Synopsis
The Inspector General (1949) is a Warner Bros. musical comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Director Henry Koster built it as a vehicle for Danny Kaye, lifting the premise from Gogol — a powerless fool mistaken for an all-powerful government auditor — and filling the rest with Kaye's particular brand of elastic physical comedy.
Kaye plays Georgi, an illiterate stooge from a traveling medicine show who ends up in jail on a vagrancy charge. The town's entirely corrupt officials, convinced he is Napoleon's feared inspector general traveling in disguise, shower him with bribes while quietly hatching increasingly botched plots to get rid of him. Walter Slezak plays the chief schemer with oily relish, and Elsa Lanchester wrings laughs out of a role that barely exists on paper.
The film wanders far from Gogol and does not try to hide it. On its own absurdist terms, it works. Stream The Inspector General (1949) on iFILM.
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