Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

When we think of Ian Fleming (if we can remember that he even existed) then it's in relation to just one name: James Bond.  This is just about the single reason why the memory of pop culture can recall the creator of the world's most famous secret agent.  The explanation for why this should be is pretty simple.  Bond is the one creation out of all his other artistic efforts that got the best notice.  Double-O-Seven is the one character in the author's gallery of wonders who managed to capture the public's Imagination in what was somehow the right time and in just the right place.  Bond himself was the product of a number of influences.  Part of it came from Fleming's own experiences as a member of the British Secret Service during World War II.  Another and more important factor, the one which seems to have been the most influential in terms of the character's ability to leave an indelible footprint in pop culture, is down to the time period in which his name first saw the light of day.  The first adventure in which the world's premiere super spy made his debut was in Fleming's 1953 novel, Casino Royale.  It was this mid-century bestseller which introduced audiences to a world of deadly secret operatives, intrigue, seduction, and a combination of action thrills combined with an improbable yet impressive technological conceit in terms of gadgets and wheels that has pretty much gone on to shape the way we conceive of espionage in the realm of make-believe.  The key thing that made all of this work so well was how Fleming became such a major beneficiary of his own particular cultural zeitgeist.

Bond can be thought of as something very close to the ultimate manifestation of the Cold War period.  He was just the sort of hero that Western cinemas were looking for in a time when all of the major Atlantic nations were locked in a global competition with the Soviet Union for ideological supremacy of the hearts and minds of the public.  It seems to have been this conflict, which was going on even in the aisles of movie-goers that first gave Bond his fame, and then immortalized him as a pop culture staple; one of many, in point of fact.  It turned Fleming's creation, if maybe not it's author, into a household name.  The perfect irony that compliments this achievement is that, just like with so many other artists, it is the one, defining accomplishment that has swiftly erased any awareness of the author's other works.  It's the same fate that Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Lewis Carroll all met with.  Each of them, along with Fleming has managed to imbue one particular imaginary figure with so much Creative life, that it's as if the audience has decreed that nothing else they ever did matters.  Roald Dahl's has met with a kinder variation of this same fate.  If the name of this Swiss-English writer means anything to anyone, then it's as the creator of Willy Wonka.  Fate has been kinder to Dahl, in this regard, however.  Far from decreeing that he never wrote anything else of worth, Dahl's other writings, such as The Witches, The BFG, or James and the Giant Peach have become household classics just as well.

Fleming was never able to have that same luck of the draw.  He never got the chance to become known as the same level of versatile talent that Dahl is now still regarded as.  Instead, whatever else the rest of his literary output may have been, pop culture memory has seen fit to consign it all to the dustheap of history.  It's James Bond we want from now on.  If it has nothing to do with the adventures of 007, then what's there to give a rip about, anyway?  There's a mercenary style quality to such zero sum thinking, and it could be worthwhile to someday examine just how this particular factor shapes the nature of modern audience reception.  It might be able to tell us a great deal of how we can be so receptive to certain Creative Ideas at one time, while others from the same artist leave us cold to the point of hostile indifference for almost all the rest.  It's a fascinating occurrence worth paying attention to, yet that's not what this review is about.  Though there may be parts of the story under examination today which can help shed some light the questions asked above.  Before we can get to any of that, however, there's the background for how the tale under the microscope came to be made.  It all happened near the end.

It starts with a heart attack, one the author suffered near the end of his days in 1961.  Fleming had nine successes to his name by the time of March in that year, and all of them were due to just one man.  Bond...James Bond.  He'd written other non-related texts by this point, yet I think it's telling that most of them were of the non-fiction variety.  These include, in seeming total, one true crime book, a travelogue, and one semi-romantic short story (web).  The only other notable title to his name is the book adaptation under discussion here.  At least it allows the critic an answer to one part of the conundrum for why Fleming isn't known for much else besides Bond.  It really does seem to be the case of the author allowing himself to be defined by success of his greatest creation.  He's almost like a version of Conon-Doyle if he were willing to rest content, for the most part, with writing Sherlock Holmes stories and not much of anything else.  It's the author's apparent comfort with this state of personal affairs that makes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stand out all the more as the great creative anomaly of the artist's life.

The book had it's genesis in the wake of the heart attack which Fleming can be said to have survived, yet just up to a point.  It was while he was convalescing that a friend did a personal favor for the author that, on the surface of things, seems like the last sort of gift you'd give to the writer of a book series centering around the exploits of a serial womanizer.  Fleming was given a copy of Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin to read while bedridden.  His immediate reaction is one that fans might expect from the creator of 007.  Fleming came away less than impressed.  What happened next is the part most audiences would never have expected.  For all intents and purposes, Fleming appears to have been seized by the idea that he could write a better story for children than that.  However unexpected or unprecedented the final results may seem, this is what happened.  He began to compose a story with the working title of The Magic Car, and proceeded to pack a lot of his own previous enthusiasms into the plot (web).  These include the tell-tale penchant for taking a simple yet stylish looking automobile, and then transforming it into a fantastical marvel of technical engineering.  This part of the author's repertoire should be familiar enough to longtime fans of the franchise's trademark Astin-Marten.

The car at the center of Fleming's single children's novel amounts to a toned down version of this same conceit.  It's possible to posit the author as creating a children's librarian version riff on the usual tropes that had defined his fiction in an up till then adult key.  The somewhat poetic irony is that this tale of a Magic Car that transports its owners on a grand adventure turned out to have been the very the last writing Ian Fleming ever accomplished.  On the 11th of August, 1964, the creator of James Bond passed away, as much a victim of the work schedule that sudden fame catapulted him into, in addition to a lifetime of hard living, both within and aside from the call of duty (ibid).  The story of how the author's single children's novel found it's way to the big screen is somewhat fitting considering that it was none other than Albert R. Broccoli, Fleming's longtime collaborator and producer of the Bond film adaptations, who was ultimately responsible for the film we're looking at here today.  The book was published in three installments after Fleming's death, and when Broccoli had the completed manuscript in front of him, his reaction probably mirrors that of a lot of longtime Bond fans who learn that Fleming also wrote for children (however briefly).  He came away less than impressed, thinking there was no way material like this would ever make for a good movie.  Then Walt Disney changed his mind.

