One of Danny Kaye's most celebrated films, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a joyful ride through an bookish man's imagination. It falls in the same category as The Seven Year Itch, Paris When It Sizzles, Secondhand Lions, and Big Fish, other fantastical flights of fancy through negotiable levels of realism. For that matter, it's not all that far removed from Danny Kaye's own Hans Christian Andersen, although that film's reverence for its fantasy is unpunctured by farce.

The story the film is based on was written by James Thurber, but it's a little surprising it wasn't Damon Runyon, what with all the colorfully mysterious thugs sneaking around the city.