Norman Panama

Norman Panama, actor, producer, director and writer: born Chicago 21 April 1914; married (one son, one daughter); died Los Angeles 13 January 2003.

In collaboration with Melvin Frank, the actor-producer-director Norman Panama wrote some of Hollywood's most famous films, including the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope comedy Road to Utopia, Danny Kaye's funniest film, The Court Jester, and the perennial favourite White Christmas.

The pair, who started in radio writing scripts for Bob Hope, also wrote for television and theatre – they wrote the libretto for the hit Broadway musical Li'l Abner. They won three Oscar nominations, and have been credited with opening the doors for other writers to produce and direct their own films. They were together for nearly 30 years, and after splitting up (amicably) neither was to have such success. "Mel and I had different strengths," said Panama,

but we sublimated our egos to what was coming out on the written page. We were a composite of almost the same personality, strangely enough – a composite talent.

The team's finest hour was probably The Court Jester (1956), in which Kaye had his most rewarding screen role as a valet who masquerades as a jester to help rebel peasants restore the rightful heir to the throne of England. Panama and Frank's direction elicited wonderful performances as comic foils from Basil Rathbone and Cecil Parker, and their hilarious script includes the classic sequence in which Kaye has to remember which of two goblets does not contain a lethal potion. "The vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison," he is informed. "The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true." Panama and Frank delighted in such word play, and in another scene they have the King (Cecil Parker) enquiring of his new jester what news is there from the Venetian court. Is it true about the Duchess, he asks, and whatever did the Doge do.

"The Doge do?"

"Yes, the Doge do."

"The Doge did what a Doge does when the Doge does his duty to the Duke, that is."

Born in Chicago in 1914, Panama was educated at the University of Chicago. Though a theatre enthusiast who enjoyed writing plays, he was studying political science, with no thought of making show business a career until his classmate Melvin Frank, born in Chicago the previous year, suggested that they should collaborate on a play during the summer holiday. (Frank had already written a novel.) Though the play they wrote was never produced, the pair discovered they had a flair for writing comedy sketches, and decided to pursue a career in radio.

Moving to Hollywood, they became scriptwriters for such radio stars as Groucho Marx and Rudy Vallee. Their major break came when Bob Hope was given his own radio show in 1938. He took the unprecedented step of hiring eight writers, including Panama and Frank, to keep him supplied with gags, paying them out of his own salary. Hope said,

No comic had ever tried to maintain a staff that size. But I wanted to be Number One, and I knew that jokes were the key. I was willing to pay for it and I must say, looking back, I got much more than I paid for.

Hope was under contract to Paramount Pictures, and in 1942 he took one of Panama and Frank's original stories to the studio. It was filmed as My Favourite Blonde, the story of a beautiful spy (Madeleine Carroll) who enlists the aid of a vaudevillian (Hope) who performs with a trained penguin.

In 1940 Panama and Frank had contributed sketches to a short-lived Broadway revue, Keep Off the Grass. Some of their sketch material found its way into Paramount's film Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) after the studio had signed the team to a long-term contract. They subsequently wrote screenplays for several hit films of the period, including the musical Happy Go Lucky (1943), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), And the Angels Sing (1944) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1945).

Their script for Road to Utopia (1945), set in the Yukon and one of the best of the series of films starring Crosby, Hope and Dorothy Lamour, earned Panama and Frank their first Oscar nomination. Moving to RKO, they were allowed to produce as well as write Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House (1947) starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as city folk who buy a rundown property in the country. MGM then hired them to serve in the triple-threat capacity as directors, writers and producers, starting with The Reformer and the Redhead (1950), a snappy comedy buoyed by the lively performances of husband and wife team Dick Powell and June Allyson.

Strictly Dishonorable (1951), based on a play by Preston Sturges, was fashioned as a vehicle for the opera star Ezio Pinza and was not a success. A spoof of television advertising and promotion, Calloway Went Thataway (1951: The Star Said No in the UK) was better, with Howard Keel as a former movie star whose westerns have found a new public on TV. Panama and Frank made a rare excursion into heavy drama with Above and Beyond (1952), starring Robert Taylor as Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

They had a comedy hit again when they wrote, produced and directed Knock on Wood (1954), starring Danny Kaye as a ventriloquist who becomes involved with spies when they plant secret plans inside his dummy. The script brought the team their second Academy Award nomination. The Court Jester was not nominated, but should have been, since it has not only one of the funniest screenplays but is also beautifully constructed. The goblet sequence has Kaye frantically scrambling the information in his mind. Having finally mastered that the pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, he is informed that the chalice from the palace has been broken. The pellet with the poison is now in the flagon with a dragon and the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true.

White Christmas (1954), which the pair scripted with Norman Krasna, gained Kaye as one of its stars by default – Donald O'Connor was originally to star with Crosby, but a leg injury prevented his doing the film. To highlight Kaye's flair for mimicry, they wrote in a sequence in which the two stars impersonate Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen performing Irving Berlin's "Sisters".

Knock on Wood had been choreographed by Michael Kidd, and in 1956 he joined Panama and Frank to produce the Broadway musical Li'l Abner, based on the Al Capp comic strip about the hillbilly inhabitants of Dogpatch, USA. In the story they fashioned, the townsfolk are delighted to hear that they have been judged "the most unnecessary town in the USA", but less happy when they learn that Dogpatch is therefore to be used as testing ground for an atom bomb. The show ran for over 600 performances, and a fairly faithful film version, directed by Frank in 1959, captured the show's good-humour and ensured that skilfully unobtrusive editing did justice to Michael Kidd's energetic dance routines.

When their old champion Bob Hope found his popularity flagging in the mid-Fifties, the team persuaded him to try more sophisticated material, and wrote That Certain Feeling (1956), which they also produced and directed. In 1960 they wrote and produced (with Frank directing) The Facts of Life (1960), which daringly put two of America's wholesome icons, Hope and Lucille Ball, into a story of adultery. The script won Panama and Frank their third Oscar nomination.

Panama's credits as a solo director were not impressive. His first was The Trap (1959), a turgid tale of fugitive gangsters. He later directed the last (and worst) "Road" film, The Road to Hong Kong (1962). The comedies which followed seemed uneasy attempts to keep up with the changing attitudes in entertainment. Not With My Wife, You Don't! (1966), starring Tony Curtis, was a strained sex comedy, How to Commit Marriage (1969) was a misguided attempt to put Hope, Jane Wyman and Jackie Gleason into a vehicle with "swinging Sixties" mores, and The Maltese Bippy (1969) was a lame vehicle for the stars of the hit television show Laugh-In, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. Panama and Frank had parted in 1966, when Frank moved to Britain (he died in 1988). "We never knew or took credit for each other's work," said Panama. "It was kind of a magic machine to give and take."

Panama's last cinema film as a director was I Will, I Will . . . For Now (1976), a satire on marriage counselling, with Diane Keaton and Elliott Gould, co-written by Panama with a new partner, Albert E. Lewin. In 1981 Panama returned to Broadway with a play co-written with Jerome Chodorov, A Talent for Murder. A comedy mystery, it starred Claudette Colbert and Jean Pierre-Aumont, but ran for only two months. In 1984 the authors adapted it as a television movie, starring Angela Lansbury and Laurence Olivier.

The same year Panama was given the Golden Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of America.

Tom Vallance