KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Brooklynn There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

gavin6942 An illiterate stooge in a traveling medicine show wanders into a strange town and is picked up on a vagrancy charge. The town's corrupt officials mistake him for the inspector general whom they think is traveling in disguise. Fearing he will discover they've been pocketing tax money, they make several bungled attempts to kill him.Unfortunately, this film is in the public domain and that means that Alpha Video seems to be the primary supplier. Maybe another version exists, but I saw the Alpha one. While it's not as bad as many public domain films, it has clearly aged and a new transfer would benefit the film greatly.This film stands out as being a wonderful showcase for Danny Kaye. His best-known films (like "White Christmas") seem to have him more often as the sidekick. This film proves he can be a leading man in his own right, with plenty of humorous acting and some incredible singing. Kaye should be recognized as a bigger star than Bing Crosby.

bkoganbing Danny Kaye got one of his most enduring and funniest parts in this adaption of Gogol's The Inspector General. Kaye suited the part very well and Warner Brothers provided him with a generous cast of familiar character players. Kaye brings a lot of laughs as well as pathos to the part of the poor illiterate schnook who is a stooge for Walter Slezak, an itinerant peddler of snake oil known as Yakov's Elixir. After they get thrown out of one town due to Kaye's bumbling, Slezak cuts him adrift.But our Danny falls into a gold mine in the next town as he arrives there poor and hungry. It seems as though the city fathers have gotten word that The Inspector General, personal emissary of the Emperor is coming to town and he's been known to go places incognito and then reveal himself and all the fraud he uncovers.The paranoid city fathers of Brodny who include such people as Gene Lockhart, Alan Hale, Byron Foulger all start fawning all over Kaye who decides to just go with the flow. That policy is encouraged by Slezak who arrives in Brodny and sees the great possibilities here.The Inspector General is one of my favorite films with Danny Kaye, he's so right for the part. This was his first film away from Sam Goldwyn and Warner Brothers managed to give this film the same kind of production values you would find in a Goldwyn production. Mrs. Kaye, aka Sylvia Fine wrote the score for The Inspector General and gave her husband one of his best film songs, Happy Times which he sings to Barbara Bates who plays a serving girl at the local inn. Kaye also has to fend off the amorous advances of Elsa Lanchester who is Lockhart's wife and who is no slouch at getting a few laughs herself.The Inspector General is a timeless classic, taken from a classic and is one of the best showcases for the many talents of Danny Kaye.

CEdWright Danny Kaye appealed most to our parents'/grandparents' generation, with their better appreciation of the often inane humor that entertainers like Danny Kaye provided: Overplayed, with sight or sound gags milked for all they're worth and then some. It was an easier, simpler time for entertainers, when slapstick was king and The Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello were the gold standard, with the later rise & fall of the Smothers Brothers marking the end of that era.But there were also the sort of more subtle gag lines and themes that still appeal to our more developed, sophisticated senses of humor. A fine example of this, "alone worth the price of admission" to this film, is where one of those corrupt officials, noted in other comments above, at first repeats about Georgi, "Less and less I like this Yakobovich...!" but as time goes on, and Georgi wins hearts & minds, his tune changes to repeating, "More and more I like this Yakobovich!" Gogol's original play was a bitter satire about corruption in Tsarist Russia, a theme and storyline that would likely puzzle Western audiences. Perhaps the greater familiarity of Napoleon as "the Emperor" in place of the Tsar -- also an emperor -- inspired the screenplay author to change the setting from Russia to some vague 'Eastern European' town, retaining the Russian names & even pseudo-accent, that may have fallen into Napoleon's empire for a while; making this film less about the Russian (pre-Soviet-Communist-during-the-Cold-War) Bear than about the rampant silliness of pervasive small-town petty and not-so-petty corruption even as still practiced today in many small towns in America. A fine farce based on real life in Russia originally, in mythical small towns in Europe then, and in our very real home towns today: Over centuries and across millions of miles, only the names on the doors have changed; from big city graft to small town vice, the only real difference is in the size of the numbers.Some say this movie is merely a vehicle for Danny Kaye; actually, only Danny Kaye could make us laugh at all the routine petty criminality encompassed in the saying, "You can't fight City Hall." All you need to do to ENJOY this wonderful timeless parody of malodorous malingering municipal malapropism & malfeasances is to willingly suspend any modern expectation of & insistence upon sophisticated authenticity & realism.

Space_Mafune An illiterate buffoon named Georgi (Danny Kaye), part of a traveling Gypsy medicine sideshow in Eastern Europe somehow winds up mistaken for the all-powerful, visiting Inspector General whose assignment from Emperor Napoleon is to root out all evil and corruption in every town he visits. Of course, the town's officials, thoroughly corrupt to the core, are terrified by his presence and do everything they can to impress him and throw him off their trail. Georgi meanwhile is thoroughly confused but not above accepting the good hospitality especially given how hungry and down on his luck he's been. Of course, being an Inspector General also means you're a target and much danger looms for Georgi.No mistaking this is the Danny Kaye show all the way. The rest of the cast including Elsa Lancaster, Gene Lockhart, Alan Hale and Walter Slezak are all good no doubt but it's Kaye's singing, dancing and comedy routines that prove this film's main focus. How much you enjoy it probably depends on how much you enjoy Kaye's brand of humor. I have to admit at times it goes on much too long, almost to the point of annoyance, but there's a kind of innocence about Kaye's Georgi character here that one is able to ultimately forgive this more often than not. Favorite bits: The "Be Arrogant, Be Elegant, Be Smart" section and the Gyspy drinking song.