The sudden breakout success of the Mouse House's freely adapted version of P.L. Travers Mary Poppins seems to have been enough of an incentive for Broccoli to swallow whatever doubts or misgivings he might have had about the manuscript, and instead hit the green light that got the ball rolling on this story's eventual road to the big screen.  The filmmaking process as a whole seems to have been time consuming on this one, as it was first in pre-production for almost two years, and that was all about trying to get the script right (more of which anon), and the production process itself seems to have dragged on for three whole months.  Whatever behind the scenes issues were going on with this picture, the movie adaptation of Ian Fleming's final novel at last made its feature debut on December 16th, 1968.  What remains to be seen now is just how well the film holds up after all of these many years.

Trying to Explain the Story.

When trying to give a good outline of this film, one of the tricks involved is that it's almost like having to describe two, maybe as much as three stories in one.  They're all crammed together into the same package, and the net result is a film that ends up being more difficult to describe than you might imagine.  Consider the prologue and first act.  It opens with something like a pre-history of the car that will become the focal point of this story.  We're introduced to the title character (if that's even the right way to describe it) as a custom-built, Rolls Royce style racing car.  It's a motor that's taken its original owners from one glory to another, as a champion model racer that has won awards for itself across Germany, France, and England.  All that comes to a literal screeching halt when the driver has to swerve out of the way in order to avoid hitting a little girl who was run into the middle of the road to retrieve her dog.  The kid and the canine emerge without a scratch.  The one who takes the real damage is the car.  The motor doesn't just catch fire, there's an explosion that rips the guts right out of the whole thing.  Cut to several years later, sometime in the early 1910s.  The racer is now a hallowed out old Junker collecting dirt and dust in the town dump of a local village somewhere in England.  It's here that we're introduced to the film's two child leads, Jeremy and Jemima Potts, who've taken a shine to the old, burnt out husk of a vehicle.  They like it so much that they offer to buy it to save it from the scrap heap.

The only difficulty is that they're a bit short of the funds necessary to buy the car.  As the children make their way homeward, trying to figure out how to scrounge up enough money to give the old racer a new place to belong, they're almost run over to a girl in one of the latest model motor cars.  She manages to miss them, yet she almost goes into the ditch for her troubles.  After a stern telling off, the woman (played by Sally Ann Howes) softens to her two sudden charges (portrayed by Adrian Hall and Heather Ripley), and offers to take them safely to their father's house.  When they get their, we're introduced to the film's main lead, Caractacus Potts, played by the one and only legend himself, Dick Van Dyke.  He's portrayed as someone who was probably already something of an archetype by this point in cinema history.  He's the idea of this humble, yet Inspired crack genius inventor.  Someone who's mind is incapable of standing still for all of the wild yet ingenious notions his over-heated brain keeps firing off at random odd moments.  In most films, this individual is often to be found wandering around in his own little world, trying to make the various gadgets he comes up with work on a practical level.  It is possible to see a link between this figure and the character of Q from Fleming's James Bond series.

He's like a retro-fitted version of the make-believe MI6's gadget master, in that respect.  A version of Bond's arch-frenemy if he'd never gone into the service, and stuck to the life of a simple country squire in the idyllic English countryside, focusing all his attention on building mostly harmless Rube-Goldberg devices, instead of an ongoing series of lethal weapons disguised as everyday objects.  It makes sense to take this vantage point, considering who the author of the source material is.  At the same time, it's like the prototypical thriller figure generated by Fleming's Imagination is being reconfigured before our eyes, and welded to an older, more lighthearted storytelling tradition.  With the character of Caractacus Potts, what we really seem to be getting is like this prototype of a later and much loved incarnation of the same idea.  It makes sense read Van Dyke's character as something of trial run for Emmet Brown, from the Back to the Future franchise.  He's like a Victorian-Edwardian version of Doc if he'd never discovered the secrets of time travel, yet he still had that unstoppable crazy-cool inventor's streak.  

It's all there in this prototype version that Van Dyke is given to work with, up to and including the occasional bout of reckless behavior born of devotion to the experiment for its own sake.  In fact, when Howes' character first sees how clumsy Caractacus can be with his equipment, her first instinct is to question the man's sanity, and worry about the safety of the children, even when all three family members assure her that this is all perfectly normal for them.  As she's busy haranguing him, Potts asks her name, and she gives us the movie's first big moment of awkwardness.  The character is called Truly Scrumptious, and I think it's possible to explain the logic of behind giving her that title (sort of, anyway), yet that will have to wait for the moment.  The point is the audience has just been handed its first major deal breaker, one of several that we'll be presented with as we go along.  How far viewers are willing to go with this film's various conceits depends on being able to handle similar creative choices, and judge whether they count as missteps, or not.  Anyway, what follows is what you'd expect from a familiar setup of like this.  Truly and Caractacus become the film's official quarreling couple, and the rest of their interactions become a matter of will they/won't they as the story progresses onward.

In the meantime, the kids bring the subject of the old, junked out racer to their father's attention, and ask if they can buy it to, as they term it "save her" from becoming a pile of scrap.  Their dad's kind of stunned at the idea, at first.  Yet he soon warms to it, not just because of the potential it presents for finally building something that works (as Doc might say), but also because he cares deeply about his son and daughter, and wants to make them happy.  It involves a night full of mishaps hawking what meager wares he has to offer at a local carnival, yet Caractacus is able to scrounge up the money necessary, and pretty soon he's acquired a new Junker in the family garage, which he then proceeds to transform into something of an all-purpose vehicle that the kids christen as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, after the sounds the motor makes as it rolls along.  Things seem to be shaping up to be something of a low-key family film. the kind with nothing much in the way of any big stakes, and just a series of day-in-the-life encounters that all seem to be shaping up as a perhaps minor yet memorable enough summer holiday idyll.  The kind of story where the experiences along the way matter more than the destination.

