Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965)

The town of Collegedale is just up the road from us, and every year they have an event at their municipal airport where you get to go up in a tiny little plane – room enough for the pilot and three passengers – for about ten minutes for free. Well, there’s a long line, so it costs time, but you don’t have to take your shoes off for Homeland Security either. So our son was hopping up and down when we told him what we were doing that Sunday, and he waited with astonishing patience. Then we left the ground and the color left his face and he bit his lip and he didn’t start crying until we were down and safe, but he sobbed for longer than we were in the air. He was horrified, and he never, ever wants to get in an airplane ever again.

But watching other people crash in absurdly unsafe contraptions, that he’ll watch all day. I told him that I thought that since he enjoyed The Great Race so much he would also enjoy this, he beamed and asked, “Will there be sabotage? I hope there’s a bad guy who sabotages the other planes!” And indeed there is. The evil Sir Percy is played by Terry-Thomas, and while he doesn’t get quite as much screen time as Jack Lemmon did in Race – there are, after all, far more characters in this – he’s still a bounder and a very entertaining villain. At one point, he’s ready to trade punches with Stuart Whitman’s character. Whitman socks him in the nose instantly and I laughed for five minutes.

The backdrop for the movie is a London to Paris air race in 1910, arranged by a rich media tycoon, played by Robert Morley, to drive circulation of his paper and prove that Britannia rules the skies. “The trouble with these international affairs is that they attract foreigners,” he grumbles at one point. That’s a great line, but sadly, the greater trouble is that I have to break out the “unflattering cultural stereotypes” tag again, because the very broad caricatures, and the ugly slang that the posh British characters employ, is the only weak part of this otherwise very funny film.

I have to note that as much as our son guffawed and giggled, the movie’s prologue was possibly every bit as effective as the next two hours in making him roar with laughter. You’ve all seen some of that very old film footage of doomed-to-crash sky cars hopping up and down and that plane with a dozen stacked sets of wings collapsing in on itself? Well, this kid hadn’t. I figured that if he enjoyed the actual movie half as much as the old stock footage, it’d be a success.

Helping the movie along, there’s a great cast of familiar faces and even a familiar location. Robert Morley’s house is Fulmer Hall in Buckinghamshire, where John Steed was living in the second series of The New Avengers. I think we last saw the house just thirty days ago! And as for talent, Stuart Whitman and James Fox are the principal competitors and rivals, with Sarah Miles caught in a love triangle between them. Gert Fröbe leads what you might call the B-team of Prussian, French, and Italian competitors. And there are small roles for three big names of British TV comedy in the sixties: Benny Hill, Tony Hancock, and Eric Sykes.

Those Magnificent Men… never feels long at 138 minutes, but it certainly feels epic. It’s a big, ridiculous film full of stunts, practical effects, giant crowds of extras, gorgeous old cars and beat-up old airplanes. It’s also got a lovely recurring gag with one actress playing six different women of different nationalities. It’s dated, unfortunately so in a couple of places, but it’s still a very good and very funny film.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

This was by no means Daniel’s favorite film, and boy, is it ever long, but I think it’s a terrific and silly fantasy. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is based on the children’s novel by Ian Fleming, and, since Albert Broccoli and his company were making the Bond films from Fleming’s books, it seemed like a good investment. Also since, in 1967, they had Roald Dahl on their Rolodex – he had written the screenplay for You Only Live Twice – they had somebody to phone who had lots of experience in writing good children’s fiction to turn Fleming’s novel into a good script.

Dick Van Dyke had been in the habit of making films in between seasons of his sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show in the early sixties. Of these, of course, Mary Poppins is the best-known. He was hugely in demand after the series ended and regularly in front of cameras. I suspect that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had a very long shoot. It filmed across three countries and required the use of those gigantic stages on Pinewood that the 007 people were typically using for bases inside volcanoes, and was released in time for Christmas 1968.

Cast opposite Van Dyke was Sally Ann Howes, who was principally a stage actress, with dozens of hugely successful roles on Broadway and the West End over her career. Also in the cast, a few names familiar from the 1960s Bond films, including Gert Frobe and Desmond Llewellyn, and, just to show there were no hard feelings for Columbia not returning the rights to Casino Royale and making that very silly spoof film instead, Broccoli hired one of Casino‘s five credited directors, Ken Hughes, to shoot this.

Like Casino, this is a movie that really could use some scissors taken to it. It’s in two sections with an intermission, about 84 and 60 minutes each. Those first 84 could have been trimmed by a good fifteen minutes, if not more. Our son has really started to rebel against songs in movies, and there are some really long numbers in the first section. He got restless and fidgety and, on a couple of occasions, got up to lie down behind the sofa just to put an end to all this nonsense and wait for this car to fly like I told him would happen.

Then he met the Child Catcher and it wasn’t boredom that sent him behind the sofa. See, if you’ve never seen this movie, its central conflict is a long fantasy story that Dick Van Dyke’s eccentric inventor, Caractacus Potts, tells, in which he and his children and his new friend (and, possibly, fiancée) are beset by agents from the country of Vulgaria who want his magical car. They have to fly to Vulgaria after Potts’ father, played by Lionel Jeffries, is accidentally abducted by the baron’s agents.

In Vulgaria, children are forbidden because the baroness, played by Anna Quayle, is afraid of them. She has employed this really freaky dude to capture them. The Child Catcher is played with bizarre energy by the late Robert Helpmann, a celebrated Australian dancer, director of that country’s national ballet theater, with a list of honors and awards as long as your arm, and he’s best known for less than fifteen minutes onscreen luring children into cages with lollipops. He is absolutely horrifying to little ones. There were so many tears welled up in my son’s eyes that I teared up a little just looking at how shaken he was!

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is flawed, but it’s aged extremely well and we were mostly entertained by it, even if our son’s restlessness during the longer sections got pretty exasperating. We probably should have taken more advantage of the movie’s intermission, but four is a little young for this one and we would have done better to wait another year or so. For adults, you’ve got the sumptuous production and giant sets and wonderful chemistry between the leads, and if their romance seems just a little too inevitable, well, you need to have your heart polished up a little bit.

Now, about getting the darn theme tune out of my head…