Our daughter, MilliCal, had never seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang before, so we rented it this weekend. I myself hadn’t seen it since it first came out.
My thoughts:
1.) My god, this movie is tooooo long. There are incredibly long dull stretches in it where nothing happens. Why does some British group rate this one of the top family films?
2.) It looks like the incestuous offspring of Mary Poppins and James Bond. You’ve got Dick Van Dyke starring, and songs by the Brothers Sherman, along with a sprightly female lead, a couple of unknown British kids, and an English setting. But then you’ve got a screenplay by Fleming friend Roald Dahl based on a book by Ian Fleming (just the same as for You Only Live Twice, producer “Cubby Broccoli”, set designed Ken Adam, and the presence of Gert “Goldfinger” Frobe and Desmond “Q” Llewellyn.
3.) Aside from the title song, I can easily ignore the others.
4.) My Eyes and Ears! Goldfinger sings and dances! Aiiieeee! And I think Anna Quayle’s dance in her corset and garters may be a contributing factor to why I don’t find these things sexy.
5.) Dick an Dyke is seven months older than Lionel Jeffries, who plays his father. This beats the previous record (in my familiarity) of Sean Connery and Harrison Ford. Connery was at least a little older than Ford.
6.) The Child Catcher was kinda neat.
7.) Benny Hill makes one of his few movie appearances. He’s not at all funny, although that’s not his fault – they don’t let him be funny. It’s like Chico Marx in The Story of Mankind.
I watched this movie a couple of years ago, not having seen it since I had loved it as a child, and agree - it’s incredibly long. But at the time, it didn’t seem so. I think we of the MTV generation have just become impatient.
Other thoughts:
The Child Catcher is the scariest thing ever, and ruined my childhood.
After the Mary Poppins fiasco, they let van Dyke retain his real accent, thank God.
Truly Scrumptious and You’re My Little Choochy-Face (or whatever) are OK songs for the kids, and P.O.S.H. is good in its own right.
IMO there’s an obvious psychedelic influence: all the hand-held fast zooms.
So are you saying you did not like it much?
When my son was three and four, it was one of his favorite movies. I do not think it been played from over a year now. He just turned six. I can watch it occasionally, but it is long for a kid’s movie. I like Mary Poppins much better. You did not say if your daughter enjoyed it or what age she is.
I always found the ages of Character Actor Lionel Jeffries and Dick Van Dyke to be amusing. Did you find it hard to believe Grandpa Potts was old enough to be Caractacus Potts’ father?
It is not even close to being a Top 50 Family movie on the IMDB, so it is hard to call it disappointing.
I saw CCBB a few years ago with our boys and didn’t think it’s too long. The Child Catcher is scary at that age, it’s true. The opening sequence, with the car competing in early auto racing, has just the right old-timey feel to it. Once rebuilt, with just a hint of magic, the car is 'way cool. The bumbling Vulgarian spies aren’t very funny. “P.O.S.H.” is a good song, IMHO, as is “The Old Bamboo.” The hidden children emerging and taking over the castle at the end is a little bit of wish-fulfillment for every child who’s felt oppressed by grownups.
A bit of dialogue from the movie has even entered our family’s parlance: when Potts makes his presentation to Mr. Scrumptious, the sweetmeat tycoon, he can’t put it together in the thirty seconds he’s allotted. Quoth the tycoon, dismissively, “Had your chance; muffed it. Good morning!”
MilliCal’s eight. She liked the beginning, but halfway through her attention drifted and she began playing with toys and “thinking” (which involves running up and down the hallway. Pacing’s too slow for MilliCal).
My daughter is eight. This is not a movie she has sat through for a long time. She has the patience if a movie grabs her attention. She Loved Narnia and wanted to see it again. The movies have about the same (longish for kids) running time. Around 2 hours and 20 minutes. Elendil’s Heir: That was kind of a strage simul-post wasn’t it? Two Jims at the same time.
The female lead is named Truly Scrumptious, what more of a Bond connection do you need?
From what I’ve heard, playing Goldfinger was quite a departure for Gert Fröbe (although he does a brilliant job of it). He made his name as a comic actor in Germany, and has rather buffoonish roles in a couple other English comedies[sup]*[/sup]. I was at the film museum in Berlin and saw some old footage of him. He was skinny.
I picked up this movie on DVD a few months ago and watched it for the first time since childhood.
I liked the song “You Two” or whatever it’s called; as well as the title song and some of the others. But some of the songs really dragged - like the lullabye and the musicbox songs.
And yeah - the movie was too, too long. It had its moments, but I don’t think I’ll watch it again until it’s time to introduce Little Skammer to it.
Speak f’yaself. I love a lot of long movies – it’s the boring ones I don’t like , even if they’re not long. I think one reason I never saw CCBB again was because it was so deadly dull – something I’d forgotten until I saw it again. It’s surprising to realize that the book i incredibly slim – they had to pad it to make it that dull and long. The filmmakers have no one to blame but themselves.
In actual fact, the book is almost unrecognisable in comparison to the movie. They changed pretty much everything apart from the car, but in the book even this was just in the kids’ imaginations.
I loved it when I was six. Seen as an adult, it’s really not very good. An obvious attempt to duplicate the success of Mary Poppins; most of the numbers are bald retreads of specific MP numbers. I do love the “Choochy Face” song, with its twisted marriage=murder dance, though, and I love to think of Marilyn Manson appropriating the imagery of the Child Catcher for his own persona.
In Mary Poppins, Disney himself approved the songs - more songs than what appear in Mary Poppins were written. There are some remarkable songs in CCBB. Toot Sweet and the title song are an earwigs. Trully Scrumptious/Doll on a Music Box is enchanting. Hushabye Mountain is often lost and forgotten.
Yes, he was absolutely terrifying. Everyone seems to have that same terrible memory of the Child Catcher. In fact, I remember reading an interview with Sir Robert Helpmann, who played the Child Catcher, in which he said that he’d often been told by people how scared they had been at his portrayal of that creepy character. He was probably better known for that than any of his ballet roles.
You can add me to the list of children scarred for life by this character. His only rivals in terror as far as I was concerned was the Wicked Witch of the West and her Winged Monkeys.
I didn’t like the movie but I remember being dragged to it at least twice one summer because my younger brother supposedly liked it. I’d be really curious to see it again now for my adult impression.
