Tom Thumb (1958).

I've written about him once before, believe it or not.  No one remembers a name like George Pal, in the strictest sense, yet his legacy does live on in the memories of Classic Movie enthusiasts, and I just happened to be one of them.  It's what allowed me to take an unironic and genuine interest in the Science Fiction B Movies of the 1950s.  Somewhere in all of that, I learned about a 1953 adaptation of H.G. Well's War of the Worlds, a film which is still notable for several reasons.  While it was not the first major Sci-Fi film in cinematic history, it does hold the honor of being perhaps the first time that the Alien Invasion from Outer Space trope was displayed and explored in a proper big-budget, blockbuster fashion.  It's a film that takes both its sense of threat and scale seriously, and so the film and its visuals are allowed to have a proper sense of dramatic weight that would often be lacking in the later glut of Drive-In Cinema fair that followed in its wake.  While Science Fiction still had a long, uphill battle ahead in an ongoing quest to have itself taken seriously at the time, it was War of the Worlds, along with an earlier effort, Destination Moon, which was released at the dawn of the Eisenhower Era, that helped give the Outer Space Adventure genre its first real, legitimate footing in Hollywood.  While Destination and the Wells adaptation each had different leaders in the director's chair, they were both united by the visions of just one man.  That individual's name was George Pal, and his contributions to the movies counts one of those silent legacies that no one really notices today.  This is something that happens despite the best efforts of his cinematic heirs.

Take the opening moment of a 1980s documentary on Pal, directed by Arnold Leibovit.  It doesn't open with a montage of clips from Pals films, but rather with scenes from Joe Dante's Gremlins, Spielberg's E.T. or Return of the Jedi, and shots of the original (and still the best) Starship Enterprise.  This is Leibovit's way of showcasing the true nature of the legacy Pal left behind.  As the opening narration by Paul Frees has it, "It is no accident that the Fantasy pictures of today captured our Imaginations.  Not so long ago, a gentle European came to America, and set a course for future generations to follow."  It's a sentiment that's echoed years later by the words of critic and historian Justin Humphreys: "From 1950 until 1964 - arguably science fiction cinema's most formative era - Pal as the American film industry's top SF filmmaker and its pre-eminent  futurist, a producer/director of rarest and most intense imagination.  He paves the way for every conscientious science fiction filmmaker to come by staunchly defending and gambling on his patron genre when it was a ghetto, its fantastic concepts widely dismissed as juvenilia (xiii)."  Humphreys is telling the truth here, yet his words cover about just half of the full picture, and they don't really get at the heart of the man at the center of today's film review.

In order to understand where films like War of the Worlds, Tom Thumb, or The Time Machine come from, it's one of those cases where you first have to get something of a clear idea of the main artist in back of them all, and of what made him tick as a human being.  In order to do that, you have to go back and take a closer look at the life of the artist's mind.  Gail Morgan Hickman is the one scholar to provide a good overview of the major plot points of Pal's life.  While her chronology is not as complete as later studies of this filmmaker, she remains the one who provides the best beginner's synopsis, so here goes.

The man at the heart of this film "was born in Cegled, Hungary, in a small town about forty miles from Budapest, on February 1, 1908, the son of Maria and George Pal (17)."  For the record, the future filmmaker's original name was Gyula György Marczincsak, and his parents were Gyula Marczincsak Sr. and Maria Tiko.  The name of Pal was a self-chosen Anglicization of the family name.  The somewhat interesting thing to note about that is that Pal felt it necessary to apply the re-christening to his entire family, and I've never found a good reason for why that is.  It leads me to believe that possible ongoing experiences with racism and prejudice during the 20s, 30s, and 40s, may have had a hand in Pal's choice of redefining himself and his parents.  This is a point which will become relevant as we go along.  For now, Hickman's summary goes as follows. "Young George came from a theatrical family. His grandfather and grandmother had been members of the National Theater, and his mother and father were entertainers in a traveling theater. Because his parents were on the road so much, Pal was raised by his grandparents. Young Pal was not interested in the theater, but decided instead to attend the Budapest Academy of Arts in order to study architecture (ibid)."  Pal's own testimony corroborates this point.

In Leibovit's documentary, Pal is recorded as saying, "I came from an actor's family, and of course, I didn't like the stage.  I didn't want anything to do with it, and became an architect."  The life choices described here does fit the familiar pattern of the child wanting to define himself in distinction from his parents.  However, if the the later trajectory of Pal's career is any indication, then it seems as if the artistic background of Gyula and Maria Marczincsak did manage to leave something of a favorable impression on their son Gyorgy.  It was a personal legacy that seems to have defined the kind of films Pal would make in the future, and its something we'll have to pause and examine in a minute.  We just need to let Hickman's timeline lead us there.  In order to pay for his college expenses, George would earn an odd-job income making drawings for medical students, and various advertising businesses.  It was this early experience in the art of illustration that appears to have been the first stirrings of Pal's artistic temperament coming to the fore.  It was also something that came in handy pretty soon.

