The Inspector General (1949): watch the full film free, legally

A Gogol comedy under French rule

The Inspector General is a 1949 American Technicolor musical comedy directed by Henry Koster. Danny Kaye stars with Walter Slezak, Barbara Bates, and Elsa Lanchester. It is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol's play The Inspector General, though its action moves from the Russian Empire to an unspecified corrupt region of a European country newly subject to the supervision of the First French Empire.

Napoleon Bonaparte has appointed an Inspector General to uncover corruption, and the official is known to travel in disguise. That possibility unsettles the people who control the town of Brodny, where the Mayor's underlings are all his equally corrupt relatives.

Georgi mistaken for an inspector

Georgi is a naive, kind-hearted member of a band of Gypsies led by Yakov. Yakov expels him after Georgi tells villagers that the elixir the group is selling is fake. Hungry and exhausted, Georgi reaches Brodny, tries to eat from a horse's feedbag, and is arrested as a horse thief. He is sentenced to hang the following day.

When the Mayor and his associates hear that the Inspector General is in their region, they mistake their prisoner for the feared emissary. They begin treating Georgi with great care while seeking to send him away quickly. Georgi later encounters Yakov again, who presents himself as Georgi's adviser and tells him how the Mayor has harmed Brodny's townspeople.

The Mayor bought the town's church organ with tax money, then sold it to another town. Yakov persuades Georgi to collect bribes to recover it, while secretly arranging a larger payment from the Mayor himself. The Mayor's wife hopes Georgi will take her away from her inattentive husband. Georgi, however, has fallen for Leza, the Mayor's kitchen maid, whose influence encourages him to help the town.

At a party held in Georgi's honor, he narrowly avoids exposure when a friend of the real Inspector General appears. The Mayor and his cronies then decide to have Georgi killed, luring him to a barn where a woodcutter is meant to murder him. Yakov discovers the plan before it can be carried out.

Songs, score and box-office receipts

Associate producer Sylvia Fine wrote the original music and lyrics. Fine was married to Danny Kaye. Johnny Green received credit for the musical direction and incidental score.

Warner Bros. records list domestic earnings of $2,154,000 and foreign earnings of $1,756,000. The last copyright holder was United Artists Television, later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and then Turner Entertainment, before later absorption by Time Warner, later WarnerMedia and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Film details from the Wikipedia article “The Inspector General (1949 film)”. Text adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0.