Word: knocks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Knock on Wood (Paramount), like Casanova, fails to fit a famous odd peg into the rectangular hole of the screen, but it is a much more entertaining try. The trouble with Danny Kaye as a movie comedian is that his humor is almost too graphic to photograph. Give him the wide-open spaces of a theater stage and like the prairie flower, he keeps growing wilder every hour. But confine him to the camera's cold, Technicolored eye and take away the living audience that gives him his reason for spreeing. and Kaye is not much better than...
...Knock on Wood. Danny tries to give himself more room to whirl around in. Melvin Frank and Norman Panama wrote their script - and Kaye's talented wife Sylvia Fine contributed the specialty numbers - somewhat in the style of an aria with a few optional passages scattered along the way, at which points Danny could go into a comic Kayedenza if the inspiration came. And inspiration does come. One of the funniest parts of the picture is the scene in which Kaye. on the spur of the moment, becomes an automobile salesman sputtering trade talk ("overhead underslung oscillating compression decravinator...
...best as a scat-back, alone in an open field. As soon as the blockers form in front of him and the routine plays have to be run off, he either loses interest in the game or trips over his won teammates. Mr. Kaye and other producers of "Knock on Wood," while apparently aware of this fact, were too obeisant to the traditions of Plot to take full advantage of it. The result is a picture which is funnier than most, but never so funny as it could have been...
...Knock on Wood," Kaye plays an American ventriloquist who, while touring Europe, becomes the unwitting carrier of a set of horrendously important atomic blueprints. Since not only the original owners of these plans (Our Side), but also two competing sets of Middle European badmen are after the documents, Kaye soon assumes the position of the rabbit in a greyhound race. The epic chases and subtrefuges which result, however, have their edges dulled by limp globs of plot which necessarily precede and follow each comedy sequence...
...when all this clap-trap is out of the way, Kaye rides triumphantly through the rest of the picture, assuming Eton accents, Irish brogues, car salesman mannerisms, and ballet postures with equal facility. It is only too bad that the people responsible for "Knock on Wood" seemed to feel that something inherently funny could be made out of a mother fixation and some stolen atomic secrets...