Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 23, 1950

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 opéra-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...

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