As Pal states in Leibovit's documentary, "When I graduated in Hungary, as an architect, and got my diploma, there was nothing to build.  Fortunately, I could draw."  "Pal's ability to draw," as Hickman explains, "got him a job making motion pictures at Hunnia Films in Budapest. To make the subtitles for silent films more attractive, Pal was employed to create little illustrations around them, and also to do movie posters for the theaters. With a steady job and a reasonable income, George proposed to his childhood sweetheart, Zsoka Grandjean, whom he had met at a dancing school, and the two were married. It was while working at Hunnia that Pal became interested in animated cartoons.

"He remembers: "In Hungary, and most European countries at that time, you had commercials in the movies. They were looking for different ways to film commercials. And we knew of animated films. We had the American cartoons, Felix the Cat, Oswald the Rabbit, and I tried to copy them as much as I could for commercial purposes. I had to find out how you draw animated cartoons, because there were no books on it, nothing. Fortunately I met a Hungarian, George Feld, who had come back from Hollywood, and he was an editor. And he told me how cartoons were made. So I had to invent my own papers and my own registration pins, etcetera.” Pal’s interest in animation flourished. And, since the job at Hunnia did not pay much, he began to look around for another job. In 1931, he and his young bride went to Berlin, where animated films were big. For a few months Pal worked independently, and then he finally landed a job at UFA, the largest film studio in Germany at the time. Although he could not speak a word of German, within two months he had been promoted to the head of the cartoon department.

"In 1932, Pal decided to leave UFA and open his own studio. With his experience he had plenty of film assignments in no time. One of his assignments came from a big cigarette manufacturer in Cologne, which wanted him to make an animated cartoon featuring their cigarettes. Pal quickly became bored drawing dozens of cigarettes. The idea occurred to him that instead of drawing them he could simply film real cigarettes, moving them frame-by-frame the same way as a cartoon. He phoned the company and asked them what they thought of the idea. When he explained they would be able to see the company name on each cigarette, the factory told him to go ahead. The film, only a few minutes long, featured the cigarettes dancing to music, and was an instant success. “They liked it so much,” recalls Pal, “that they ordered other films where the cigarettes spoke. So we put little mouths on them—no face yet, just mouths. And then we put faces on them, and put hats on them, and put arms and legs on them. I built wire legs with buttons for feet and made a series of legs that way. And that was the birth of the Puppetoons.”

"With the rise of Naziism, Pal found himself being investigated by the Gestapo in 1933 because of his Hungarian birth. The Nazis considered all foreign- ers suspicious. Hating dictatorships of any kind, Pal decided to leave Germany. With some money he and Zsoka had managed to save, the two moved to Prague, where Pal hoped to open his own animation studio. But incredibly no one in Prague had ever heard of an animation camera. So Pal designed his own stop-motion camera that could easily be dis- mantled and carried in a suitcase. When he and his wife moved again, this time to Paris, they set up shop in their hotel room and made films there. “In Paris,” says Pal, “I made cartoons for Philips Radio of Holland. I had an idea for another film in which everything would be made of glass. But we had trouble finding a factory that would do a series of figures out of glass. So Philips Radio said, ‘We're going to give you lots of work, why don't you come to Endhoven, Holland” They had a great glass factory there, and they put it at my disposal.” The result was The Ship of the Ether, a color short subject in which a  glass ship floated through space on ether waves also made of glass to the accompaniment of music (17-19)."  Pal soon set up his own studio and found commercial work with American advertisers.

This establishment of contact with American companies proved to be the important stepping stone in Pal's career.  It was his first foot in the door to the sort of dream career that Pal had begun to harbor since he realized he was good at the new medium of film.  In time, Pal became one of the lucky ones.  He had applied for a visa not just for himself, but also his wife and fellow animators to immigrate to the United States in the hope of building a life and career for himself in Hollywood.  Here's where we come to the two biggest influences that shaped the cinema that George Pal went on to create.  The first was already touched upon in passing.  Pal shares something in common with artists like Rod Serling and J.R.R. Tolkien in the sense that all three of them knew what it was like to have their lives touched by war, and the often tragic and traumatic fallout that can result from it.  Both Serling and Tolkien experienced this crisis from the vantage point of soldiers in the trenches, jungles, and foxholes.  Pal got to experience the same reality from the inverted side of the telescope, not as a combatant but as a civilian who stayed in his European homeland just long enough to see the effects that Fascism and the Nazis had on one's ability to lead a normal life.  Much like the Hobbits of Tolkien's works, Pal also got to see the idyllic patterns and rhythms of childhood brought to a crashing halt by a looming tyranny.

