Comments regarding Danny are in yellow.

“‘Me and the Colonel’ Outstanding”
The Vancouver Sun – Oct. 16, 1958
By: Glyde Gilmour

           One of the most tired and tiresome gimmicks in the bag-of-tricks of the average Hollywood publicity department usually takes the form of an excited “news release” announcing that some famous comedian is going to play a “straight” role in his next picture—and that he will thus be revealed to his bedazzled fans as an actor of exceptional ability.
            Such communiqués almost always turn out to be just so much windy press-agentry; but from now on I’m going to scan them less skeptically than before. Because Danny Kaye really does play a “straight” role in “Me and the Colonel” and although he also manages to be very funny without one going into a Kaye-type song or sketch or acrobatic clowning, he really does disclose himself as an actor more sure and subtle in his effects than dozens of rivals whose careers have been built on “straight” acting alone.
            Come to think about it, the title is the only thing about “Me and the Colonel” that I dislike. Its farcical, ungrammatical flavor is completely out of tune with the quiet ironies and elegance of the story and its presentation.
            The original source was a play (based on an actual case) by Franz Werfel, which the American dramatist S. N. Behrman adapted for the New York stage during the Hitler war. He called it “Jacobowsky and the Colonel.” The present screenplay is by the same Behrman in collaboration with George Froeschel. It tells of the reluctant companionship which develops between Jacobowsky, a humble and philosophical little wandering Jew, and an aristocratic, anti-Semitic Polish colonel while both of them are fleeing in 1940 from the advancing Germans in France.
            The Jew (superbly played by Kaye) and colonel (vigorously overacted by Curt Jurgens) are a gloriously incongruous pair. Soon they are joined by one of the officer’s French sweethearts (Nicole Maurey), and the little group is completed by the colonel’s beefy orderly (Akim Tamiroff). Their adventures together often skate on the thin ice that protects raw tragedy from derision, but not once does the film lapse into bad taste. At the end, all are somehow wiser humans but still true to their basic individual codes.
            “Me and the Colonel” was directed by Peter Glenville, one of Britain’s younger stage luminaries. He should enjoy all the career he wants in the film industry, too.

 

“Danny Kaye Scores Hit in Serious Role”
Oakland Tribune – Sept. 20, 1958

More of a quick summary than a review

           Danny Kaye, clown, singer, dancer and master of double-talk, believes that his role in Columbia’s “Me and the Colonel,” opening Wednesday at the T&D, will open up for him new vistas in acting.
            “Me and the Colonel” is a story of two men with nothing in common but their desire to live, who come to mutual understanding and esteem during a long, serio-comic flight from peril. Inevitably, there is a comedy—but it is comedy tinctured with humility, dignity and wisdom.
            In “Me and the Colonel,” Kaye plays a Polish Jew who, in a lifetime of ups and downs—the downs predominating—has learned to endure adversity with a philosophical acquiescence; when he shrugs at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, there is as much humor as resignation in his shrug.
            Kaye combines forces in leaving Paris just ahead of on-rolling nazi hordes in 1940 with a colonel (Curt Jurgens), an aristrocrat, stiff-necked in his regard for caste observances. Their means of escape is an aged Royce, in which a fellow passenger is the colonel’s girlfriend, played by French actress Nicole Maurey.
            Before the Odyssey is over, the colonel has learned much about basic human values, and accepts the despised plebian as his cherished comrade. “Together,” declares the former snob to his new friend, “we are a hero.”
            “Me and the Colonel” marks several “firsts” for Kaye; it is his first film in black-and-white; the first in which he wears a moustache, the first in which his entire wardrobe consists of one hand-me-down suit of uncertain vintage.
            Produced by William Goetz and directed by Peter Glenville, “Me and the Colonel” was filmed largely in France, on the actual locations of the story.
            Francoise Rosay, Akim Tamiroff, Martita Hunt and Alexander Scourby are featured in “Me and the Colonel,” written by S. N. Behrman and George Froeschel, from Behrman’s Broadway play, “Jacobrowsky and the Colonel.”

 

“’Me and the Colonel’”
The Sydney Morning Herald – Dec. 27, 1958

           Danny Kaye does it at last. The hankering to play serious character comedy, which has dampened his reputation several times in recent years, here reaps its reward with wit, grace and charm—a delightful film for any adult who, like Danny himself, may have outgrown the brilliant jabber-jabber music-halling of his “Up in Arms” and “Wonder Man.”
            With astonishing restraint upon all his old limelight-hogging urge to virtuosity, Danny brings consistent warmth and depth of feeling to his impersonation of the quiet little Polish Jew who, in Franz Werfel’s lovable “Jacobowsky and the Colonel,” uses much shrewdness—and as much real sweetness of heart—to escape from Paris to the Spanish border before the pursuing Nazis.
            Meek in all his attitudes, even down to the trim of his respectable bourgeois moustache, this glowing-eyed Jacobowsky is always believable as he applies his wits to the problem of survival.
            He gets out of Paris in a Rolls-Royce quietly wheedled out of the deserted estate of the Rothschilds there, and driven for him by a fugitive Polish officer who not only despises all Jews of the “mediocre” classes but also caricatures all the old-fashioned romantic attitudes about military glamour.
            Curt Jurgens has the role of this contemptuously rank-proud officer whose detestation of bourgeois Jacobowsky slowly swings towards grateful wonder as the quiet little Jew charms ways of escape for them.
            Nicole Maurey is pleasant and decorative as the French innkeeper’s daughter who, starting off as the officer’s lady-love, acquires quite a palate for meek and tender little Jacobowsky.

Me and the Colonel Reviews

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