8/13/2023 0 Comments Walter black inkAha, now we have scope for Walter to have a love interest Thurber said in the story only now it’s not Mrs. The film opens with a large, unpleasant, domineering women saying to Walter/Danny exactly the things that Mrs. MGM bought the rights, got some advice from Thurber on how to expand the story into a two-hour film, ignored all the advice, cast Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty (which pretty much guaranteed that the dark element of the story would disappear into Kaye’s sunny silliness), added some musical numbers to play into Kaye’s multiple talents, and cast Virginia Mayo, one of then-reigning beautiful blondes, as the girl. That was 1939, the year the last hope for peace was crushed, a dark time for the whole world. It ends with his wife disparaging him one more time as he retreats into yet another heroic daydream. Mitty is truly trapped in a miserable marriage and his only escape is in his imagination. The original Mitty story, although darkly funny and brilliantly told, is also tragic. Thurber was seldom denounced in his own day for misogyny, although in today’s culture he would be. Magazine was a shocker when it launched in 1972. The modern version of the women’s movement (sometimes called “Second Wave Feminism”) is much more recent than we may recall. (See “The Curb in the Sky” about a man driven mad because his wife corrects everything he says.) He wrote many stories about husbands with domineering or annoying wives, so much so that in his prime there were stock characters in the culture known as the “Thurber man” (a nebbish) and the “Thurber wife” (a shrew.) Thurber clearly sympathized with the husbands. Then he disappears into another hyper-masculine fantasy.Įspecially as viewed from today’s mores, Thurber had a misogynist streak. Then, from the middle of each fantasy, his wife hauls him back to the quiet desperation of his own life by yelling at him and giving errands to run while predicting that he will screw up even the errands. Mitty escapes from his wife’s demeaning nagging into a fantasy world of noisy machines (all of which go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa) in which he is brave, heroic and masterful, whether piloting a submarine or an airplane or saving a patient with his world-renowned surgical skill. Thurber’s Walter Mitty (the 1939 original, print only) was a classic hen-pecked husband. To use the three Mittys for this purpose is almost too easy, but fun, so here goes: Round One: Hen-pecker and hen-peckee But when the same (sort of) story gets written in 1939, filmed in 1947, then filmed again in 2013, we get a delicious opportunity to see how the culture has changed as reflected in how the story has been reinterpreted. That one, directed by and starring Ben Stiller (co-starring Kristen Wiig), is still around in suburban theaters. Then, after apparently trying out various concepts and casts for a remake for almost 20 years, Hollywood made Mitty again last year. (I do not endorse it for any best film list.) That film, according to its Wikipedia page, turned up on the list of the 500 best films of all time, albeit at No. Hollywood, which didn’t do much with Thurber’s work in general, made a film of Walter Mitty in 1947 starring Danny Kaye. But his most famous piece, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” published in 1939, still shows up in anthologies of great American short stories. I’m not sure my kids’ generation knows much about him. Thurber died in 1961, when I was 10, and before I became enamored with his work, but he was definitely still a name in my teens and 20s. As a young man, I laughed at, loved and devoured the short fiction of James Thurber, the great New Yorker magazine humorist.
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