The Inspector General (1949 film)
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The Inspector General is a 1949 musical comedy film. Loosely based on Nikolai Gogol's play The Inspector General, it stars Danny Kaye and was directed by Henry Koster. The film also stars Walter Slezak, Gene Lockhart, Barbara Bates, Elsa Lanchester, and Rhys Williams. Original music by Sylvia Fine and Johnny Green.
In this movie, Kaye sang such famous lines as "What does an Inspector General do? Inspect generals?" and "And so we drink! But first. . ." This film is probably the version of Gogol's story best known to Western audiences, in no small part because it changed Gogol's pessimistic ending into a more upbeat, Americanized one in which the Inspector General is a heroic figure.
The film lays the action in an unspecified country - possibly Hungary or Poland, just after occupation by Napoleon.
Georgi (Kaye), an illiterate member of a wandering band of gypsies led by Yakov (Slezak) escapes from a travelling medicine show after he innocently lets slip that the elixir they're selling is a fraud. Tired and hungry, he wanders into the small town of Brodny and whilst trying to sample the contents of a horse's feed bag, he's arrested as a vagrant and sentenced to hang the next day by a corrupt police chief, desperate to prove his efficiency.
The town is run by a corrupt Mayor, whose employees and councillors are all his cousins and equally corrupt and incompetent, but they are frightened when they learn that the Inspector General is in their neighbourhood, and probably in disguise. They mistake Georgi for the Inspector and ply him with food and drink whilst plotting to have him killed.
Naturally, their plans go awry and Georgi, despite his innocence, discovers how corrupt they really are. And when the real Inspector arrives suddenly, he also realises that Georgi is the most honest fellow he's met since leaving Vienna. He names him as the new Mayor of Brodny and arrests the others. Yakov, who's also wandered into the town, becomes Georgi's personal servant.