The pattern of crisis is a familiar, and frustratingly recurring one throughout history, one that finds its reflection in the testimony of one artist after another.  In this sense Pal's undergoing of the familiar pattern of Innocence in collision with Experience is a personal trajectory that reads like an all too well-read book.  It even fits the familiar pattern of Loss and Gain by taking into account that as a child of the theater world, Pal would have been exposed to the ruling strains of Continental Romanticism that was in vogue among the Hungarian arts scene of the early 20th century.  The influence of thinkers and artists such as Goethe, Herder, and Schlegel had by this point become a commonplace of the Eastern European mindset that Pal imbibed growing up surrounded by the stage world of his parents.  While he might have harbored the constant desire that most rebellious youth have of defining themselves in distinction to their parents, this Romantic strain proved to be the one influence that Pal could never shake off, and in time, he seems to have more or less come to identify with, and to encode into the vast majority of his later cinematic efforts.  This appears to have been a process that Pal was already undergoing during his graduate and early adult years as a novice artist learning to discover his own creative voice.  It was just as Pal was on the cusp of bringing these talents to fruition that history stepped in with other plans.

These plans turned out to be the of the kind that effects whole nations and peoples, and Pal and his wife seem to have been no different.  It was then that the ubiquitous pattern of the lost childhood idyll took its by now familiar and well-trod course.  Just as Pal began to find his voice, the Nazis invaded Hungary, and while Pal found himself exempt from the worst of the war's atrocities through the discovery that he was non-Jewish, many of his friends and collaborators weren't so lucky.  Nor was the pervasive sense of open-minded Romanticism that had been the defining note of his most impressionable years.  Though perhaps there was a strange and uncanny sense of irony in watching all of this unfold, as it made a perfect match for the kind of plot developments from all the fairy tales he'd heard and had read to him as a child.  It was as if the Big Bad Wolf had descended on his quaint little town, and was now terrorizing the villagers left and right.  Unlike Tolkien and Serling, Pal was never qualified for military service, and even if he had tried to enlist, the occupation meant there was only one sort of regiment he would have found waiting for him, and Pal carried on a white hot antipathy for the Nazis that remained lifelong, even years after the threat had turned into ancient history.  Instead, with nothing else to do, and very little in the way of choices left, George and his wife fled to America.

It's these two crucial inflections points of childhood Romanticism clashing with the threat of Totalitarianism that in effect created the type of storytelling that George Pal would later be known for.  It's what accounts for the creation of his 1942 animated Puppetoon short, Tulips Shall Grow, which is an allegorical retelling of Pal's experiences seeing the Nazis march in and take his entire life away from him.  It's a thematic presence lurking in the back of films like War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine.  However, and again, just like with Tolkien and Serling, Pal's cinema also manages to illicit this innate and unshakeable sense of awe and wonder at the center of life.  It's perhaps no coincidence that one of the fast friends the new arrival from war-torn Hungary made after establishing himself in Golden Age Hollywood was none other than a hayseed Midwesterner by the name of Walter Elias Disney.  There seems to be plenty of indication that not only were the two Fantasy wunderkinds on the same wavelength, they also appear to have seen themselves as part of a vanguard standing in the breach of the kind of cynicism and propaganda that Tinseltown was err to, even back then.  Both men focused their professional sights on a cinema that would serve to enchant and enlighten their audiences.

This is something that's evident in many of the more forgotten efforts that Pal churned out during his heyday as a producer and director.  This can be seen in his lesser known, and more light-hearted offerings, such as Houdini with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, or The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm with Harvey Laurence, or The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, which Tony Randall in a multi-part performance.  Tom Thumb fits neatly into this lesser known category, and while I can't say it's the most representative work that Pal ever did, I think it is possible to understand why he would turn from works by writers like H.G. Wells to more easygoing Fantasies like this.  In order to understand that logic, however, it helps to stop and take a close and careful look at this now forgotten fairy tale adaptation. 

The Plot.

"Once upon a time, long before man learned to fly, long before locomotives left smoky streamers on the horizon, long before all this...somewhere farther than man could sail...There was a little valley.  There on the banks of the winding stream nestled a peaceful little village, and draped around this hamlet, stretching far and wide, over hill and dale, was the great forest."  It was in this forest that there lived a simple woodcarver, named Jonathan (Bernard Miles).  This woodcarver, named "Honest" Jonathan (even by the people of the village, as well as his friends and neighbors) was a simple man, for the most part.  He was born and raised on the edges of the town, and so the forest thereabouts was as much of a lifelong companion as his wife, Anne (Jessie Matthews).  Much like the woman he fell in love with, Jonathan had grown to know all about the forests and glades that sheltered and encompassed all he ever knew of the world.  It was a time when everyone lived in the forest, because no one lived anywhere else.  This at least was Jonathan's opinion, and it suited him well enough.  He and Anne made a decent living off his skills with woodwork, and while their lives were spent on the outskirts, their village was too small for them not to be considered a familiar pillar of the community.  It was a good life that the woodcarver and his wife had, on the whole.  The one thing they longed for the most was something denied to them both by nature.