That all seems to change when Caractacus takes the family to a holiday at the beach, and it's here that he begins to spin them a story about the value of their new car.  It seems that Chitty isn't just any vehicle.  She's a powerful, all-purpose motor complete with various gadgets and technical secrets that make her the coveted prize of the wicked potentate of a vaguely East-Northern European, Ruritanian country (played by none other than Goldfinger himself, Gert Frobe).  Now this evil dictator, it turns out, has spent many a long year hunting for the whereabouts of Chitty, and after all this time searching, he's got the car and her owners cornered on the shores of a beach, just as the tide is coming in, leaving them stranded and vulnerable.  Baron Goldfinger decides to go on the attack, yet just when all seems lost, one of Chitty's many capabilities spring into action, as the care transforms into a speed boat in the shape of a souped-up Royce, which then sprouts wings and begins to fly.  If all of that sounds like something straight out of left field, then...yeah, that's pretty much what it is.  And you've seen nothing, yet.  From here on in, what starts out as a quiet village idyll takes a wild veer turn into the land of Weirdsville.

Conclusion: An Intriguing Idea That Won't Quite Come Together.

There's perhaps a few things you should know about me as we get into this review.  I've never been a fan of musicals.  Nor was I ever any kind of Theater Kid.  Come to think of it, the closest I ever got to any of that was Milos Forman's Amadeus, and the real punchline there is that my parents saw fit to show me that when I was still like six or seven years old.  The further joke is that it doesn't even count as a musical, proper.  Instead its a gritty social drama of obsession, jealousy and hatred; a kind of 18th century riff on a typical Film Noir story, where the music tends to serve as mere background punctuation that the characters sometimes muse over, and even then, it's not in any way that would qualify it in the same category as, say, West Side Story.  Perhaps the real funny thing is that you've got this culturally inclined household expecting their young son to wrap his head around it all.  The real curious thing is that I somehow managed to figure it out.  The net result being a certain amount of caution in how I approach others.  Can't be too careful with all those weirdos roaming about, after all.  So, thanks Mom and Dad!  I guess, anyway.  The point is when it comes to this unorthodox Ian Fleming adaptation, I'm having to deal with an entire musical storytelling format of which I have next to no real exposure.  Nor have I ever developed any real interest in it.  I'm an outsider having to look in on it all.

Perhaps I give all this information as kind of warning for what I'm about to say next.  It means pretty much the only way I have to judge this films is how well it holds up in terms of the quality of its writing as opposed to its musical score or production value.  I think it also helps to keep in mind that what I'm about to say next belongs to a chorus of commentary that this film has gained for itself over the years.  It means a lot of what I have to say won't amount to much of anything new.  Let's start with the nature of the first act, which in the main consists of a great amount of build-up and character establishment.  I'm inclined to say it comes off as rather pedestrian, in a way, if that makes any sense.  It's all told in a style which was typical of the big Hollywood production numbers that dotted the landscape in an era where the Big Screen was still trying desperately to compete with television for the hearts and minds of the audience.  This means the camera tends to focus on a series of well composed and competently filmed set pieces with a wide angle lens that makes sure to viewer gets a good look at all the care that the set designers and the prop department took in crafting the imaginary pre-war Britain that the film is set in.  The final result is less than convincing as a place that might actually exist in real life.  However, it's clear enough that make-believe and not realism is the goal in a picture like this.

The entire story is meant to take place in a Fantasy realm, with only the meagerest of nods to how life in Great Britain was like at the dawn of the 20th century.  The world that Caractacus Potts inhabits is no more real than an illustration in a book of nursery tales.  It's a creative decision that can be said to work for a movie like this, as its the one most likely to compliment the type of narrative that's being told.  This is a bedtime story meant for children above all else.  It's a style that dates all the way back to The Wizard of Oz, yet in this instance it's clear that the filmmakers had Disney's success with Mary Poppins of just a few years previous in mind when both casting and constructing this film.  As others have pointed out, it's more than possible to come away realizing that one of the biggest regrets the producers of this film had is that they offered Julie Andrews the chance to star alongside Van Dyke once more in a similarly themed children's Fantasy movie, and she turned them down.  The unintended consequence is that there's the this impression of having to settle for second best that tends to linger over Sally Howes performance, even when it's clear that none of this is her fault.  It's just that it becomes glaringly obvious the role of Truly was always meant for Mary Poppins, and she said no.

So here's what they've had to settle for.  It's to Howes credit that she is able to take a role designed for someone else and make it her own.  This is perhaps best demonstrated in a puppet themed musical number she shares with Van Dyke in which she was able to nail her big scene in just one take.  It is nothing less than a testament to her own strengths as an actor.  Which sort of makes it all the more ironic to have to report that the biggest flaw that hampers an entire cast of talented actors is the material they are given to work with.  The fundamental problem is that the story is too thin on the ground for its own good.  The filmmakers found themselves confronted with the question of how to adapt or expand upon Fleming's source material, and in the end, they sort of tried a kitchen sink approach which became too crowded and haphazard.  This is all best demonstrated when the film reaches the one segment that everybody remembers, the Ruritanian Fantasy sequence.  It's the point where everything veers into a sharp left field that sees our protagonist family unit being set upon and chased after by an over-the-top, buffoonish version of Goldfinger if he was this vaguely Hapsburg style emperor, complete with a retinue of retainers, servants, and generals, all of whom acts as if they were Monty Python extras.  It's possible to wish this was the case, in many ways, as it might have made for a more entertaining movie.

