The most heavily promoted opening the week of April 14 was Samuel Goldwyn’s THE KID FROM BROOKLYN starring Danny Kaye, Vera Ellen and Virginia Mayo, an RKO release that settled in on April 18 for a four-month run at the Astor, displacing Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.” The Astor, a simple but elegant Greek Revival theater, was built as a Broadway playhouse but had switched over to movies in 1925.
Producers Sam Goldwyn and David Selznick had a five year deal to share the theater alternately as a New York showcase for their productions. According to Variety, the deal stipulated that a film would stay in the theater as long as it was pulling weekly grosses of $17,000 or better. Selznick’s “Spellbound,” which could have squeezed out a couple more weeks under the agreement, exited early to give Goldwyn’s “Kid From Brooklyn” the Easter holiday week, reciprocating for a similar favor from Goldwyn who had pulled “The Wonder Man,” which also had starred Kaye, prematurely to make way for “Spellbound” 23 weeks earlier. RKO was the distributor at this time for both producers who provided big budget films for the RKO pipeline, supplementing the studio’s own somewhat more modest productions.
“Samuel Goldwyn is bringing him on...that likable, lovable guy--from the borough where the LAUGHS are born!!” said the ad copy on opening day. “As a milkman with a curdled brain, Kaye has never been funnier--and when a screwball plot turns him into a Man of Distinction you'll knock yourself out with laughter!” Within days the theater announced it would be adding 8:30 AM and midnight shows to accommodate the sell-out crowds. Kaye was a big hometown favorite with New York critics and audiences alike. A kid from Brooklyn himself, born David Kaminski, he had worked his way up through the Borscht Belt, where he started as a tumuler, the guy hired to keep the joint jumping so bored guests shouldn't check out on rainy weekends, then moved on to the New York nightclub circuit where he became a sensation with the tongue-twisting patter songs written for him by his wife, Sylvia Fine, and for his physical humor. It was then on to the Broadway stage where he had won raves for “Lady in the Dark” and “Let’s Face It.” It had been a quick trip from obscurity to stardom. He already had starred in two box office hits since hitting Hollywood. He was currently filming an adaptation of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” from The New Yorker writer and cartoonist James Thurber.
Except for the interpolation of a handful of musical numbers, “The Kid from Brooklyn” was virtually a scene-by-scene Technicolor remake of Harold Lloyd’s “The Milky Way,” released only 10 years earlier, and based in turn on a stage comedy. Character actor Lionel Stander played the same role in both film versions. Goldwyn not only bought the rights to the story but according to at least some film histories, he also destroyed the negative and as many of the prints of the original as he could locate.
There was no escaping “The Kid from Brooklyn” that month. According to Audience Research, a division of Gallup, the extensive promotion and advertising had given the film a greater pre-release audience penetration than any film since “For Whom the Bell Tolls” in 1943. The average person, Gallup said, had heard about "Kid" at least four times before its New York opening. The film’s producer, Sam Goldwyn, like David O. Selznick, was a big believer in audience research. According to Variety, measuring audience penetration was becoming de rigueur for studio marketing and publicity departments.
The pre-opening publicity included more than 60 syndicated newspaper and periodical stories; plugs on the radio shows of Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, Jimmie Fidler, Hildegarde and "Cavalcade of America," as well as Kaye’s own radio show. Advertising tie-ins included Cream of Wheat, Wheaties, Jergens, Woodbury's, Simmons Mattresses, Quink, Blackstone Cigars and Admiral Radios. Tie-ins netted five pages in American Weekly and stories had run in Colliers, Time (a cover story), Cosmopolitan, Women's Home Companion and others. Kaye had a smash live stand at the Paramount in March, the occasion for the Time cover story, which called him the most talked about comedian in America and reported that the 33-year old comic had attracted almost as much adulation from the screaming bobbysoxers as Sinatra. Publicity stunts included bringing the Goldwyn girls to NY the week of the premiere for personal appearances at fashion shows, on radio and at the aircraft show. Meanwhile Selznick already had the drumbeat going for “Duel in the Sun,” not expected to open until the fall.
The critics gushed over Kaye with Bosley Crowther of The Times among the most ebullient, saying that “the incredible Danny Kaye gives a wildly hilarious performance.” But he felt that neither the picture itself nor Kaye’s fellow cast members, who included wisecracking Eve Arden, Walter Abel, Steve Cochran and the ubiquitous Fay Bainter, were up to the comedian’s level. Kaye had teamed with former Rockette and Broadway chorine Vera-Ellen, one time Goldwyn Girl Virginia Mayo, and Steve Cochran before in the 1945 Goldwyn production “Wonder Man.” John McCarten of The New Yorker thought Kaye is “rapidly reaching that happy point where he can do no wrong,” but unlike Crowther he liked the supporting cast. Agee was not completely sold, saying in The Nation that he wished he had seen Kaye in the nightclubs because he felt that the best things he had seen him do “belong there, and are evidently blunted on the screen.” He suspected that if Kaye ever did become a great screen comedian it would be as an archetype, like Chaplin and Keaton, but then he worried that the days of the archetypes may have passed with the “loss of silence.” In Time he said “Still, laughs are a precious commodity these days and, even in an off-picture, Danny Kaye can furnish more than most people.”
The plot had Kaye as a mild-mannered, physically inept, naive milkman who is led to believe he has natural abilities as a boxer by a crooked manager and trainer in a fight-fixing scheme. Crowther did worry that Hollywood might be pushing Kaye too far into slapstick mode at the expense of the in-joke comedy that a more refined New York crowd preferred. The film included one such “sophisticated” number, one of Sylvia Fine’s tongue twisters about a ballerina, exactly the sort of thing that worked better in nightclubs. where Kaye had first performed it, than on the screen. And, as natural as this routine was to Kaye as a performer, it was completely incongruous for the character Kaye was supposed to be playing. The Goldwyn Girls, bosomy starlets in tight, bust-boosting garments who were a fixture in Goldwyn musicals since the advent of the talkies, provided other moments that had little to do with the plot. Here are the opening scenes, including the Goldwyn Girls and Kaye.
SPELLBOUND finished a 23-week run this week at the Astor. The Hitchcock suspense classic starred Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck as a psychiatrist and her amnesiac patient, who might also be a killer. Surrealist artist du jour Salvador Dali designed the dream sequence. Most of the critics liked it well enough, finding the depiction of psychiatry, however, somewhat suspect. Miss Bergman was named Best Actress of 1945 by the New York Film Critics Circle for “Spellbound” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s." The dream sequence is here.