Review #804: 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' (1968)

To audiences young and old who grew up watching it, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang surely holds a warm, nostalgic place in their hearts. At the age of 29, this was my first viewing. I somehow knew all of the songs, knew everything that happens in the plot, and was certainly familiar with the notoriously creepy Child Catcher (Robert Helpmann). For me, watching the film was like eating a huge slice of cake. The first few bites are delicious and barely touch the sides, mid-way through you start to waver but you just can't seem to stop, but by the end your stomach is turning and you wish you'd never eaten the damn thing.

The brain-child of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, the movie was only loosely adapted from his novel by children's author Roald Dahl and director Ken Hughes. Chocked full of sweets and machinery, most of the film will have children eating out of it's sugar-coated palm. When skipping school one day, two mop-headed children come across Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes), a pretty but strict lady who takes the children straight to their father to report their truancy. The father, eccentric inventor Caractacus Potts (Dick van Dyke), supports their free-spiritedness, much to the horror of Truly.

While observing Potts' warehouse of barmy inventions, Truly comes across a sweet that can play like a flute. They takes it to Truly's father, Lord Scrumptious (James Robertson Justice), a successful confectionery manufacturer, who eventually throws Potts out when the place is overrun by dogs responding to the flute sweet. Eventually he saves up enough money to buy an old banger loved by his children and manages to fix it up, dubbing it 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' due to the clunking noise it makes. While off on a picnic one day, Potts and Truly start to fall for each other, and Potts tells his children the story of an evil pirate baron (Gert Frobe) who wants to steal the car for himself.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is carried along by some gorgeous Technicolor cinematography by Christopher Challis and an energetic performance from van Dyke, who puts in a highly physical one-man show and remains effortlessly likeable throughout. At two and a half hours, the film far outstays it's welcome. The majority of the songs are wonderful, but the film is slowed by mushy scenes, drab love songs and unnecessary sub-plots. It struggles with settling on a tone and ends up becomes a bloated mash-up. The first half of the movie I enjoyed as much as I did with the great's of the genre, until Grandpa Potts (the magnificent Lionel Jeffries) is whisked off to Vulgaria and it all becomes increasingly sickly.


Directed by: Ken Hughes
Starring: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Ann Howes, Lionel Jeffries, Gert Fröbe, Anna Quayle, Benny Hill, James Robertson Justice, Robert Helpmann
Country: UK

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie

Review #597: 'Mary Poppins' (1964)

I'd like to think that I've seen a lot of movies, of varying quality and genre; enough to believe I have at least a basic grasp of cinema as a whole. But during all the classics and tripe I've endured over the years, Mary Poppins has somehow managed to evade me. I was too busy watching rabbits getting torn to pieces in Watership Down (1978) and clapping giddily at Rocky Balboa's training montage in Rocky (1976) as a child to be distracted by something quite as colourful as this. So, it's at the ripe old age of 28 that I came round to sitting through Mary Poppins, to struggle through its squeaky-clean visage and many, many songs that I somehow knew all the words to before seeing the film. Well, I was wrong to be so cynical, as although the film is hardly what I would call a classic, it's really rather good.

London, 1910. Merry jack-of-all-trades Bert (Dick Van Dyke) is playing a one-man-band to an enthusiastic street audience when he senses something magical in the air, signalling the return of his good friend Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews). He takes us into the stable yet unhappy Banks' family home, where the household is ran by lord-of-his-castle Mr. Banks (David Tomlinson), and his suffragette wife Mrs. Banks (Glynis Johns). Busy attending to work and other matters, the Banks' have started to neglect their children, Jane (Karen Dotrice) and Michael (Matthew Garber). After their umpteenth nanny walks out on them, Mr. Banks makes a desperate newspaper plea for a nanny who will lay down the law, and teach the children respect and the harshness of life. So enters Mary Poppins, 'perfect in every way', a nanny who is as strict as she needs to be but one capable of also showing the children the joys of life.

Mary Poppins suffers mainly from the same thing that I feel plagues most musicals - it's too long. Seemingly every musical feels the need to round-up every change of emotion and sub-plot with a grand song-and-dance number that gets old quickly. The first half of the film is pure family entertainment, with memorable songs and some stunning special effects (for its day) making the film zip by happily. Then the songs get more clunky and forgettable, and we are exposed to much more of Dick Van Dyke's terrible accent and his grating, over-enthusiastic Bert than we need (although I'm sure he has his many fans). Yet after the somewhat exhausting 139 minutes is over, Poppins still leaves you with that cuddly feeling inside, something I thought had died inside me when I sprouted my first pube.

Most of the success of Poppins comes from the performance of Julie Andrews. All sweet and idyllic, she could have come across as a stuck-up Miss Perfect, but Andrews' effortless likeability and stage experience makes her more of a supernatural missionary, sent to make a stand against Mr. Banks' stern and rigid outlook on life. Disney were really coming out of their Golden Era at the time of this being released, but it's still one of their most fondly remembered, and certainly their most critically successful live-action efforts. It's more than likely that children will turn away from it, due to the mega-bucks spewed into children's films these days, but it will continue to enchant adults, especially those that grew up with it, and even those new to it, like me. Chim-chimernee, chim-ernee, chim chim, cheroo! Damn it, it's in my head again!


Directed by: Robert Stevenson
Starring: Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, David Tomlinson, Glynis Johns
Country: USA/UK

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie