Friday 8pm THE INSPECTOR GENERAL – Romance/Musical - A town's corrupt officials think a fool is actually an investigator in disguise.
Danny Kaye stars as Georgi, a snake oil salesman in a traveling medicine show who is too honest for his own good. After his partner fires him, the simple-minded Georgi wanders into a corrupt town and is picked up on a vagrancy charge. The town's corrupt officials mistake him for the inspector general whom they think is traveling in disguise. Fearing he will discover they've been pocketing tax money, they make several bungled attempts to kill him. Matters get even more tangled, and amusing, when the real inspector general shows up.
TRIVIA
- Nikolay Gogol's play, "The Inspector General" opened in St. Petersburg, Russia in April 1836.
- Near the beginning of the movie Leza (Barbara Bates) is tightening the corset of Maria (Elsa Lanchester). Maria demands that Leza tighten the corset more and Leza explains that it's already tight. After Maria leaves, another character comments that Leza was correct and the corset was too tight: "it makes her eyes bug out." This was an inside joke, since Elsa Lanchester's eyes were somewhat protuberant.
- The song "Happy Times", written for this film, was a recording hit for numerous artists during the late 1940s and early 1950s.