Word: jesters
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Beside the Kaduna River one day last week, a gaudy explosion of sound and color broke over Britain's largest colony. Spearmen whooped and saddlery creaked. Drums bongity-bongity-bongitied. Reed pipes wailed, wooden kafo horns growled out Louis Armstrong blue notes. The Emir of Kano's jester wore his best blue-dyed sheepskin wig and beard. Some of the warriors wore chain mail, wide-bladed swords or helmets of Crusader descent...
...Court Jester (Dena; Paramount) features Danny Kaye, bedecked with ASCAP and belles, in a pleasantly goofy travesty of the olden daze into which Hollywood falls so often and so profitably. Danny is cast as a song-and-dance man at the court of a wicked king (Cecil Parker), but in reality Danny is nobody's fool. He is the secret agent of the Black Fox, a nobleman who hides in the forest like some robbing hood. With him hides the true king, still an infant, for whom the Black Fox plans to seize the power...
There is a villain (Basil Rathbone), a palace witch (Mildred Natwick), a princess royal (Angela Lansbury) and a political poison plot. When the squirrely-burly's done, Jester Kaye has managed to get the false king on his knees, the true one on the throne, the heroine (Glynis Johns) in his arms, the villain on his point, and the audience happily lost in some muddle ages that no history book records...
...Court Jester, Funnyman Kaye takes all the laughs he needs, but he takes them when they do not stop the show. To this rule he makes one wonderful exception: the scene in which he jousts with a person known as "the grim and grisly Griswold of the North." The episode begins as Danny totters up to the stirrup cup. There is a beaker of wine for each of the contestants, and he cannot remember which one has been doctored. Does the vessel with the pestle have the pellet with the poison? No, no. The chalice with the palace...
...inspection that afternoon." Asked if he feared any grounding orders from federal authorities, Folsom, virtually there for the big kickoff already, drawled: "I'm the law around here." But at week's end, an aide of Kissin' Jim's nervously volunteered that he was sure Jester Folsom was just jesting...