To the film's credit, there are some interesting ideas and set pieces going on here.  The idea of the titular car having this magical aspect to itself and then displaying it all in a moment of emergency is taken straight from Fleming's novel, and there are certain expansions that offer intriguing ideas for further exploration.  Then there's the Ruritanian village setting in which most of the movie takes place.  It's a segment sprinkled throughout with a few interesting ideas, here and there.  The all of it is original to the film, and it's clear that this is the point at which Broccoli and the director Ken Hughes have made the deliberate choice to veer off from Fleming's text, and take things in a direction of their own choosing.  In the original  book, for instance, all that happens is that the characters take the car for a holiday in the French countryside and get involved in an exciting yet overall mild caper concerned with gangsters.  Basically, all that Fleming did was take a typical Bond setup, and tone it down for the sake of young eyes and ears.  It's all rather basic, and it's easy to see why Hughes and Broccoli went in a different direction.  As was also said above, there are one or two interesting story ideas in play here.  The biggest ones of note are the faraway land that the main cast travels to in pursuit of the evil Baron, who has kidnapped the children's grandfather as a way of luring them into his twisted, dystopian kingdom.

Van Dyke and company are treated to the site of a village with no children in it, which makes the Potts kids stand out like sore thumbs.  Eventually the family is taken in by a kindly toymaker who is basically just Geppetto if he were played by Benny Hill, and didn't have Pinocchio around.  The reason for the absence of even a flesh and blood version of "Little Wooden Head" is because as the toymaker explains.  Children have been outlawed in the land of Vulgaria (and yes, sometimes the naming conventions of the film's Fantasy elements are lacking; you'll notice I don't use these titles all that much).  They've been declared as undesirables by the Baron's egomaniacal wife (Anna Quayle).  This has lead to a campaign against all the pre-teens and young adults of the village.  If they aren't hiding in Vulgaria's ancient underground sewer system, then they are rounded up and thrown into the palace dungeons by the King's Royal Child Catcher (Robert Helpmann), more of which anon.  It's all lead to a state of tyranny in the kingdom, and now if Caractacus isn't careful, his children might be the next victims.  What's important to note about this bare-bones synopsis is that it's good enough on paper. 

There's a reasonable amount of dramatic, fairy tale style intrigue to at least make the potential audience somewhat receptive to watching it unfold on the screen, always providing you can do something interesting with a notion like this.  To be even more fair, it does sound like the kind of setup with a rich variety of places you can take it in.  It's your basic enchanted adventure scenario with a surprisingly sinister edge to it.  The surprise of this dark sounding tone is all explainable once you realize that Broccoli and Hughes have tapped none other than Roald Dahl to expand on Fleming's original treatment.  He seems to have been the one who came up with the idea of the Baron, the desperate, the fairy tale village, the plight of the children, and above all, the Child Catcher.  We'll get to him, don't worry.  What's important to note now, however is that it all points to the latter half of the film being the result of the filmmakers turning to the creator of The Witches and basically telling him to do his usual thing with the plot.  It's the explanation for the sudden dark turn from an otherwise quaint and charming knock-off.  Everything about the Fantasy elements in this film have Dahl's trademark macabre fairy tale sensibilities attached to it.  The greatest example of this, is of course, the one and only Child Catcher.

Here comes the part where I will have to give Dahl's efforts on this picture at least some amount of genuine credit.  He's hit paydirt with this ominous and creepy figure whose sole job is to live up to his title.  He's literally meant to go about stalking the streets in search of children to kidnap and imprison.  There are also less than subtle hints that this guy is implied to do a lot of other things to kids that are too awful to speak of.  The greatest and singular clue we're ever given to this aspect of the character is the fact that he's often seen wielding a miniature, hand-held scythe whenever he's on the prowl, and it's been sharpened to a wicked point of crystal clarity.  I'd recommend this YouTube video for a good overview of the Child Catcher taken on his own terms, in almost total isolation from the rest of the film as it now exists.  Part of what makes that vlog so easy to recommend is the way it paints a picture of what could have been.  It's the figure of the Child Catcher, more than any others, that lets you know we've got the outlines of a very solid sounding Dark Fantasy adventure on our hands.  One that could have showcased Dahl's strengths as a writer at their potential best.  It's what makes it all the more sad that I'll have to say the inherent sense of promise, and ghoulish entertainment contained in these notions on paper just ends up getting buried under the demands that the studio has made on Dahl's talents.

The major problem is that none of these interesting concepts are allowed to grow and develop in a natural way.  It's all at the demands of executive meddling, and I can't help thinking the final product suffers as a result from it.  What Dahl has managed to do here is take an otherwise pedestrian piece of source material, and add his own delightfully twisted flair to it.  Neither the Child Catcher, the Baron, or their Dystopian Ruritanian kingdom are anywhere to be found in Fleming's book.  They're all the product of what Dahl brought to the table, and if I'm being honest, these are all the plot elements with the most creative potential in them.  I mean think about it.  The idea of a story set around this journey a simple English family takes into dark Fantasy kingdom is kind of the stuff that all the best fairy tales are made out of.  There are literally so many interesting places you can go with a concept like that.  It's like stumbling upon a blank canvas where you can still see all the creative ideas lurking within the folds of the page just struggling and begging to be given a ball park to play in and roam wild.  It's just the kind of thing that sets the child's Imagination alight.  I'm also starting to think that's what we should have been able to enjoy, instead of the film we ended up with.  It's disappointing to say, at the very least.