Jonathan and Anne had pining for a son to call their own, and yet this was the one particular capability that had been left out of Annie's skillset.  Jonathan never cared about that, he loved her too much to ever blame for for a fate she never chose for herself.  Though it did mean there was always a certain lingering sense of loneliness to their daily affairs.  The couple remained close and loving, nevertheless, and it seemed to all who knew them that they would continue so to the end of their days.  There just seemed something wrong to the woodcarver and the misses about having to live those days out with no one else left just to share that life with them.  Then one day, Jonathan went out about his trade in the woods, and spotted a particularly fine looking specimen for the job, one made of solid, grand old oak.

Jonathan had picked his ax from the toolkit, and was just about to raise it to deliver the first cutting blow, when a young girl's voice asked him not to.  At first, Jonathan looked around, and wondered aloud who was playing games with him.  When no one bothered to give an immediate answer, Jonathan just shrugged, hefted the ax once more...and had to break to a frantic dead halt before it met the skull of a beautiful, regal looking young lady, who was now seated at the base of the grand oak.  "Look here, young woman," Jonathan exclaimed, "I might have cut you in half!"  To his ongoing surprise, the bright lady answered, "No ax can harm me, Jonathan."  Addressing the woodcarver's obvious astonishment, the lady continued, "Honest Jonathan, that is you name, isn't it?"  The woodcarver allowed as how it was, "Honest by name, honest by nature."  Jonathan then stated that he had business with the grand oak, "And so have I," the lady replied, "I've come to ask you not to cut it down."  When the woodcarver naturally enquired why on Earth not, the lady then gave him the biggest shock of the day.  "You see," she said, "I'm Queen of this Forest (June Thorburn)."  Jonathan allowed as how that made him the Emperor of China, so her majesty proceeded to prove it to him by demonstrating the kind of magic that was often native to the forests and wildernesses of old, back before all the trees began to fall silent.

When the extent of her nature and powers were made very clear, Jonathan then allowed as how he was dreadful sorry to have offended her majesty, and promised never to harm the grand oak ever again.  That would amount to going after the lady herself, and in addition to being honest, Jonathan was also a perfect gentleman where the fairer half of life was concerned.  Seeing as how the woodcarver had a good heart, the Dryad Monarch decided to take pity on him, and in exchange for sparing her life and many limbs from his ax, she decided to grant Jonathan his fondest wish.  The lonely woodcarver then admitted the he and his wife had been longing for a son ever since they first eyes on one another, and yet that the same power that made the dryad Queen of the Forest had also left his wife barren.  The lady understood exactly what he meant, and promised him that when he got home, and before the night was through, the fondest wish of him and Anne would come true.  They would be blessed with a son.

If Jonathan had his doubt about this, he kept them to himself, and instead continued on his business elsewhere, and made his way home to the arms of the woman who won his heart years ago.  What proved her majesty's words was a knock on the door that woke Jonathan up in the dead of night.  When the flustered woodcarver went to answer the door, he found to his surprise a bright-eyed young man who looked to be in his 20s, yet somehow much younger than that, standing on the doorstep ready and eager to greet him.  An unexpected caller at odd hours is strange enough.  It's odder still when that same caller is no bigger than five to seven inches tall, no higher than the average human thumb.  The strange lad at the door then delivered the crowning moment of oddity by announcing that it was good to be home, and that, "Don't you recognize me, father?  I'm you're son!"  It's been said by the wisest storytellers that all magic comes with a price.  Sometimes these price tags can be deadly.  Therefore its often best never to make deals with unknown or little understood powers beyond human ken.  It's an equation that is so simple its still something of a recognizable truism in an age that has ceased to believe in wonders.

The case of the woodcarver and his wife must have been the exception that proved the rule, however.  Because once Anne and Jon were able to learn that, yes, indeed, the Lady of the Woods had kept her promise, this boy who could fit in the palm of their hand was none other than their very son, it was, for all intents and purposes, as if a new light and sense of life and vibrancy had entered the old woodcarver's cottage.  From that day forward, Honest Jonathan could be seen going about his business while holding himself just a bit more erect and proud, while Anne moved and went about her days with a new skip in her step.  The villagers noticed, and when they found the reason why, while they might have been astonished at first, they also soon came to accept their new son as one of the community, just like his parents.  Jon and Anne christened the boy Tom, and the people round the village took to calling him Tom Thumb (Russ Tamblyn), though there was not a trace of malice in this nickname.  While Tom was soon just as much of a well-known and liked face as that of his family, he was also, in many ways, still a child of the forest.  This meant that Tom possessed the occasional special ability here and there.

For instance, he could talk to horses, and being in part a product of the woodland Folk meant that he could interact with the spirits that sometimes inhabited not just trees, but even the object that were made out of them, such as the toys Jonathan had spent a lifetime carving for the son he thought would never come.  The good news was that even here, whatever curious magic Tom possessed was clearly of the benign kind, and none of it was ever a problem for the village or his family in and of itself.  The downside was that even when magic is good, it can still sometimes come with a price.  In Tom's case, this amounted to no more than drawing the attention of an unscrupulous pair of crooks (Terry Thomas, Peter Sellers), who noted Tom's size, and realized that they may have just found the makeshift key they were looking for to help them rob the village treasury blind.  Tom may have looked like a grown young man, and known something in the way of the Elvish crafts, yet he was still just a boy for all of that.

