See It Now Reviews


“Danny Kaye Hit On See It Now”
Star-News – Dec. 5, 1956
By: Charles Mercer

           NEW YORK (AP) – Danny Kaye, a man who hurdles language barriers with the greatest of ease, has given television one of its finest 90 minutes. The occasion was “The Secret Life of Danny Kaye” on See It Now (CBS-TV) Sunday.
            Kaye’s secret life turned out to be most uncomplicated. He loves children. He also happens to be one of the merriest and most imaginative pantomimists alive. So he took his love and his talent on a 50,000-mile tour of 10 foreign countries, accompanied by a camera crew as an unsalaried and undignified representative of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.
            The result, as viewed by the television audience on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now, was an extraordinarily moving dramatization of an often forgotten fact. The only great international language is laughter.
            Superior photography furnished striking evidence of what UNICEF is doing in such diverse places as Nigeria and Yugoslavia and Morocco. Had See It Now belabored the purpose and nature of UNICEF further, the result would have been tedious. As it was, Kaye has made many millions of Americans receptive to the purposes of that most worthy organization.
            For Kaye and the cameras demonstrated another often forgotten fact. Children are alike everywhere. In faces and reactions they cannot be separated into nations and creeds. Often during the program it was impossible to tell in what country Kaye was performing as the cameras searched the rapt faces of his audiences.
            One wishes, of course, that Kaye would consent to embrace television as a constant medium. But it might be even better for the world if he were sent abroad into it to organize all its children to laugh down all the adult idiots who are trying to run it these days.

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