This movie is very difficult to review without a bias... on the one hand it is a great deal of fun, yet on the other hand... it just ends without any strong script writing. On the one hand it stars Glynis Johns, Angela Lansbury, and Danny Kaye, which automatically makes it amazing! Yet the other hand holds a mash of not enough of humor to balance out the sheer idiocy that sometimes overtakes this movie. Thus the deciding factor on whether or not you will enjoy this movie entirely depends on your love for old classics and old movies which always seemed to thrown in a large amount of musical numbers (because everything was done in song back then you see... just like the world made a sudden change to color, which is why we no longer have all black and white pictures... we developed color).

This is undoubtedly a movie from old Hollywood, produced in the same fashion as many of the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly films. If you loved Singing in the Rain... if you loved the insanity that was Donald O'Conner... then you'll love Danny Kaye in this movie. If you enjoyed his performance in White Christmas with Bing Crosby... you may not enjoy this as much, because he is very much playing off of his insanity. If you don't know any of the people that I have mentioned in my review up until this point, then you may not want to watch this movie (though I would encourage you to watch all the movies I've mentioned because you are severely missing out).

Half the fun of this movie is watching Danny Kaye get himself out of one problem and into another. He shows a mastery of tongue-twisters that will blow you away and have you attempting "Peter Piper Picked..." for several minutes just trying to prove you can do the same. It has a few songs, but none of them are memorable (though I have "You'll Never Out-fox the Fox" and "Jester" on my MP3 player)... and while they are not memorable, they are a joy for the soul and worth laughing at. Of course there is the standard "serious" song, but thankfully it is over quickly and if you wanted you could ignore it because it holds no pertinence to anything. Comedy abounds! And that is what makes this a classic. This movie holds everything in it that made Danny Kaye famous and has perhaps one of his best comedic performances... I recommend that everyone watch this just so you can see how seamless his acting performances could shift.

I rate this movie as accurately as possible, because it is a good movie from the time period, but far from perfect... but it ages well and it shows what you can do when you have good actors and a "mediocre" script. Take it for what it is and you will not be disappointed.