Pretty soon the two thieves have roped Tom (literally) into helping them to swipe all the gold that the town has set by for the stability of the community, and some of the evidence has wound up in his parents house.  Which means that Anne and Honest Jonathan are soon tried and condemned to death at the whipping post.  It's now up to Tom, the Queen of the Forest, and a mutual friend (Alan Young) to try and locate and retrieve the hidden gold, expose the thieves as the real culprits to the public, and save the life of Tom's newfound family, before the lad can be made into a premature orphan.  They say that all magic comes with a price.  Sometimes this is true even when the enchantment is well meant.  When something like that goes wrong, it's all the worse for the good that was meant to result.  What's even more ironic is when its the original, elemental spellcasters who find themselves on the receiving end of such a price tag.  Still, when consequences roll out, whether for the wish givers or the receivers, the basic fact remains the same.  Once that sort of thing happens, it becomes necessary for any decent soul who is willing to do something to help the situation to take a stand, no matter how small.  With the help of his friends, young Tom Thumb must see if he can rise to the occasion, and try to save his family. 

Conclusion: A Very Take-It-Easy Kind of Film.

My own history with this picture is the sort that follows its own kind of pattern.  It's something I remember watching way back when I was really young as a child.  I was born the year Orwell made famous, which means my arrival in whatever the hell this is placed me at just the right moment in history during the 80s.  The first of that decades opening salvos had already left their mark on pop culture, and there were still five more years of creativity, the likes of which we've never really seen since, waiting to appear in the wings.  I seem to have had all the good luck in that sense.  I'm one of the few remnants of a pre-21st century society who got to experience what a normal childhood was like.  It was also somewhat different from that of most of my fellows 80s kids, in that my diet was never limited to just the list of usual suspects that defined that time for most of us.  It's true, I did catch my fare share of episodes from shows like Inspector Gadget, Garfield, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  However, that's where most of the regular strand of pop culture memory tends to end so far as history still has any awareness of what it was like to come of age in that decade.  In addition to the usual round of Saturday Morning offerings on TV, or the latest Spielberg produced Fantasy adventure at the local shopping mall cineplex, this was also a time in which the Golden and Silver Ages of Hollywood were experiencing a kind of minor resurgence of their own while all the other stuff most of us remember was going on.

Most of this was thanks to the childhood enthusiasms of one Mr. Ted Turner, more often than not.  It's thanks to the founder of TBS and Turner Classic Movies that Old-Time Cinema still any kind of mnemonic footprint left in the annals of pop culture history.  And when I wasn't being introduced to the artistry of Jim Henson, Paul Reubens, or Jim Davis on CBS each Saturday Morning, I was getting to know the names of a bunch of movie stars that most of us no longer even know once existed.  These were actors like Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, Humphrey Bogart, and Peter Lorre, along with grand old funnymen like a cat named Tom, a mouse named Jerry, and a couple a guys with names like More, Larry, or Curly, or Grouch Marx and his Brothers.  What I think a lot of us 80s kids tend to forget is just exactly where any of us might have first seen any of these latter names.  Looking back on it all now, I realize that it worked like this.  The three big ruling networks of the 80s (ABC, NBC, CBS) where the ones who gave us the 80s as most of us remember it.  It was Ted Turner and his various cable networks, meanwhile, who were responsible for helping us remember who Bugs, Daffy, Yogi, Boo-boo, or Fred, Wilma, and Barney were.  It's thanks to Turner's boundless enthusiasm for antique cinema that I still know who Quick-draw McGraw or Huckleberry Hound are.  I suppose a good way to say it is that Turner was the one who revived the Saturday Mornings of the past for a new generation of 80s kids.  It makes him a vital yet often forgotten component of 80s childhoods that tends to get overlooked.

A large part of this proto-TCM broadcast package meant the somewhat easy availability of films from Hollywood's Golden Age.  Before Ted set up his own 24-hour cable channel devoted exclusively to Tinseltown's glory days, it was either TBS or TNT where you went if you wanted to catch a rerun of King Kong, or something with Bogie, John Wayne, or Mickey Rooney.  This was the alternate, and oft-forgotten aspect of the decade that always gets overlooked when it comes to most retrospectives of the 80s.  It was the now neglected factor that cinema's Golden Age was still able to hang in their for a brief window of time before the advent of viewer specialization, and the mind-shifting onslaughts of the digital age seems to have swept it all into the pop culture memory hole.  Yet it was just as much a fact of growing up a child in the 80s as the more familiar and pervasive Spielbergian/MTV quality that colors most of our memories from that time.  I was one of the 80s kids who got see Turner's pre-TCM experiments with reshowing old movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s on TBS and TNT, so at least my 80s was a heady mixture of the old and the then new, often with one blurring into another until both the Classic and New Hollywood sort of became indistinguishable in my mind.  The perfect irony, or course, being that now films like E.T. are regarded in the same light as a movie such as Bogart's Casablanca.

