Ken Hughes’s musical is a bright, generous family film whose first half is far better than its second. The songs hold, the car is a real machine, and Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher has earned every sleepless night. It is twenty minutes too long.
Albert R. Broccoli took Ian Fleming’s novel, handed it to Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes for a script, hired the Sherman brothers for the songs and Dick Van Dyke to sing them, and asked for a British Mary Poppins (1964). Critics at the time judged it against that film and found it wanting, which was unfair then and is beside the point now. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a good family musical with a first half that is close to lovely and a second half that goes on and on, and the best thing in it is a man with a butterfly net.
The first hour is set in an England of meadows, windmills and steam, and it is where the film is happiest. Ken Adam gives Caractacus Potts a windmill full of machines that cook breakfast badly and cut hair worse, and he builds the car itself, long, brass-trimmed and red-leathered, so solid it looks as if it might start. Christopher Challis shoots the countryside in a green so bright it looks freshly painted and keeps the car in wide frames so we can see all of it. Joan Bridge and Elizabeth Haffenden dress Truly Scrumptious in white from hat to hem and every Vulgarian in frills.
The Sherman brothers’ songs hold up. The sweet-factory number turns the building into a dance floor. “Me Ol’ Bam-boo” gives Van Dyke a fairground routine with a troupe of dancers and bamboo poles, and he does it with the loose-limbed ease that was always his gift. The number that got to us is the lullaby sung to two children in a windmill at night. It is a small, sad tune from a widower with no money, and it moved us more than we expected.
Then there is the Child Catcher. Robert Helpmann plays him on his toes: long black coat, top hat, a nose that arrives before he does, and a way of sniffing the air for children. He drives a cart with a cage hidden under a canopy of lollipops and calls out that the sweets are free. We were horrified by him as children and we are not over it. Watching again, the fear still works, because Helpmann never once plays it as a joke.
The trouble is Vulgaria, where the film spends its second half and where John Shirley’s editing stops cutting anything. Gert Fröbe and Anna Quayle, as the Baron and Baroness, play a couple who want each other dead and sing a duet about it, which is funny once and is repeated. Two spies (Alexander Doré and Bernard Spear) fall off things at regular intervals. Somewhere in the palace, watching two adults in silk repeat a slapstick routine we had seen twenty minutes before, we were bored, and then annoyed at being bored by a film that had made us cry an hour earlier.
The romance is thin, too. Sally Ann Howes sings cleanly and looks the part, but the script gives Truly a motor car, a father and a name, and nothing to want. Lionel Jeffries, as Grandpa Potts, is better company; he plays him as a pantomime old soldier, big and warm. Benny Hill, as the Toymaker in a country where children are forbidden, is gentle and nearly unrecognisable, and his scenes are the quietest in the film.
Most critics now like it and one or two never did; we sit near the middle. Set beside Mary Poppins it is less disciplined and less sure of its story. Set beside most other family musicals of its era it has a real car, a real tune and a real villain, and children have gone on remembering all three. It runs 144 minutes and carries a U certificate, which is generous to the Child Catcher. Watch it at home with an interval at the beach picnic, and be ready to explain at bedtime that the man with the net was only pretending.
