as close to being an ensemble player as he ever did, because he was surrounded by ace farceurs.
The movie requires not only that he cavort while, to some extent, subverting his ego to the ensemble effort; he also has to be physically agile, handle literate dialogue, and engage in routines written in the language of vaudeville. In short, he is offered the chance to exploit his myriad talents as never before.
The deadpan dialogue throughout, is beautifully underplayed, as the writer Norman Panama and the director Melvin Frank keep their tongues deftly in cheek. Often there is such meter and balance in the exchanges that rhythm alone seems to be getting the laughs. In such comedy, timing is everything, and that is especially evident in the "pellet with the poison," routine that has become a modern classic, comparable to the best of Jack Benny or Burns & Allen, S. J. Perelman's material for Bert Lahr, George S. Kaufman's for the Marx Brothers, or Abbott & Costello's "Who's on First?"
(Aside: One can't help but think that Shad's 2018 hip-hop song, "The Fool Pt 1" is at least partially a deliberate, sweet homage to Kaye's repeated exchange, "Get it? Got it. Good!")
Mr. Kaye's performance is a generous one, crisply disciplined and yet shining with bravura. Not so young anymore at forty-two, he was in superb physical condition, moving through the picture's rigors with seeming effortlessness. His tights reveal a youthfully trim man, with good muscle tone (although he apparently didn't think so, wearing "symmetricals"--stockings padded with sponge rubber in order to fatten up spindly legs).
The versatility, then, that had once made David Kaminski unclassifiable and had made Danny Kaye's early career so frustrating and problematic is precisely what The Court Jester celebrates. Nobody else could have done everything that he does in this movie, and it is as simple as that!