Reviews of Old Movies Department: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was made in 1968, so I would have been 14 at the time and really too old for it but if I remember correctly, I did see it at the cinema.  Then I saw it on TV just the other day, so it was a good chance to compare perspectives across a few decades.  A few observations:

Dick van Dyke is one of the great comic dancers of all times, right up there with Donald O’Connor,  but those dance routines had less relevance to the plot than in a Bollywood extravaganza.  The songs were pretty lame for the most part, too.

1968.  It was still O.K. to make jokes about murdering your wife.  It was, of course, the evil Baron of Vulgaria, and he always comically failed, but this was the lighthearted bit, the thing that was designed to make him more likable.  That he shot at his wife after she’d been accidentally ejected and her skirt made a parachute and he knocked her out of the sky and into the lake,  and then later tried to impale her with a lance falling from the ceiling and dropped her down a trap door was the bit that was supposed to make him more endearing, more human.  I remember those days.  The jokes that Larry the Cable guy tells were known to everybody.  He’s just quoting 1960s a.m. radio.  But today it is shocking.  As it should be, really.

Holy Crap!  That kindly old toymaker is Benny Hill!

My kids didn’t believe me when I told them the car could fly.  I can’t figure that out.  They’ve seen movies with flying cars before.  But they didn’t believe me and then they thought it was super cool when the car did fly, like I’d predicted it correctly.   I think they thought I was lying when I said I’d seen the film before, too.

The Indiana Jones rescuing the children from the dungeon under the mountain scene was not as completely original as most people think.

Characticus Potts! Ha! LOL! I didn’t get that one the first time around.

I often tease my wife and kids about Czech film making which I think, for the most part, I’m granting  exceptions, is crap.  One of the points I raise is the overly pompous character going into a pond or lake accidentally.  On a bicycle

After rescuing the children from the evil Baron of Vulgaria. That's Benny Hill on the left.

or in a car or a truck, they are suddenly startled and next thing you know they are wet and spluttering.  Anyway, CCBB pulled that stunt 3 times.

The kids liked it.  Isabel is still singing the song today.