So in a strange, yet incomplete way, it's as if history is slowly catching up to that idea of a merging of the past and present that was my experience of the 80s.  Heck, if you want to hear the perfect punchline, one of the last major TV broadcasts of 1989 was the opening of the Disney/MGM studios in Florida, and back then that place was meant as basically a living shrine to Golden Age Hollywood.  So it's like after an entire decade of innovations and boundary pushing in terms of what cinema could do, all the great artists of the 80s cap it off by going to Disneyland to celebrate the films of old that Inspired them, and they're doing it with the help of a company that's just come off its latest success, which is a hybrid live-action/animated 40s Film Noir for kids.  It seems the history 80s childhoods are full of interesting little developments like this.  I'm just sorry so much of it has slipped through the cracks of time and history.  The point is that it was on one the networks Turner helped found to showcase these older movies that at one point I happened to catch a rerun of George Pal's Tom Thumb.  I channel surfed to it right in the middle of things, just as the main action of the plot had kicked off.  Tom's parents had been arrested under false suspicion of theft, and now Tom was setting out on an adventure to clear their names.  I can remember being interested in what happened, even if I didn't know who Peter Sellars was.

If I had to give a better description to how my child self reacted to the picture on the whole, then I'd have to say I was tolerably invested in it.  I don't recall thinking I was watching something groundbreaking, yet it was fun and enjoyable enough.  Bear in mind, when you're a kid, you tend to have a higher tolerance threshold for things like filler and even empty stretches where not much is happening.  It's when you get older that the crack which were always there to begin with are too big to ignore, and I'm afraid that's sort of the problem with this film.  Like I said, my experience with this fits a familiar pattern.  What started out as easily enjoyable enough when you were a kid somehow became one of those films where it became a chore to sit though.  In some ways, the worst part about it stems from being a genuine, unironic fan of Classic Hollywood films.  It's more than possible, and sometimes necessary to mount a defense for the genuine artistry in a lot of these older movies, and yet the problem with a film like Tom Thumb is that we're given an interesting premise, and a special effects production which was pretty impressive for the time, and yet Pal and his team never really do anything exciting with it.  The best parts of the movie are all in the beginning, when we're establishing setting, backgrounds, and lore about the characters.  Once the plot kicks in is also when it grounds to a halt.

This marks Tom Thumb out as one of those movies where the actual story ends up being a secondary concern.  While I've heard and seen other critics try to make the argument that this really doesn't matter, and sometimes can even be a good thing, it's just never sat right with me.  All books and films exist for sake of entertaining the audience with a good plot.  That means the narrative itself will always remain paramount.  Even if you're telling just a simple folktale, you've still got to make the premise unfold in a way that leaves your listeners interested and wanting to know more, and the only way to do that is to make sure the incidents that happen are able to have at least some sort of narrative power behind them.  In this case, it's as if Pal was able to conjure up all of these fascinating visual elements in his mind, yet he somehow never found a way to fit them all into anything resembling and good and proper story.

Instead, all the closest thing we get to a plot is when Dr. Strangelove shows up in the frame.  Even the fact that the late, great Peter Sellers is one of the main baddies just serves to demonstrate how lackluster the final product is.  When you here that Inspector Clouseau is in the picture, it kind of raises your expectations to a great degree as an adult.  That's because the more you know about Sellars and his career, you're able to realize that he was one of the key architects of modern alternative comedy.  Sellars and Spike Milligan basically pioneered the Monty Python style of humor that we now still recognize the world over.  So when you go into one of his films with this knowledge in the attic, you're first expectation is that you hope you're in for a surreal, nonsensical, yet wacky and fun time.  In all honesty, I get the impression that's probably the course of action Pal and his team should have taken.

They should have let Sellars take a hand in the writing and together he and Pal could have crafted this weird yet funny, Jonathan Swift style satirical fable about big and little men and how in order to be taken seriously in life, you have to jump through all sorts of pointless hoops until you reach the point where you realize that those in authority are full of nothing but crap, and that it's all in service of a completely illogical and non-existent goal.  So that means you really shouldn't let people like that push you around and tell you how to live your life.  What makes this alternate idea even more of a logical way to go is how it ties in way better to the kind of themes Pal was used to exploring in his movies.  Remember what I said back in the contextual intro, about how Pal shared a common experience with Tolkien and Rod Serling centered around the traumas and hardships brought about by war and tyranny?

