Me and the Colonel (Columbia) clothes Danny Kaye, hailed as "the world's greatest clown" by his pressagents and some critics not on the payroll, in a seedy business suit and black Homburg, and tints his hair middle-aged grey. Not a prat in the whole picture falls, and not one double-talked song or double-sung talk issues from the Silly Putty that is Kaye's usual movie face. The result of this hold-down of his celebrated talents is the most appealing and one of the funniest films Danny Kaye has ever made.
"Me" is one S. L. Jacobowsky, gentle, modest, resourceful, wryly philosophical, and also frightened silly because he is a Jewish Polish refugee stranded in Paris as the Wehrmacht plunges toward the city in the late spring of 1940. Cooped up in the same fleabag hotel with him is Colonel Tadeusz Boleslaw Prokoszny (Curt Jürgens), a class-conscious Polish nobleman who lives like the last tassel in the dying lunatic fringe of men dedicated to the proposition that women are to be loved, vodka is to be drunk, war is to be lived and honor is to be died for —preferably all in the same moment. Together they make a team whose picaresque adventures betray a desperation cloaked in human warmth, a cry of anger hidden in humor.
In S. N. Behrman's screenplay, adapted from Jacobowsky and the Colonel, his 1944 Broadway version of a play by Austria's Franz Werfel, Jacobowsky has "spent most of my life trying to become a citizen of some country ... In the technique of flight, you might say I'm an expert." He needs to be. When he bribes a Rothschild chauffeur into selling him "the last car in all Paris," he is able to prevent its being commandeered by the colonel only by hiding the gasoline until promised a ride. Once aboard, he finds they are heading not south toward safety but north to where the colonel's heartthrob waits. As German staff cars whiz by, the colonel speaks to his lady (Nicole Maurey) of matters urgent: "In the cathedral of my heart, a candle was always burning for you!"
The candle finally gets pointed in the right direction—south—and the rest of the film rattles along in an unpredictable Tin Lizzie of adventurous comedy, underscored by the slowly developing admiration of the colonel for his shy, uncannily ingenious passenger. Later, when the colonel comes swaggering into a German trap, pontifically confident that he can outwit the whole Nazi army, the picture explodes into a mock-chase climax that is sentimental, funny, and equally satisfying on both counts.
Less surely handled by Director Peter Glenville or either of the principals, Me and the Colonel would tip over into maudlin sociology or an embarrassing joke. But Actor Kaye, in his first completely straight role, keeps such a clear grasp of Jacobowsky's innate strength that every sly remark creeps through with the force of wisdom as well as the bite of wit. And Germany's Jürgens, curling back his lip and swirling his eyes as he exults, "I sniff battle—I'm alive again!" accomplishes the tricky task of making Actress Maurey's summation of him seem just right, and somehow regrettable: "There are no men left in this bleak, awful, modern world like you."