What I come away with the most from this picture is a sense of frustration at a lot of missed opportunities.  Bringing Roald Dahl to punch up the script was sort of the best choice Broccoli and Hughes made, yet I also get the sense they were breathing down his neck with their own demands and ideas about what the film should have been, and the film just has to go along for the ride.  It's clear Dahl was settling in to pen a fine sounding piece of the usual Gothic Enchantment that he's still best known for.  His major problem was that all the flairs sent up from the basement workshop were at odds with the director and producer.  It's obvious that Dahl's talents were taking the material in a vastly different direction from the kind of approach that Disney utilized in their previous Dick Van Dyke vehicle.  The good news was that Dahl seems to have found a certain amount of space that would accommodate Fleming's characters as suitable protagonists.  This would still be enough to allow Rob Petrie and Benny Hill a chance to shine.  Indeed, it sounds fascinating to think of what these two comedy legends could have accomplished in a story setup that was able to play to both their strengths as actors, and Dahl's skill's as a Fantasist.  The bad news is that each of them was at the mercy of a studio that was desperate to create the next Mary Poppins.  The more I think that part over, however, the more sense it makes.

MGM was close to entering its Bronze Age by this point in the studio's career.  During its heyday, it seems to have been something of the top dog in the Tinseltown kennel.  It was able to fashion itself into the Cartier of Cinema.  The ultimate refinement in movie-going taste that was able to stand head and shoulders above the likes of Paramount, Warner Bros. and Universal.  It liked to bill itself as the Dream Factory, where there were more stars in their films that those of the heavens itself.  It's easy to see how this would make for a very competitive outlook.  Its even easier to understand how the breakout success of a then indie entrepreneur like Walt Disney would come as something of a shock for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Here they are, casting their studio as the main weaver of dreams in Hollywood, and yet this young Midwestern punk whose set up shop out in Burbank has managed to outclass them with offerings like Snow White.  And the little bastard had the gall to accomplish all that without the aid of freaking named talents, for Heaven's sake!  It's more than possible to see how guys like Louis B. Mayer would feel his dominance of the film industry threatened by such achievements.  It also sort of explains why films like The Wizard of Oz were given the greenlight in the first place, if you stop and think it over.

It all points to there being this kind of hidden yet ongoing, hot and cold running competition between MGM and Walt to see who could be the true ruler of dreams in Hollywood.  I think history has told the victor on that contest long ago.  However the idea that Metro was probably still carrying out this on again/off again game of one-upmanship with the House of Mouse does at least offer an explanation for a lot of the creative choices made with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  This is a film with all the hallmarks of being desperate to see if it can ape the success of the previous box office winner.  That honor, of course, went to Walt, Julie Andrews, and Van Dyke with their story of a magical nanny.  So of course Metro is going to want to try and see if it can recreate that particular blend of magic.  Over in the other corner there's Roald Dahl, however, and he's come up with all of these gnarly and cool sounding ideas.  The mind of the screenwriter was headed in one direction, while those of the director, producer, and the studio as a whole were aimed at another.  MGM was focused on outdoing the competition, whereas Dahl's focus remained on the story and its artistry.  It's a textbook example of the Imagination being at odds with a production whose sole focus remains on carrying out a pointless and unwinnable feud.

In a situation like that, it's obvious that all questions of genuine creativity are going to suffer as a result.  In retrospect, it's easy to see what should have been done here.  Once Dahl was brought on board, Broccoli and Hughes should have just learned to get out of his way, and let him work his usual mojo on the movie.  Perhaps the most important thing the filmmakers should have realized is that sometimes one of the best ways to one-up the competition is to see if you can make something just as creative, yet in a completely opposite direction.  That's what Dahl was up to as he began to add his own particular twists and turns to Fleming's source material.  If you give the job of creating a Fantasy script to the man responsible for a novel where there's a scene of a bunch of witches patiently removing their faces in a grotesque manner, then odds are even we're dealing with someone whose Imagination is always going to be sort of locked in to that particular mode of artistic expression.  It means that with a guy like Dahl, you can always expect him to be operating in like that classic Grimm's Fairy Tale manner of storytelling.  He's comfortable working in an avenue of the genre where wicked old ladies get pushed into ovens by the children she's kidnapped and plans to serve up for supper.  It's how Dahl rolls.

It's the explanation for all the darkest and macabre elements to be found in his children's fiction, even in the most seemingly light-hearted of fair, such as Matilda.  What you've got here is nothing more than one of the world's premiere Fantasists operating at nothing less than standard procedure, at least so far as his talents are concerned.  What's most important about this so far as the Broccoli-Hughes adaptation is concerned is that the way the producer and director handled Dahl's attempted contributions is all a pointer to the great flaw at the heart of this picture.  The creator of Willy Wonka gave them the blueprint template for an intriguing story idea, one that would have ridden off the success of Mary Poppins, yet it could have done so by taking things into the realm of Dahl's trademark Dark Fantasy approach.  How else do you explain the presence of the Child Catcher?  We're talking here about a character who is somehow so out of left field as to be at odds with how the finished film has developed.  Yet it's precisely whenever he's on-screen that the movie seems to take on this larger than life quality that's lacking in almost every other scene in the film.  It's these few and fleeting moments when the story manages to come alive, as if someone had flicked an unseen light switch, that acts as the best pointer to the picture we should have gotten.  It should have been one of Roald Dahl's patented creepy tales of wonderous enchantment.

Something that would have been able to compete with Disney and Julie Andrews by finding its own unique legs to stand on.  Doing so by proving itself capable of showcasing the shadow side of the Fantasy genre, where Mary Poppins chooses to highlight the bright light of day.  Since Broccoli and Hughes pretty much put the kibosh on all that promise by playing a mistaken game of Follow-the-Leader, anything that could have been made from the faint handful outlines of ideas that Dahl brought to the table will have to remain guesswork, at best.  Anything I could offer here will have to fall under the heading of pure fan speculation.  With that said, if I had to provide anything in the way of constructive criticism, then some ideas might go like this.  The best way to start would have been to streamline the plot in several places.  In particular, I get the sense that the beginning can be edited to be less time wasting.  Start with the kids wanting to buy the care, meeting Howes and introducing her to their father, before telling him of their wish to own the old racer.  From there, I suppose we'll to keep the scene of Van Dyke raising money at the carnival.  Yet let's also see how much dross can be cut away from that scene to just its bear essentials, so that we know he gets the needed funds to buy the car.