Well, as you might expect, because of that, in all of Pal's best work, it's clear you can see the filmmaker grappling with this subject matter in much the same way as the creators of the Hobbits and The Twilight Zone.  Like them, Pal is a moralist whose values have been shaped by an up close and personal experience of the will power, and the ways in which mental illness can become widespread public policy, and the clear and unmistakable threat that poses to everyone at large.  It's the beating and bleeding heart behind all of his work, and it's what makes his best efforts shine out all the more clearly.  It's obvious we're meant to view H.G. Wells' Martians, for instance, as a clear allegory for Hitler and the Nazis.  The interesting thing is that if this is the engine driving Pal's artistry, then it's pretty obvious he knew how to discuss these matters on film in ways that would have somehow managed to have a mass appeal to a child audience.  There's every indication that Pal could have found the right vantage point which would have allowed the film to speak to these issues to kids on their own level, without ever dumbing things down.  It also doesn't hurt that Sellars and Spike Milligan were another pair of artists whose comedy was shaped to a great degree by the pain and absurdity of war, and a desire to fight against the sort of tyranny that would always try to enforce a crooked will upon the public at large.

So it's like you had this perfect combination of talents coming together, and all of them were on the same wavelength and knew how to create fantastical worlds on the screen in an era when that was very difficult to accomplish, and yet it's like none of it really gels together.  Instead, what happens is we're treated to the kind of plot that starts out on an intriguing premise, and then fails to really develop it, or take things in any sort of interesting direction.  All that happens after Tamblyn steps in front of the camera is he and Miles's father character set out to collect more wood like usual, and then they run across Thomas and Sellars who just happen to be traveling on the same road.  They realize Tom's size could help them rob the town treasury, Tom gets roped in, his parents take the blame for it, and so he and the future voice of Scrooge McDuck are stuck having to go on a shenanigan filled romp just to retrieve the gold and bring Dr. Strangelove to justice.  I'm really not telling you anything else of interest here besides that.  The whole plot unravels in a way that is very pedestrian and by the numbers.  There's a minor subplot involving Alan Young where Tom's friend Woody has fallen in love with June Thorburn's Dryad girl, and yet even this side plot isn't developed in any sort of interesting way.

It doesn't take any sort of narrative route that might intrigue the audience's interest.  For instance, we're never given much insight into what life must look or be like for Thorburn's character as an elemental spirit of myth whose home and life are often threatened by man's careless ways.  The fact that she has fallen in love with a human would have been a great chance to explore such an angle in a way that would have tied in with Pal's constant themes tackling the subject tyranny in its various forms.  It would have been very easy to draw on old world folklore to take the figure of Queenie (as she's described in the film) and build up an entire sylvan otherworld around her and Tom in a way that gives them both more three-dimensional personalities, rather than leaving them as just a walking-talking cinematic gimmick, or a sideline love interest.  Instead, a better way of handling the film would have been to let Tom be the one whose curious about how the world works, and Queenie is determined to find an answer to why the humans are so determined to tear down her home, and herself into the bargain.  It's the one of the possible good basis from which to launch a quest plot where the two heroes, accompanied by Uncle Scrooge, set out on a quest to find these answers, and they end up having to face off against Peter Sellars in full-on Strangelove mode, as this wicked trickster villain who holds a great deal of aces.  

Heck, one good idea would be to let Sellars put his skills at multiple role-playing within a single film to good use.  Let him be cast to play a series of roles through the film.  Let him play a different yet significant character that Tom, Queenie, and Woody meet on their Swiftian travels, and let each encounter have just enough ambiguity to it so that when it's time for the final showdown, we're left to wonder if the main protagonists have been stalked and played for fools by the villain this whole time.  Like I say, the movie would have worked better going for a more Swiftian Fantasy Satire, where all the exploits the heroes have carries a biting comedic edge that acts as a commentary on all the sorts of hypocrisies that typified the post-war 1950s conformist America that Pal was surrounded by on all sides.  If done right, it would not only have tied into the ideas that provided the fuel for Pal's best efforts, if you also allowed Sellars a hand in crafting the story, then it might have resulted in a prototype form of the kind of Surrealist Fantasy that Terry Gilliam would later become famous for.  What the viewer has to look forward to in real life, however, is just this long, hard slog where the characters are pretty much forced to go through the motions, and all of them have this, hollow, mechanical nature.

For instance, when the actual plot kicks off, and Tom goes to confront the thieves, he enlists Alan Young's help, and rather than do anything clever with this setup, the showdown between heroes and villains first involves Tamblyn trying to use subterfuge to bring down their enemies.  This involves stuff like trying to spike their drinks, messing up Sellars and Thomas's count in dividing the spoils, thus causing them to get into a lengthy, and tiresome quarrel, and when all of that doesn't work, it all devolves into a comedic bout of fisticuffs that makes William Shatner's fight choreography on the original Star Trek look Epic by comparison.  The fundamental problem with this film is that Pal displays moments of genuine visual invention, and yet none of it is put to anything like a full creative use.  Part of Tom Thumb's marketing centered around how the film was meant to be the triumphant return of the Puppetoons to the big screen.  Well, it's a promise the director makes good on, and yet for whatever reason, Pal never stops to consider how to put his considerable skills with stop-motion animation to use on a truly creative premise.  A much better scenario would involve Tamblyn's character being sent on a journey through an entire world made up of almost nothing but these stop motion animations.  Let it be a true Fantasy with all sorts of otherworldly characters for the hero and plot to bounce off of.  Give the story some actual stakes by having Tom fight against all sorts of fantastic stop-motion creatures.

