Contemporary Children’s Cinema vs. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Unlike just about everything that passes for children’s entertainment these days, 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is both gloriously weird and genuinely mischievous. While nothing in the film offers up the sublime in quite the same manner as Pixar’s remarkable run of animated films of the past fifteen years (the safest bet for a high water mark in contemporary children’s entertainment), this film, about a crackpot inventor, his adorable kids and their customized jalopy (the onomatopoeically christened Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) redeems its utter lack of sophistication through the sheer glee it generates by simply being odd. But just like a small child’s recitation of a personal narrative, the film loses its way easily and often, strains sweetness too often, is prone to gaps in logic, and is occasionally frustrating in its inability to get to the point. That it is also capable of a jouissance nearly unthinkable in today’s market of kiddie entertainment – unforgivably congested with bratty miscreants and cuddly icons-in-waiting bound for fast food containers – mutes its comparatively trivial shortcomings.
Moreover, the film’s utter lack of willpower and restraint gradually become assets; it is as petulant and impulsive as its target audiences, and for this Chitty Chitty Bang Bang should be applauded and revived. In a brassy confluence of style, the film’s authors managed to find common ground between the absurdism of postwar British Humor, the French le fantastique, and Grimm’s fairytales, with American Tall Tales thrown in for good measure. This isn’t to say that each genre is explicitly pursued through the narrative, or that overt stylistic hallmarks can be easily pinpointed, but merely that the filmmakers successfully drew upon preexisting ideas and themes to such a dizzying extent that they produced something as familiar as it was (and is) bizarre.
Children’s entertainment has since dedicated itself to retellings of folk and classical mythology, or attempts at ironic pop hipness. The former works well with apprehensive parents keen on wholesome entertainment (while boasting a patina of esteem), while the latter is intent on blurring the line between entertainment for children and adults (the “something for everyone” family film.) If adults are to enjoy fare like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they are forced to indulge more completely the inner tyke; as such films boast no innuendos or cultural allusions with which to stoke the pop culture-infused data banks of the post-pubescent set. Ironically, it could easily be argued that this strategy ingratiates such films with adults even more so than their entendre-packed counterparts, because an escape from the oppressions of adulthood is one virtue that children’s entertainment has to offer the beleaguered parents of its target demographic. Cast in this light, it’s not hard to understand why a bizarre (and, more importantly, innocent) fantasy like Spongebob Squarepants has experienced such enduring success. Likewise, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a considerable box office success in its day, and while plenty of the snide patter that has since been marketed to children has exceeded its modest financial success, it’s not likely that these works will endure as even minor works in the history of children’s films. Instead, the plastic chotchkies bearing the likenesses of their protagonists will exist in landfills far longer than the films themselves will survive in the cultural imagination.
The plodding first half of Chitty details the life of a hapless, widowed inventor, Caractacus Potts, (played by Dick Van Dyke) and his affectionate, precocious children struggling to make ends meet in rural Great Britain. That Van Dyke’s distinctly American accent is at odds with his children’s cockney delivery barely registers as just one of the film’s thousand inconsistencies. The few satisfactory scenes in film’s first act all involve Potts' inventions, which include an elaborate Rube Goldberg-like Breakfast machine, an overeager hair cutter, a jet pack, and musical lollipops, the very things that provoke and inflame the child’s imagination. These few ingenious sight gags aside, the first hour or so of the film lack much of interest, but as Van Dyke (keeping a promise to his beloved children) restores an old jalopy for a jaunt to the beach, the film comes to life when the full capabilities of the car announce themselves in a scene of inventively staged, rotating rear-projection. As the car spreads wings and takes flight (naturally escaping from pirates), the family (accompanied by the confection heiress Truly Scrumptious [the unmemorable Sally Ann Howes]) find themselves immersed in a fantasy world, and the audience in a wonderfully goofy frolic.
Though handsomely (if often clumsily) directed by British television veteran Ken Hughes, the film’s overall spirit could more properly be attributed to co-writer Roald Dahl, who deviated noticeably from Fleming’s source novel. Dahl’s trademark brand of dark, yet winsome humor permeates the film’s far more interesting second half, though an early scene set in a candy factory calls his Willy Wonka books to mind. Hughes’ realization of his and Dahl’s screenplay benefits immensely from an aesthetic program which relies heavily on techniques borrowed from the various New Waves gaining traction worldwide at the time of the film’s production: grand, unmotivated tracking shots, quick zooms, wide angle lenses and a quicker approach to editing. The aesthetic eccentricity gives the film a roughhewn, chaotic quality that breathes life into even the most tedious subplots while reaffirming the narrative’s more radical impulses. The anarchic glee of the film is equal parts The Beatles’ Help!, and Tex Avery animation. If the film can claim a single inspiration, it would be that of Richard Lester, whose punchy delivery and schoolboy’s wit feel their way into each scene of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with nary a smirk or wink. The film is at its best when its idiosyncrasies pass by unassumingly, suffused with a characteristically dry British grin and a bouncy rhythm.