From there we'd do a time skip to where we see a soot and oil covered Rob Petrie futzing around with the car in the family garage, followed by a shot of pages being ripped from a calendar as he continues to work on it.  We'd then keep the unveiling scene where the revamped vehicle is debuted for Truly and the kids.  All of this should have been kept in, yet also had its focused more concentrated on keeping the plot moving.  Which means a lot of the musical numbers can be cut for the sake of story.  Where things get interesting is how the following alternate plot scenario takes place.  Rather than the Potts family enjoying a day at the beach, what could happen is that Caractacus offers to take Truly and the kids for a fun seaside afternoon, except they have to drive through a dark forested area in order to get there.  As you can guess, this is where the Dahl-esque plot elements start to kick in.  As the new family car chugs its way through the thickets, and the forest around them grows darker, let Jeremy relay an old wives tale he's heard about these woods.  How some say that travelers have gotten lost in the forested area, only to run into all sorts of creepy and fantastical creatures lying in wait.  This scares Jemima, and their Dad has to calm the kids down, telling them not to worry, and how he knows where they're all going.

So of course, they lose the path through the forest, and get turned around.  Here's where the landscape around them can begin to shift and change, become less realistic, and more of the same kind of dark forest that Hansel and Gretel had to make their way through.  There can be weird sounds which Caractacus insists are just normal animals, but which sounds like inhuman voices whispering wickedly to each other.  It's the typical sense of the dark enchanted woods closing in on the main cast until, just when it looks like the trees are about to reach out and grab the car, family and all, they reach the end of the road leading out of the forest.  The one problem is the landscape no longer looks like the familiar English country lanes they're familiar with.  Everything seems to have taken on this heightened, uncanny quality, like looking at pictures in a storybook come to life.  Here's where we come to a very specific suggestion I'd have for making things more interesting.  I've asked myself what would happen if you decided to make all the proper Fantasy elements of this story into an animated cartoon?  Part of the logic for this idea is self-explanatory when you remember that's what Disney did for part of Mary Poppins.  So I'm wondering how the same creative choice would play out if applied to this scenario?

My thinking goes something like, "How cool do you think it would be to get guys like Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, William Hanna, and Joe Barbera to collaborate in creating this animated secondary world as the movie's main feature.  That or you could tap Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass, or else all the envelope pushing animators at UPA to bring Dahl's twisted fantasy kingdom and its inhabitants to life".  You can also choose to turn the live action actors into animated drawings for this part as well, though I'm willing to be up in the air on that last choice.  That said, it would lend a sense of continuity to the scenery.  This is all just "What If", anyway, so neither harm nor foul.  Instead, the real focus from here on would be to improve and strengthen all of the interesting concepts that were merely hinted at with the film as we have it now.  Let the kingdom itself be this place with a genuine sense of threat about it.  It should have the look and feel of a once happy dwelling were all the life has been taken and sucked out of it.  The buildings all contain hints of cozy warmth and sometimes even honest grandeur.  Yet all of it is belied by the gloomy color schemes and often twisted designs of Jones, Hanna-Barbera, or UPA.

The same thing should apply to the villagers.  Each of them looks nothing less than human, yet life under oppression has left most of them with this sunken eyed, sallow complexion, giving the townsfolk this vaguely less than human note to their features.  It should suggest that we might be looking at a community of Fair Folk where the glamours they normally use to hide their true faces and nature are starting to slip and run because of all the wear and tear they've been put through.  A lot of it has to do with the fact that they live under the rule of an evil king, and that their children have been taken away.  Yet another function of drawing the villagers in a less realistic style would be to highlight the suggestion that maybe we're dealing with people who may always be something a bit less than the normal flesh and blood of the main cast.  This is one good reason for making Van Dyke and company into animated drawings.  Even as cartoons, you could tell from the way they are drawn that it's still a bunch of Hominid Sapiens that we're dealing with.  By drawing the villagers, and especially the underground children in a more stylized, abstract way, it would serve to highlight the vaguely supernatural, otherworldliness of the enchanted dark kingdom the characters have stumbled upon.

Something tells me the exact nature of the people beyond the forest, and the kingdom they inhabit is a plot element that's best kept ambiguous.  That way it allows room for the audiences Imagination to run wild and have fun filling in the gaps of what such a place and people could mean.  So much then for the setting.  In terms of how this alternate plot could go, here is where it's possible to toss the film a bone or two.  At least some of the ideas it has to work with during the Fantasy segment is worth keeping.  This would include the kingdom itself, its inhabitants, Benny Hill as the toymaker, the Baron and the Baroness, and last but not least, the nightmare fuel attendant known as the Child Catcher.  Where things go wrong is the attempts made by Broccoli and Hughes to try and make it conform to what they think a film like Mary Poppins amounts to.  Yet here's the deal with that.  Even if it's not high on your list of greatest hits from the House of Mouse, what can't or shouldn't be denied is the sense of warm-hearted humanism at the center of it all.  It's what gives even the highest flights of Fantasy in the Disney picture this sense of, not groundedness so much as a sense of weight.  You can go along with the antics of Rob Petrie not because they are believable, but because they are well written, so there's no real off notes.

It's the lack of polish to the material that comes across as the biggest takeaway for the Hughes knock-off.  In that case, what's needed is any story element that can make the best of a scenario where a family finds itself trapped in a Dahl-esque Gothic dystopia.  It means the best ways in which to tell a story like this would have to be one that matches the colorful whimsy with Dahl's trademark dark humor in terms of visuals, and above all, plotting and characterization.  The best suggestions I've got on that score would go something like this.  It's clear to me that the biggest thing this picture's got going for it is the Child Catcher.  He's the one who makes the film worth watching, even if you don't like it.  The trick there is it means spending an interminable amount of runtime waiting for the real star of this attraction to come on-stage.  So the way you fix that is, first, to give this character more screen time.  In fact, let's not be content to rest just there.  Let's rewrite things so that the Catcher is revealed to be the actual power hiding behind the throne.  Let the Baron be the distraction that Caractacus and Truly think they should be aiming for, when in truth they still haven't got to the heart of the problem.  The way this could work is that you take certain elements in the finished movie and rework them to fit in with Dahl's twisted fairy tale aesthetic.