These are all just hints at the kind of ideas that would have helped propel Pal's movie to whatever next level might have been necessary in order for the film to succeed.  It's the fact that Pal never seems to have bothered with this extra effort that stands out as the picture's most glaring omission.  It leaves the disappointed viewer with the lingering question of why that should be the case?  I mean, it's like, if you go back and watch any of Pal's better efforts, you know he's got the skills and talent to pull it off.  We're dealing with one of the great (though perhaps too unsung) Sci-Fi/Fantasy filmmakers here.  So it kind of begs the question of what went wrong?  Well, I think I might have an answer to that, yet it's pretty mundane as hell once you here it.  I think we're seeing the results of what happens whenever Pal decided to just kick up his heels and take it easy.  Perhaps a better way to contextualize this film is to make the reader aware of its place in Pal's filmography.  Tom Thumb is a film made in the wake of an impressive streak of blockbuster Sci-Fi adventure films.  These includes the aforementioned War of the Worlds, along with similar fare such as When Worlds Collide, The Naked Jungle, and The Conquest of Space, which many hold as a more caustic and less triumphalist counterpart to one of Pal's earlier works, Destination Moon.  Each picture refined his sense of Serlingesque moral ethics, and all of them count as much more sober-minded affairs that take themselves a great deal more seriously than here.

I get the impression then that after all of this great effort, Pal was more or less ready to take it easy for a spell.  He never wanted to quit making films.  That didn't seem to be in his nature.  However, it does seem as if he felt the need to create a form of art that was a lot less demanding of his time and effort as opposed to his more serious offerings.  After Tom Thumb Pal would go on craft what many considered to be his best efforts with an adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and would more or less continue in that vein going forward.  While it's nothing more than a best guess, my thinking is that this counts as one of Pal's leisurely vacation efforts.  He was willing to take things a whole lot less seriously than with his usual output, which tended to be a form of passion project in one sense or another.  He made other films in a similar vein to this one later on, most notably The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and The  Faces of Dr. Lao.  However it's clear the director is a lot more on point in those latter two flicks in a way that he never quite manages to be with Tom and his adventures.  The best explanation for a movie like this is that we're looking at one one cinema's great and unsung visionaries in the middle of giving himself a bit of a rest, while still keeping his hand in the game.  It's essentially the same as if Rod Serling or Gene Roddenberry decided to take a Busman's Holiday.  

It's clear Pal isn't taking himself too seriously with this sort of film, and he probably doesn't mean his audience to do the same, either.  That's understandable, though perhaps its also a bit of a shame, especially if you're familiar with Pal's capabilities when he's on point.  The Time Machine, for instance, is the kind of film that anticipates the entire Steampunk and Heavy Metal genres all in one go.  So it's understandable that viewers impressed by that sort of performance would go into a film like this with the same level of high expectations.  It's still possible to wish that Pal had brought his A game to this picture, and crafted the kind of satirical fairy tale that would have made both Mark Twain and Jon Swift proud.  Still, it's clear he needed a bit of break here.  I'm just wondering if maybe a real vacation would have been the better option, rather than committing so much filler to celluloid.  In the end, Tom Thumb is one of those films that occupies a peculiar kind of shelf life for itself.  It's not really a great film, and yet there's so much talent on display, even in a highly muted form, that it's impossible to call it all bad.  I guess the best final judgment call I can make on a film like this is that it's pretty much just all filler.  Yet it might be worth watching from a technical perspective, if nothing else.  It has to be emphasized that George Pal was one of the great special effects pioneers in the history of Hollywood.

It's thanks to his groundbreaking efforts at creating a Martian Invasion, or else building up and then destroying the entire city of Atlantis, that helped pave the way for people like Phil Tippet, Stan Winston, Jim Henson, George Lucas, and James Cameron.  In that respect, at least, it is more or less worth giving this film a watch.  Beyond that, though, the biggest statement of the film remains that it's an opportunity squandered.  It's Pal's version of the director fulfilling the demands of a studio contract, and using it to grant himself a bit of a Busman's Holiday.  The result is a film that isn't too concerned with being anything in particular, and that kind of goes against the very nature of storytelling in general, regardless of format.  Still, if Pal wanted to take it easy for awhile to the point of phoning it in, the good news is that this picture doesn't represent an example of the artist getting stuck in a creative rut.  Instead, it's best seen as a minor pause while the director gathers up his resources for better ideas waiting in the wings.  It's George Pal's cinematic equivalent to an album like Beatles for Sale.  Tom Thumb is a simple toss-off to keep the studio happy before moving on to bigger and better things.  In that sense, it all amounts to a bit of wasted opportunity, yet the good news is the mind of the artist kept creating.