In a letter to Life magazine, Thurber expressed his considerable dissatisfaction with the script, even as Goldwyn insisted in another letter that Thurber approved of it.

Thurber later complained that at one time the psychiatrist scene contained 'a bathing girl incident which will haunt me all the days of my life.' He was repeatedly consulted by Goldwyn, but his suggestions were largely ignored. According to Thurber, producer Samuel Goldwyn rejected the Englund and Freeman script in December 1945, and sent Englund to consult with Thurber, who worked with him for ten days.

Ken Englund and Everett Freeman reportedly began work adapting James Thurber's story in January 1945. Eventually, he acquires the courage to stand up to those who kick him around. Caught up in a real-life adventure that seems unbelievable even to him, Walter attempts to hide his double life from his mundane family and friends. Rosalind is working with her uncle, Peter van Hoorn, to help secure some Dutch crown jewels hidden from the Nazis during World War II. Things become much more complicated when he runs into a mysterious woman, Rosalind van Hoorn (Mayo), who just happens to perfectly resemble the girl of his dreams. Believing he is still a British fighter pilot, he salutes, and places a red-hot poker under his arm-only to burn a hole in his suit jacket. He is awakened from this daydream by his mother, who orders him to come to dinner. In one scene, while stoking the heating boiler, he dreams what it would be like to be an RAF fighter pilot. But his dreams only seem to land him in more trouble. Walter's escape from their incessant needling is to imagine all sorts of exciting and impossible lives for himself, fueled by the pulp magazines he reads every day as an editor at the Pierce Publishing Company. He is henpecked and harassed by everyone in his life including his bossy mother, his overbearing, idea-stealing boss Bruce Pierce, his dimwitted fiancée Gertrude Griswold, Gertrude's obnoxious would-be suitor Tubby Wadsworth, Gertrude's poodle Queenie and her loud-mouthed mother, Mrs. Walter Mitty (Kaye) is an 'inconsequential guy from Perth Amboy, New Jersey'.

The film was adapted for the screen by Ken Englund, Everett Freeman, and Philip Rapp (uncredited), and directed by Norman Z. The film stars Danny Kaye as a young daydreaming proofreader (later associate editor) for a magazine publishing firm and Virginia Mayo as the girl of his dreams. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a 1947 Technicolor comedy film, loosely based on the 1939 short story of the same name by James Thurber.

The secret life of walter mitty thurber