What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Notice anything unusual in this foreign Danny Kaye poster?

This is a half-sheet poster for the 1970s Italian re-release of one of Danny Kaye’s best known movies. Can you tell which one?

The cast and crew mentioned make clear it’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947). The foreign re-title, “Sogni Proibiti,” is a common Italian phrase, meaning “Forbidden Dreams”—and is used as the title to this day whenever the film is broadcast in Italy or sold on DVD.

The artwork, though, may have thrown you for a loop. The color photo is actually from The Man from the Diner’s Club (1963). The line art is even stranger. The head shot appears to be a bad Europeanized redraw of the famous pop-eyed image of Kaye from the original Mitty ad campaign. (See here) The tux-and-girls shot, though, appears to be a redraw of elements from several movies, notably James Bond in Thunderball, but none of them having anything remotely to do with Danny Kaye or Walter Mitty.

Evidently, the Italian distributor was trying to capitalize on the Bond-mania of the early 1970s and pretend that one of Mitty’s dreams was to be a tough guy secret agent. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.)