As the story-within-the-story develops, the Baron of Vulgaria and his wife, the child-hating Baroness, kidnap all the children, the grandfather, Ms. Scrumptious and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang itself at various points. A collector of wonderful machines, the Baron dispatches two classic bumbling henchmen (variation of the silent film villains fond of tying damsels to train tracks) to procure the car for his collection. The sequences in which our heroes trek through Vulgaria and the Baron’s palace are the highlights of the film. As each of Hughes and Dahl’s creative impulses crescendo, Caractacus masquerades about the palace as a staggering marionette (a ruse designed to distract the Baron) while simultaneously staging a revolt of slave children imprisoned in Vulgarian sewers. The children occupy the palace and assault the distinguished Vulgarian gentry in a gesture of juvenile anarchy reminiscent of the Jean Vigo classic Zero for Conduit. That a film designed for young people can embody the spirit of a classic film without lazy homage intended to tickle the pedantic, cinephilic synapses of older moviegoers, is an odd notion currently, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang succeeds in nodding to the Vigo masterpiece without attempting to supplant it. Hughes and Dahl don’t see the recurrence as clever, another odd notion in today’s climate of aggregate references and juxtaposition. The slightly altered and certainly modest extension of a narrative situation or creative idea apparently belongs to a bygone era, perhaps because it leaves open the possibility that the creators themselves are not in on the joke, or deceptively expect to pass the transgression by a dopey audience. Today, both audience and filmmaker seek to be on the same page, that is, both in on the joke. The self-consciousness of this attitude masks needless, counterproductive guilt, and has done nothing but detract from the formerly easygoing nature of popular entertainment, becoming especially pervasive (and proportionately repellant) in work made for children.
Late in the film, audiences are also treated to one of cinema’s most memorable maniacs: Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher, a villain authentically menacing, yet such a caricatured oddity that he fails to evoke real horror. The performance is worthy of canonization as Helpmann’s wide-eyed snarl provokes squeamishness in even the most hardened adults. Something of a dandy, the long snouted Child Catcher is the court officer responsible for sniffing out hidden children in Vulgaria so they may be apprehended and punished by the evil Baroness. Swinging his noise about in search of a child’s scent while merrily prancing through the streets of Vulgaria, the Child Catcher embodies sexual perversion and cold-blooded innocence in equal measure. A forerunner to both Pee Wee Herman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, the Child Catcher’s anguished squeals – as he is visited by revenge at the film’s end – rival Peter Lorre’s plea for clemency before the makeshift court at the end of Fritz Lang’s M. If the film is granted one legacy let it be this character, who could equally be at ease in an episode of Star Trek, a Tolkien adaptation or a reworking of Alice in Wonderland.
The Child Catcher’s subplot, in which helpless children are tucked away in the attics, sewers and basements of Eastern Europe, pursued by half-crazed monsters, is loaded from a historical perspective, but the goofiness of the overall plot and the film’s pretzelling of time (the Baron’s court borrows elements from at least three centuries of aristocratic European décor and hosts a kind of stateless, pan-European nobility), prevent the adult viewer from pursuing strands of allegory too far.
Sadly, the film sags to lifelessness during nearly of its musical numbers, which grind the viewer’s nerves to tatters through a combination of maudlin sentimentality and poor craftsmanship (a similar blight on the adaptation, three years after this picture, of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) Exceptions of note include the title song, which is far too charming to ever be cloying, and one of the later numbers featuring a duet between the Baron and Baroness: as the two skip through a ditty of rosy-cheeked marital affection, the Baron attempts increasingly ambitious methods of murdering his wife – including a vintage trapdoor and a faulty chandelier – who cheerfully reappears ceaselessly as though spun from a Looney Tunes sketch. Had there been a few more scenes of such saccharine/macabre antics laced throughout the picture, it would be an irreproachable masterpiece. As is, warts and all, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang beats the hell out of the competition, even forty years later.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang / UK / 1968 / Color / 144 min. / Directed by Ken Hughes / Written by Mr. Hughes and Roald Dahl, from the book by Ian Fleming / Starring: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Anne Howes and Lionel Jeffries
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