Let the Child Catcher provide the dominant sense of threat once Van Dyke and company reach the village.  Take the sense of menace this guy already provides in the film as we have it, and find all the right ways to amplify it to let the viewers know this story is playing for keeps, and might not be afraid to at least make a feint for the jugular.  Once the Catcher has his first big scene.  Benny Hill's exposition should lead us to believe that the Baron is an even worse threat than the stuff of children's nightmares that we just met.  We would then be shown a rewrite scene between the Baron and the Catcher where it's clear that all the background info we've just been given is completely backward, as it's apparent that the Baron pretty much relies on the Catcher for just about every major decision he makes in regards to the village and its people.  The implication here is that the Catcher sees the entire kingdom as just a petri dish in which conduct his own personal "experiments" on the townsfolk in general, and children in particular.  This scene would take the place of what in the movie is a rather pointless number where the Baron tries to get rid of his wife.  The reworked version would be a villain monologue song moment.

It would allow the Child Catcher a chance to have his character and motivations fleshed out, while also giving his actor, Robert Helpmann, the chance to show off his singing and dancing chops.  This would in turn make up for a glaring omission that's missing from the final MGM flick.  It's clear that Helpmann was probably the most accomplished musical theater actor in the entire cast.  So it's a wonder that no one thought to utilize his skills for a scene like this.  Granted, this can also work in the character's favor, as the Catcher's the one person who doesn't partake in the musical shenanigans.  A way to make sure the villain doesn't lose his sense of menace with a song would be to allow Helpmann to use the Catcher's trademark scythe as part of the performance.  Let his dance have moments where he's seen visibly slashing it across the walls of the Baron's apartment, leaving cruel looking gashes in the surface.  It's even possible to showcase the Catcher dragging his blade across a stone surface, then slashing it forward at the camera before holding it up to reveal a low sizzle of fire on the smoldering blade, as Helpmann flashes his best slasher smile for the camera.  At least there's one way of doing it.

Another idea is to make the scene where the Baron's palace is stormed by Van Dyke, Howes, and a resistance made up of children and villagers be more suspenseful by figuring out how to match it to Dahl's signature macabre style.  Don't be afraid to let things be more dark and dire, especially whenever they try to go after the Catcher.  One final idea I have is that while the Baron and his cadre are defeated, and the villagers and their children are all set free, the Child Catcher must be made to get away, even though it seems like he's been taken care of.  This would be the perfect setup for a very different final act, where it's revealed that somehow the menacing little stalker has followed the Potts family all the way back home.  His final appearance in the movie would also offer a good explanation for making him a cartoon character, at least at first.  Making him an animated figure would serve to soften whatever Gothic blows the character lands during the time the film spends in the fairy tale realm.  It leads the audience into a false sense of security by letting them think once he exits the stage in the Vulgaria sequence that we've seen the last of him.  That's the precise moment to pull the rug out from under the viewer in the best manner possible.  You'd do it by crafting a final sequence that goes a bit like this.

It could focus on the children being tucked into bed for the night.  Everything looks like its being wrapped up in a bow.  Only for the Catcher to somehow break into the house, and reveal that he's followed the Potts family all the way home.  What follows could be a stalker chase sequence that owes one part to Nosferatu (the original silent film), another to Robert Mitchum's Night of the Hunter, and all of it told in told in Dahl's trademark Dark Fantasy style.  It's very easy to imagine Jeremy and Jemima holing up in their father's basement, listening to the tell-tale squeaking sound that the villain's shoes make as they creep their way closer to the cellar door.  Which then slowly opens to cast the maniac's Gothic shadow onto the floor below, as he stands perched at the top of the stairs.  The shadows turning the Child Catcher into something like a bat or a twisted carrion bird of prey, as Robert Helpmann is now transformed into frightening flesh and blood.  He's no longer just a figment of some imaginative tale woven by their father.  In this version, the nightmare has somehow come to vivid and dangerous life.  It's very easy to imagine the Catcher perched on the top step, barring the way to freedom, and then calling down into the cellar after his targets: "....Children?...Chillldrennn"?!  Now that's an image.

It's one that Dahl might have been proud of, come to think of it.  As for how to end such a scenario, while I can't provide any real details, I do know it should be based, in part, on a conceit found in a now obscure Ray Bradbury short story, "Lets Play Poison", where a group of neighborhood kids manage to get the better of their tyrannical school teacher.  It's the kind of story that Dahl or Charles Addams would have appreciated, and something like it seems like a fitting way to dispense with the Child Catcher.  In other words, it would have to be the kind of ending that Roald Dahl could sink his teeth into.  This is at least one possible idea for how a better version of this film could have gone.  As for what we've actually got on on our hands?  Well, a lot of the main spring for all the faults of the picture have already been gone into.  The best I could give after that would be an anti-climactic survey of the results of Broccoli and Hughes stifling Dahl's ideas.  The biggest gripe remains the same.  How the filmmakers took all the creative potential of the setup Dahl delivered them in outline, and then proceeded to pretty much drain the life out of characters who should have been larger than life.  Figures like the Child Catcher and those around him demand this kind of heightened Gothic quality to them.

