Geekscape Reviews Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on Blu-Ray!
So get this: Back in World War II, Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming were both British spies living in America assigned to make valuable contacts and drum up support for the European front (which America had yet to officially give a crap about). Many years later, Fleming would use many of his experiences to create the James Bond series, a badass bunch of books and later films about one extremely manly man saving the world from Communists, assholes and Communist Assholes. Dahl, in contrast, would become famous for inventing a world of magical chocolate factories. Later on, Fleming would write Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a book about a magical car that gangsters want to use to rob a chocolate factory (or something like that), and Dahl would write the screenplay for the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. So everything came full circle eventually.
Roald Dahl also wrote the screenplay for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a film very, very loosely based on Fleming’s novel. The movie starred Dick Van Dyke, featured songs by The Sherman Brothers (who also composed songs for The Sword in the Stone, Bedknobs & Broomsticks, Summer Magic and Mary Poppins), and yet somehow it was not made by Disney. No, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang may be a contemporary of the great fantastical Disney musicals everyone loves but it was produced by United Artists, and perhaps coincidentally (or perhaps not) it’s something of a lesser film. But it’s still a childhood favorite of many and it makes its high-definition debut this week with the mostly-excellent Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Blu-Ray.
For those who managed to get through their childhoods without sitting through this mostly saccharine flight of fancy, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stars Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts, whose name sounds like “Crackpot” if you say it real fast (and wrong). He’s an inventor living with his two cherubic children (Heather Ripley and Adrian Hall) and a father (Lionel Jeffries) who apparently suffers from dementia, something which was apparently really funny back then. The Potts children don’t go to school, and instead spend most of their time playing in an old beat-up racecar in their neighbor’s backyard. When the junkman offers to buy it, Caractacus only has a few days to put together the whopping 30 shillings necessary to save the car and, essentially, buy his childrens’ love. There’s a supposedly sweet scene in which the children offer Caractacus some of their priceless treasures – mostly junk that looks vaguely valuable – to solve the family’s financial problems, but your heart doesn’t warm quite so much when you remember that they’re only doing this so they can acquire an even more desirable product.
“Buying Your Children’s Love: The Movie!”
Caractacus spends the first half of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang bouncing from one “Get Rich Quick” scheme to another. There’s an outlandish musical number as he tries to sell edible sugary flutes – called “Toot Sweets” – to a local candy magnate, but it goes awry when the factory is swarmed by dogs attracted to the high pitched notes they make. He goes to a fair and sets up shop with a homemade haircutting machine, with predictably hilarious results. Eventually he accidentally makes all the money he needs by being a song-and-dance man. The number in question – “Me Ol’ Bamboo” – is arguably the highlight of the film, so the plot development makes sense, but it’s hardly thematically appropriate.
Caractacus buys the car, now named ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,’ and takes his kids on a joyride with his underwritten love interest Truly Scrumptious (Sally Anne Howes, aka ‘The Julie Andrews You Get When You Can’t Get Julie Andrews’). Soon, the kids get bored and ask Caractacus to tell them a story. This story – about the country of Vulgaria trying to steal Chitty Chity Bang Bang – takes up the second half of the film and contains such childhood nightmare fuel as the villainous “Child Catcher” (Robert Helpmann of The Red Shoes) and a creepy showstopping number featuring Truly Scrumptious as a living music box and Caractacus as a human marionette.
When they were making Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Dick Van Dyke reportedly boasted that it would “Out-Disney Disney.” That was wishful thinking. All the pieces are here – some wonderful musical numbers and damned fine casting for the most part (the kids don’t make much of an impression, that’s for sure) – but the movie is a bit of a mess. Lots of movies make a point of being stories within stories. The Princess Bride, for example, gets a pass. But Chitty Chitty Bang Bang asks the audience to get invested in half a movie’s worth of actual events before sweeping them to the side and just making stuff up for an hour or so. The events are entertaining to a point, but mean nothing. There’s also not a whole lot propelling the plot most of the time: The Potts children are much more invested in the well-being of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang than the audience is, Caractacus and Truly aren’t convincing bickerers so their love story feels like a foregone conclusion, and with the possible exception of The Child Catcher all of the antagonists are incompetent boobs who don’t pose much of a threat. It’s diverting and some of the songs are great, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang couldn’t “out-Disney” if it had pictures of Walt dressed as Cinderella.
The Blu-Ray, however, is a wonder unto itself. The picture quality is nothing short of astounding. I picked up on a bit of edge-enhancement here and there, but nothing shameful. They lovingly restored this film to the point where even the otherwise dated special effects come out smelling like roses. It’s an extremely pretty film. The disc also comes with a fair number of Special Features, though it’s hardly the Alien Anthology. There are the prerequisite production stills and vintage advertising, a kid’s game called “Chitty Chitty’s Bang Bang” (ahem) and a nice albeit obviously repurposed short documentary called Rememering Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with Dick Van Dyke. Dyke has a lot of family-friendly memories about the shoot, including some very interesting anecdotes that are absolutely worth watching, but the documentary isn’t anamorphic so you’ll have to adjust your screen settings when you watch it or it will just look weird.
I know this is going to sound freaky, but I find Anna Quayle’s performance as Baroness Bomburst kind of hot. Plus, she hates children almost as much as I do!
The highlight of the Special Features are the Sherman Brothers Demos, in which The Sherman Brothers sing their way through most of the songs in the film. Many of their performances are better than those in the actual movie, although the presentation leaves a little something to desired: Each song plays under a single shot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a hill. Could they not have thrown together a montage of production stills for us? It’s a minor quibble for a Special Feature wonderful enough to warrant its own paragraph.
I didn’t grow up with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang myself (we were a Summer Magic family, thank you very much), but this Blu-Ray is a definite treat for anyone who did. Though a weird, jumbled film there’s no denying that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is an entertaining musical that’ll keep your kids distracted for hours and only traumatize them a teensy weensy bit in return. The set is very lovingly presented and the transfer is gorgeous. If you’re a fan this is definitely worth your time. If you’ve never seen it before you owe it to yourself to at least rent this thing, which must be seen to be believed.
