#The incredible mr limpet free
It doesn't matter that Bessie Limpet thinks he's dead and they're now of different utterly incompatible species because he has to impose a very human concept on the free world of the fish. He's about to head off to the spawning ground with the first ladyfish that comes along, but backs out at the last minute because he has a wife. Limpet wants to be a fish to get away from all the troubles of the human world, but when he actually becomes a fish he promptly brings all those troubles along with him. To an adult though, and I'm coming to this film at the ripe old age of 38, there are a whole slew of questions, beyond the fact that Limpet's wife has obviously been cheating on her husband with George Stickel from moment one. We only have to want to, which is a pretty solid thing for a kid to learn. The obvious moral lesson is that we should all do what we can, and if we're classified 4F as unfit for combat that's OK, because we can just turn into a fish and become the US Navy's secret weapon.
#The incredible mr limpet movie
And they have a point.Ī kid would watch this and see a movie about a man doing his duty, even if he's become a fish.
Obviously the filmmakers felt that given that we're talking about a man turning into a fish for precisely no reason whatsoever except he wanted to, why don't they just go hog wild and make him talk and keep his glasses and have a powerful belch that scares away barracuda. He can't swim so is quickly presumed drowned, but of course he just turns into a fish instead, one who can swim just fine, though that's far from the only bizarre convenience that we're slammed with. And there, while reading up on the theory of reverse evolution and wishing hard, he tumbles off the pier into the ocean. 'I wish I were a fish because fish have a better life than people,' says Limpet, but his wife makes him take them back to the pet store and go to Coney Island instead. When he's around fish he drifts off into his own little world, which hardly endears him to his wife Bessie, who henpecks her husband and hangs instead on every word that issues from the mouth of George Stickel, who has enlisted and comes up with more and more outrageous stories of his contributions to the war effort every day, even though he's only a mechanic's mate, second class. And he likes fish, as his colleagues find out when they discover Monty the goldfish in their water cooler. Henry Limpet is an average sort of guy, married and living in Flatbush, working as a bookkeeper in Brooklyn for the Atlantic & Gulf Line, blind as a bat without his glasses. We leap back to September 1941 to discover his story. The answer is that in a startling turn of cinematic fantasy, he's turned into a fish. Now anyone who's seen Don Knotts must be wondering what he's done to become so incredible. Maybe they can be useful to the Americans because Superman isn't enough, or something. Apparently scientists are discovering that porpoises are becoming pretty intelligent and they wonder if he has anything to do with it.
Mr Limpet is pretty incredible, in fact he's so incredible that the Navy has a file on him that they locked in 1945 with the aim of never opening it again, but now they need to recall him to active service. I'm beginning to get a little fascinated with these American family classics, because they hold a real glimpse into that different age and what America was at the time.
They don't resonate with me like they do to Americans because I didn't grow up with them, but they have a charm to them that comes from a different age and is more than a little welcome. I'd already seen him in Cannonball Run II but he was hardly the biggest name in that film, but eventually I saw Pleasantville and It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Apple Dumpling Gang and with each one, I'm intrigued to discover more of these American favourites. He made 25 feature films, three of them (along with much of this movie) as a voice actor. I hadn't seen it before because we didn't get The Andy Griffith Show in England and his other long running show, Three's Company, was an American version of one of ours anyway, Man About the House. I think the first time I saw him was in his famous role of Barney Fife while travelling the States in 1999. There are many household names in America whose reputations didn't travel beyond the country's borders, just as there are many names I grew up watching in England who Americans have never heard of. A personal favourite of my wife, who insisted I record it, this one features Don Knotts, who I'm fast discovering was one of the great American comedians.