They want to be the stuff of children's nightmares, and Dahl would have been one of the few artists out there capable of delivering on that potential.  To give an idea of what I mean, as much as he might not have liked Willy Wonka, moments like the Tunnel Sequence are a great encapsulation of just how messed up the writer's mind could be.  If I were in Dahl's shoes...well, there are a lot of mistakes I would have avoided even going near, for one thing.  For another, the least of them would be to acknowledge that Mel Stuart and David L. Wolper had done a standout job of capturing both the light and the dark halves of the artist's mind.  With the trip down that messed up, psychedelic, river boat passageway serving as a good bit of creative visual shorthand for all of the darkest places that the author's mind could go to, and represent.  With the Ian Fleming adaptation, the filmmakers had the opportunity of brining out those macabre elements in a more elaborate storytelling way.  One that would have helped spell out the logic of one of cinema's most fondly remembered Big Lipped Alligator Moments.  The fact that they didn't will forever stand as a testament to their lack of creative vision for the film.  At the same time, and to be fair, it is perhaps just possible to see why they might have chosen to hold back on this material.

One of the ironies when it comes to any winning portrayal of a well written villain is that sometimes the combination of the right actor for the role can cause the unintended consequence of making someone who is clearly written to be unsympathetic somehow likeable.  History is full of such examples.  The best that come to mind being Michael Keaton's performance as Beetlejuice, what happened with Robert Englund's portrayal of the big bad of the Elm Street series when he morphed into the wisecracking and goofy Uncle Freddy, and then of course there's been the ongoing metamorphoses of Darth Vader in the public eye.  Though in the latter two cases, I'd argue it's all a matter of going a bit too overboard.  The point is, there was always the possibility that in giving Helpmann and his character a chance to shine in the spotlight might have saddled the film with unintentional mixed messages where they didn't belong.  A good way to illustrate the conundrum is to consider what would happen if you gave the role to someone like Tim Curry in his prime.  You know he would find a way to make it all look cool.  It's just something he was always able to do at the drop of a hat.  He's always been good at finding the likeability in otherwise unlikeable characters.  It's a gift I'm sure Helpmann could do just as well.  Yet the results with either actor would have perhaps crossed some sort of invisible taboo line for anyone to be fully comfortable with such an outcome.  So from that point, certain choices are understandable.

It still doesn't get rid of the fact that the filmmakers should have been willing to find a way around this conundrum.  One that would have kept the audience clear they're not all supposed to root for the villain, while at the same time still leaving room to push the envelope enough so that we'd get a picture that could compete with Mary Poppins in the only way that truly matters.  Namely the honor of being able to say the final product can stand on its own merits as a film.  One that goes in a very different direction from the Disney version, while also maybe sharing something of the earlier film's spirit of enchantment, however many shadows get added on.  As things stand, what we're looking at here is a series of missed opportunities.  The central mistake seems to have been a mixture of the filmmakers desire to ape the success Walt had with Mary Poppins while thinking they could just take whatever Inspirations Dahl had to offer, and throw them into the pot without much in the way of foresight to help the picture's efforts.

It shouldn't come as any real surprise that the final result was less a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, so much as the head chefs not realizing where the real talent and potential for their film came from, or knowing how to utilize it all in a winning formula.  Instead, what we've ended up with is an erratic hodge-podge of styles and story elements all coming together to produce a confused and scattershot sense of plotting and characterization.  I'd almost has to call the main action of this film less of a story, and more of an excuse for Dick Van Dyke show off his skills at musical theater.  To be fair, there is a way in which this can work.  The central point, however, is that this would mean creating a film that is less of an actual plot, and more a simple variety review, where the theatric spectacle itself is the main event.  The mistake the filmmakers seem to have made here is in not realizing how to tie this basic cabaret presentation in with Dahl's imaginings.  Indeed, the real mistake of the film is one that could be described in two complimentary terms.  Either the director and producer couldn't or wouldn't take seriously the need to have a compelling narrative to tie it all together.  Or else their biggest mistake was in trying to tie what should have been a series of stand alone, Fred Astaire style performances into anything even remotely resembling a proper story in the first place.  It's a film lost in translation.

Come to think of it, I now recall hearing reports that Ken Hughes didn't have a real fun time in the director's chair for this feature.  Cast and crew testimony report him as an argumentative leader on the set.  Someone who would often clash with the actors on occasion when it came time to film certain scenes.  By most accounts, Hughes really didn't seem to get along with the film's two child leads.  It even got to the point where Van Dyke and Helpmann felt they had to go out of their way and confront Hughes about the way they he felt was actually bullying the children on set.  This seems to have been born out by the testimony of Jemima's actress, Heather Ripley.  She had recollections of Helpmann being nothing less than an absolute gentleman and team player on-set.  To put this into perspective, what do you think it says about those in charge of production when the freaking Child Catcher is the one whose in your corner, and willing to stand up for the kids?  It tells me we might have a clue as to the incoherence of the final product.  This film is the result of people who, for whatever reason, were probably in over their heads with material like this.  Albert Broccoli spent an entire career proving he knew how to help make first class action thriller films.  When it came to Children's Literature, then perhaps not so much.  Even Hughes later admitted that the whole thing wasn't his sort of film.

So, there you have it.  A bunch of talented names trying to come together for the less than stellar desire to chase after box office royalties.  Two of them are out of their depth, and also sort of can't help but make clear how little they know about either musicals or children's adventures in particular, and the Fantasy genre as a whole.  Meanwhile, there's just one man out of the whole crew who knows anything about how to tell a good modern fairy tale, and yet his ideas keep getting sidelined by the director and producer.  With all this in mind, is it any wonder the film comes out looking like such a mess?  It's clear now that what I'm looking at is the great unmade Roald Dahl film.  One that would have showcased the author's lifelong streak of Inspired Gothic insanity.  Under better circumstances, this could have been something that rivaled the Mouse House with its own quirky brand of enchantment.  One that would have hinted at, and paved the way for the later triumphs of Willy Wonka, and perhaps kept Dahl from souring on working in the film industry to the point where he could never be satisfied with most adaptations of his work.  Instead, we'll have to rest content with the cluttered mess that is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  There are tons of great children's films out there.  This one just doesn't make the final cut.