Unlike his close friend and fellow humorist Robert Benchley, James Thurber was never able to become a movie personality and actor. There talents were equally wonderful as writers and humorists, but Benchley (despite some alcoholic problems) was basically photogenic. You look at him in his films and see someone...well who was worthy to both listen to the voice and watch the physical presence. Thurber was handicapped - literally. He was a tall, thin man, who had been injured in his youth accidentally - it resulted in him having worsening and worsening eyesight until he finally went blind before his death in 1961. The American public has tolerated many physical problems, and even once gave a best supporting Oscar to Harold Russell, a genuine war hero and double hand amputee. But it would have been more than it could expect to support a film career for an exceptionable writer that everyone knew could barely see the film set.
It is as a creative writer of comedy (THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY, THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES, MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT, THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN) that Thurber left his mark on screen. And bless 'im for it. But there is much that was never tried because Thurber wrote in so many styles, from plays (THE MALE ANIMAL) to short stories (MITTY), to essays comical ("THE MACBETH MURDER MYSTERY"), to serious historical essays on crime ("A KIND OF GENIUS" - about Willie Stevens, one of the defendants in the Hall - Mill Murder Case). One thing he liked was the old form of the fable, a la Aesop. As he was a cartoonist of great ability as well as writer, his fables frequently were accompanied by the drawings of his imagination of his scenes. When he did a series on the "THE LAST FLOWER" every event is a captioned cartoon.
Modern readers of the female sex will not be quite so fond of Thurber as I happen to be - he being male, his views of women are generally hostile (witness Mrs. Mitty, in the short story - a shrewish wife). This is an unfortunate habit of his - like similar habits found in other comic geniuses like W.C.Fields and Laurel & Hardy. Except Fields and Stan & Ollie had some nice women (or understandable ones) occasionally. I have to acknowledge this misogyny as a dark point against Thurber. I can't, off hand, think of a similar female writer with a serious comic grudge against males.
One of his best comic fables - in fact the one most people recall - is "THE UNICORN IN THE GARDEN". It is a very clever and unexpected example of the worm turning.
A husband has woken up on a week-day before his wife, and is making his breakfast. As he eats the breakfast he looks outside the window at the kitchen nook and sees a unicorn calmly in the garden, munching grass and roses. The amazed husband goes out and looks at the beautiful unicorn (Thurber's drawing is actually simple and lovely) in silence. He gets excited and runs up-stairs to tell his wife.
In the cartoon we have already HEARD the wife, angrily wanting to know about the noise she heard (a dropped egg earlier). Now the husband is trying to show his wife the wonderful site of nature or whatever inside their garden. But she is angry or mean, and dismisses the news with a snide, "The unicorn is a mythical beast". It disheartens the husband who goes down to the garden again. This time he feeds the unicorn a lily, and he pats it's horn. He races upstairs again to tell the wife what he has just done. And now she becomes threatening and says, "You are a booby, and I'll have you put in a booby hatch." He angrily replies, "We'll see about that!".
The conclusion of the film follows how the wife does try precisely what she threatens. She calls a psychiatrist and the police and requests they bring a straight jacket with them. Then she tells them what the husband said, and how he must be crazy. But by now the actual unicorn is gone, and the husband is just quietly napping under a tree. The wife is considered insane and bundled into the jacket. Her fate is capped off by the husband telling the doctor that everyone knows a unicorn is a mythical beast. As the wife is taken away in protest, the husband smiles at the reader.
The moral is given: Don't count your boobies before they are hatched.
This cartoon followed the basic drawings of Thurber in the original version, and filled them out quite well. Gently told, and compactly, it is a small marvel of a comic genius of the middle 20th Century.
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