“Danny Kaye Begins His First Movie”
Pittsburgh Post-
By: Frederick C. Othman (United Press Hollywood Correspondent)
HOLLYWOOD, July 5 – The story now is going the rounds concerning Sam Goldwyn’s long distance conversation with a New York pal, who wanted to know what Danny Kaye was playing in “Up in Arms.”
“He’s a hypochon—, he’s a hypocron—, he’s playing a nervous wreck in Technicolor,” retorted Goldwyn.
We don’t guarantee the authenticity of that yarn, but we did go out to the studio today to see the nervous wreck and his pals, including Dinah Shore, Dana Andrews, Constance Dowling and Director Elliott Nugent.
Kaye, the lad who was earning $30 a week a couple of years ago on the subway circuit in New York, who’s getting $150,000 for his first chore in the movies, and who takes on another job for his Uncle Sam at $50 a month as soon as he’s finished, said he was getting along all right in the picture business.
“The first day it was bad,” he said. “There was a big butterfly in my stomach. All morning it tramped around down there, spinning a cocoon. About noon it flew away and I’ve been all right since.”
Gets Dinah, Too
Kaye is the hypochondriac private, who heads for the South Sea islands, and takes care of the Japs and his own ills in what the experts predict will be a funny fashion, indeed. He also gets the beauteous army nurse, Miss Shore.
This Dinah Shore, as you know, is the gal from the South who sings on the radio and makes strong men fall in love with her, just listening. The strong men don’t know it, but she can’t sing unless she has her shoes off, her eyes shut and her fingers crossed. Otherwise, she says, she cannot concentrate.
Miss Shore now is performing in her second movie. Her first was “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” which Warner Brothers made last spring and still have not released.
“But they did preview it the other night,” Miss Shore reported. “They phoned me they were having a special secret showing and that I could come if I didn’t tell anybody. So I put on my best dress and drove out and parked my car on the lot. And it was nearly 8:30 p.m., and I was too scared to go in. I sat on the parking lot for an hour arguing with myself. Then I went home.”
Miss Shore, as a Technicolor army nurse, was wearing a full regulation army uniform, made of strawberry pink flannel. Might purty, too, and if all army nurses wore suits like that this would be a pleasanter war.
Miss Shore was eating shrimps, as supplied by Irving Sindler, the demon property man. She had been eating shrimps since 8 a.m., dunked in Sindler’s special Technicolor sauce, and it appeared as though she’d still be eating shrimps day after tomorrow.
Smells Like Wharf
The scene was fishermen’s wharf in San Francisco. There were so many fish piled around the edges that the set not only looked like the wharf, it smelled like it.
As for Sindler, he’s the man who gets his name into every picture on which he functions. The directors always go to all lengths to outwit him, but he invariably wins. His last job on Goldwyn’s Russia picture was a toughie, because how can an American name appear in a Russian sign? Sindler fixed that by having a Russian peasant operating a Sindler sewing machine.
As for this film, Director Nugent has a surprise coming. A fish wagon is going to clatter across the dock, with a sign: “Sindler and Son, the Sea’s freshest fish.”