The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

Kaye’s film was a deceptively bright movie for post-WW2 America and the fact it stars peaches and cream actress Virginia Mayo (1920-2005 pneumonia and heart failure) shows it was meant for family audiences interested in musicals as opposed the cynicism and disillusionment of film noir which was gaining in popularity.ĭated comedian Danny Kaye’s famous quote from the movie The Court Jester (1956) This original version of the film was made in colour and Kaye is the henpecked unmarried son of a bossy mother who works for an idea stealing boss in a publishing firm where he works as a proof-reader and editor. The first film version starred Danny Kaye (1911-87 AIDS and hepatitis from tainted blood supplied during a heart bypass) and he is a comedian whose antics have dated for all except the most devoted of fans. He is probably most famous for his 4000-word short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty which has been made into a movie on two occasions (19) as it tells of a fellow by the name of Walter Mitty who escapes the mundane everyday life of his marriage by imaging the most outlandish adventures. It was the first such scandal in Connecticut history, and local residents were shocked to learn about their lawmakers’ corrupt “secret lives.” Mitty also picks up a magazine with the cover story “Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?” which refers to the growing power of the German military at the start of World War II in Europe-a situation that accounts both for the presence of war on Mitty’s mind and for anxieties about strength from America as a whole.Cartoonist, illustrator and humorist James Thurber Thurber makes a couple of specific allusions to local and world events: Mitty hears a newsboy on the street shouting about the Waterbury Trial of 1938, in which the mayor of Waterbury (also the lieutenant governor of Connecticut) and more than 20 other city officials were indicted for corruption and taxpayer fraud.

1939 marked the transition from this long period of anxiety into a more prosperous era, with the comfortable routines of middle-class consumer culture representing the new American Dream.

For relief, Americans turned to the kind of escapist genre fiction and films parodied in Walter Mitty’s fantasies, featuring dashing heroes like Errol Flynn in hypermasculine roles.

The Great Depression of the 1930s gave American men a widespread sense of impotence and failure as economic forces beyond their control left them unemployed and unable to provide for their families.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber