BOOM! 1968

"I don't believe God is dead, but I do think he is inclined to pointless brutalities."

Tennessee Williams

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made a total of ten films together (11 if you count the presciently-titled 1973 TV-movie Divorce His/Divorce Hers) over the course of their highly-public, passionate-but-rocky, ten-plus-one-years marriage (wed in 1964, they divorced in ’74, remarried a year later, re-divorced a year after that). By the time they appeared in their 8^th vehicle together, Joseph Losey's Boom!, unkind film critics--worn down by years of ceaseless press coverage of the couple's top-of-the-line lifestyle and bottom-of-the-barrel movie resume--had taken to referring to the paparazzi-popular pair as a traveling vaudeville act. A difficult point to argue against at the time.

Branded infamous for their scandalously out-in-the-open, adulterous canoodling during the making of Cleopatra (1963), the combination of gossip and public curiosity helped turn cinematic dogs like 1963s The VIPs (neither had secured divorces from their respective spouses by then) and the following year’s The Sandpiper (their first onscreen pairing as man and wife) into boxoffice blockbusters. Yet it wasn't long after scoring an unexpected critical and boxoffice bullseye in Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), that Taylor and Burton developed the reputation for saying yes to any film offer that promised a hefty payday, major tax break, or exotic locale in which to work. 

Il Palazzo di Goforth
Built especially for the film, the mansion of Mrs. Flora Goforth is situated high atop the limestone cliffs of Isola Piana, a small island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Sardinia. Along the bluffs are replicas of the Easter Island moai heads, six of them, representing perhaps the spirits of the six husbands she outlived. Some interiors of the mansion were sets in Rome.

Boom! offered all three, plus the prospect of granting Taylor an unprecedented Tennessee Trifecta: Having already appeared in two successful Tennessee Williams screen adaptations—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)—garnering Oscar nominations for both, surely reuniting with Williams for Boom! (working titles Goforth and Sunburst) would result in delivering the third cherry for a boxoffice jackpot. 

In his diaries published in 2012, Richard Burton admitted that The Sandpiper—a substantial financial success, but critical flop—was a film both he and Taylor knew to be a joke, but accepted solely for the opportunity to work together and as a cash-grab of convenience should negative public opinion about Le Scandale lead to their never working again. On the topic of the $5 million mega-flop that was Boom!, Burton asserts that it was a film both he and Taylor very much believed in and very excited to do. In fact, after watching dailies mid-production, Burton writes of the film looking “perverse and interesting,” and optimistically intones, “I think we are due for another success, especially E [Elizabeth].” Given the dismal returns on their most recent releases The Comedians (1967) and Doctor Faustus (1967), perhaps the words "long overdue" are more apt.   

Elizabeth Taylor as Flora "Sissy" Goforth

Richard Burton as Christopher Flanders 

Noel Coward as Baron William "Billy" Ridgeway, aka The Witch of Capri 

Joanna Shimkus as Francis "Blackie" Black

Michael Dunn as Rudi

Elizbeth Taylor is eccentric millionairess Flora (“All my close friends call me Sissy”) Goforth. Cloistered away in a majestic mountaintop villa on her private island in the Mediterranean, Sissy Goforth dictates her alternatingly introspective/self-aggrandizing memoirs to her put-upon secretary (Joanna Shimkus) while being overzealously watched by her sadistic bodyguard Rudi (Michael Dunn). It’s summer (isn’t it always in a Tennessee Williams movie?) and Signora Goforth is dying. But not to hear her tell it.

 After burying six husbands--five wealthy industrialists and a penniless poet/adventurer who was the love of her life--the widow Goforth fancies herself as an indefatigable force of nature and nothing less than eternal. And, in point of fact, after getting a load of her constant carping, bellowing, and hurling of coarse invectives at all and sundry, one can well imagine that even death itself, when faced with the prospect of coming face-to-face with Flora Goforth, might opt to pass her by.

In 1968 Boom! and Rosemary's Baby earned the dubious distinction of being the first American feature films approved by the MPAA (Production Code Seal) to feature the word "shit."

"The doctors are disgusted with my good health!” Flora insists. Even in the face of nightly pain injections, blood transfusions, regular vitamin B shots, a steady diet of pills and medications, and the distressing increase in the number of paper roses blooming in all corners of the villa (a paper rose is Flora's bleakly poetic name for the many discarded wads of tissue stained with her coughed-up blood.) 

But for all that money can buy, it can't buy immortality, so the gravely ill Flora Goforth...racing against time to complete her memoirs...is fated to go forth from this plane of existence. But not until she’s good and ready. And ready she’s not. The "dying monster," as she's referred to by her scornful staff, is not yet willing, prepared, or capable of relinquishing her vicelike grip on life. Or, closer to the truth, that which has come to represent life tor her: wealth, power, possessions, position, acquisition, and excess. 

The Walking Dead
By way of her vulgarity, cynicism, lack of compassion, and ostentatious flaunting of wealth,
it's inferred that Flora Goforth's spiritual death occurred long ago.

As though metaphysically summoned, a trespassing stranger named Christopher Flanders (Richard Burton) arrives at the villa carrying two heavy bundles and professing to have been invited. Flanders, whose saintly Christian name proves to be as symbolically relevant (and subtle) as Flora’s surname, is an itinerant poet, mobile artist, aging gigolo, and professional houseguest. Most recently, among his circle of imposed-upon jet-set friends, he has come to be known as “The Angel of Death.” A bitchy-but-accurate name assigned to him after a pattern emerged involving his paying visits to some of his aging and ailing benefactors shortly before their deaths.

With Christopher’s arrival, the already sublimely bizarre Boom! takes on the form of a spiritual allegory played out in a highly-stylized manner suggesting a Western interpretation of Eastern kabuki theater. Flora, facing mortality by stubbornly ignoring its existence, clings ever tighter to what she wants. Meanwhile, Christopher, whose physicality inflames Flora’s lifelong use of sex as a means of denying death, dares to suggest that beyond the things she wants lie the things she actually needs. 

Death Takes a Holiday
Flora amuses herself by dressing Chris (whose clothes were shredded by her attack dogs) as a samurai warrior, but the joke may ultimately be on her. The flowing black kimono and samurai sword present Chris as a kabuki variant of the traditional black-robed Grim Reaper with his scythe.  

Hostess and guest engage in verbal sparring matches exhibiting the one-upmanship strategizing of games. An element emphasized both in the costuming (Flora & Chris are dressed in the colors of chess pieces) and art direction (chess boards and B&W domino tiles are scattered throughout the villa). Between bouts of seduction and bargaining, their parry and thrust conversations circle around existential fundamentals like acceptance of the inevitable and the relinquishing of the inessential. 

As the sun sets on Flora Goforth's island and indeed, Flora herself, Tennessee Williams’ paradoxically heavy-handed and confoundingly opaque screenplay leaves us with the metaphorical food for thought that “Saint” Christopher has trudged up that mountain to assist Flora in her journey to the other side. And in the recurring device of having Chris' requests for food (especially a drink of milk) met with refusal or completely ignored, the presumed takeaway is that Mrs. Flora Goforth is singularly lacking in the figurative ‘milk of human kindness,’ its train long having ceased pausing at her lonely threshold. 

Flora Goforth, appearing to be engulfed by a stylized golden shroud, is at last ready to go forth. But in reciting the title of the 1963 Broadway play upon which Boom! is based, lets it be known that she...like Helen Lawson...intends on going out the way she came in. 

Such is the tale Tennessee Williams hoped to tell. What he delivered was a wordy, over-stylized exercise in opulent incoherence that, had the cast been a decade younger, would likely have been labeled a youth-culture "head trip" movie. As it stood, the generation still interested in the life-in-a-fishbowl antics of Taylor and Burton were either baffled or bored. It didn't take long for word about Boom! to get around, and, as the saying goes, people stayed away in droves.

Taking advantage of a little breather between Goforth tantrums,
her houseman Etti (Fernando Piazza) and her attending physician Dr. Luilo (Romolo Valli) 

PASSION PROJECT

One of the more persistent Hollywood myths that gains traction every award season is that of the passion project. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen Oscars triumphantly hoisted overhead as the recipient shares the same “tenacity rewarded” tale of never giving up on a beloved movie vehicle despite years of studio rejection. This then cues everyone watching to shake their heads in amazement at the thought of all those studio dummkopfs failing to recognize the value of a project whose obvious merit now shines so brightly. As reassuring as all this is to those who romanticize the never-say-die spirit, I think it neglects the equally-valuable flip side: recognizing when it is both wise and prudent to let something go. Ironically, one of Boom!’s major themes

Even those who meet Boom! with, as one journalist phrased it "almost gleeful critical contempt" are apt to be impressed by the glorious compositions of Douglas Slocombe's stunning cinematography, and the breathtaking production design and art direction by Richard McDonald and John Clark.

If any Tennessee Williams work can be called a passion project, it’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. How else to explain the alarming fact that Boom!’s screenplay represents Williams’ 4^th crack at the same material and he STILL failed to work out bugs?  What began life in 1959 as a short story titled Man Bring This Up Road (a line of dialogue that survives in Boom!) morphed into a stubbornly unsuccessful Broadway play that had the unprecedented honor of bombing twice in the same season. Claiming it to be one of his most obsessively beloved yet most difficult plays to write, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is partly 52-year-old Williams confronting his own creative decline (his last hit was 1961's The Night of the Iguana), part his processing of the 1963 death of Frank Merlo, his partner of 14-years, from cancer at age 40.

Flora Goforth's secretary, Mrs. Black--the most honest and compassionate character in the play--owes her name to Williams paying tribute to his love, Frank Merlo. Merlo is the Spanish name for a blackbird, one of which appears in a golden cage in Boom!

In what feels like a desperate, last-ditch effort to get his point across, Williams has a character simply verbalize one of the film's themes: "Sooner or later, a person's obliged to face the meaning of life!" but Joseph Losey's stylized direction works just as hard making sure little as possible makes sense. What comes through (almost in spite of itself) is that death is the ultimate solitary act. No manner how many friends or how much money and "stuff" we amass, we can't take it with us and we must "go forth" alone. Boom! in its clumsy, campy way, proposes the gladdening notion that life offers us final mercy...the appearance of someone (something?) to ease our fear and escort us on our irrevocable journey.  We may claim it was never invited, but death requires no formal invitation. It's been summoned the instant of our birth. 

In his 1975 memoir, Williams relates that he was both astonished and overjoyed when the film rights for The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore had been purchased and director Joseph Losey (The Servant) assigned to the project: “Then a dreadful mistake was made. [Producer Lester] Persky offered the film to the Burtons.”

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Were I the gambling type, I’d wager that the very reasons Tennessee Williams saw the Burtons as the least-favorable casting option for Boom! are the very reasons I find them to be absolutely ideal for the material. The stunt-miscasting of Taylor & Burton in Boom! was a bald-faced effort to try and recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of Mike Nichols’ “And you thought she/he was all wrong for the part!” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  hat trick, while simultaneously exploiting the screenplay's many Taylor-related bits of self-referential coincidence. Flora was supposed to be a past-her-prime battleax grinding to a halt in her 60s (Taylor was 35), Chris a fading gigolo in his early 30s (Burton was 42). Neither really fit their roles in ways having nothing to do with their ages, but say what you will, Taylor's mesmerizingly purple performance abutted by Burton's Sunday-morning-hangover thesping are the sole and primary reasons Boom! achieves any level of watchability at all.

Chris: (Indicating cigarette) "May I have one?" 
Flora: "Kiss me for it."

But I’m the first to admit that the Boom! I adore is probably not at all the Boom! Losey & Co. set out to make. As a play cloaked in Brechtian minimalism, it reads like a needlessly convoluted rehash of themes Williams has already explored…with more poignance and coherence…in Sweet Bird of Youth, The Fugitive Kind, Summer and Smoke, and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. As a film, not only does Williams’ trademark brand of cloaked symbolism and Freudian metaphor sound cobwebby in the era of “tell it like it is,” but no one involved in the project seemed aware that high-minded drama and high glamour have a funny way of canceling each other out. The end result is like watching a Theater of the Absurd sequel to Valley of the Dolls dramatizing the final days of Helen Lawson.

Since Mrs. Goforth on her deathbed looks better than most people in the full bloom of health,
it's kinda hard to wring much pathos out of her plight. 

Representing murky ideologies rather than people, the king-size personalities of Burton and Taylor, left with no characters to inhabit, resort to playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Portraying Death and often looking like it, Burton staggers about while letting his trained voice do all the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, Taylor, tottering around in high heels and even higher hair, plays Flora Goforth as a female impersonator doing a burlesque of Elizabeth Taylor. Yet they’re impossible not to watch. The film's sole concession to a contemporary sensibility is achieved in having a character written as a gossipy queen actually played by one. The Witch of Capri is traditionally played by a woman, and the producers had hoped to snare Katharine Hepburn. But granting the role to famed playwright/composer Noel Coward is inspired if ultimately affectless. 

Losey’s directorial style is languid and lovely and the storytelling clumsy, but there’s no end of delights to be found in the Burtons in their scenes together. Or in the regal blowsiness of Liz and her coughing, barking, swearing, drinking, glowering, and bitching. It entertains and maybe even enthralls.

Despite his initial reservations, Tennessee Williams, feeling his screenplay for the film was much better written than his play, ultimately warmed to Elizabeth Taylor's interpretation of Flora Goforth. Even going so far as to call her performance "The best that she's done." 

Howard Taylor (Elizabeth's older brother, who died in 2020) appears briefly as a journalist 

THE GAWK FACTOR

Before reality TV, the only opportunity fans had of getting a glimpse into the private lives of the rich and famous was when movie stars obliged them by taking on roles audiences were encouraged to interpret as fictionalized versions of themselves. They called it the Gawk Factor. Boom! is a movie loaded with Gawk Factor. The play was written for Tallulah Bankhead, but new generations of viewers are to be forgiven if they assume the role of Flora Goforth was Taylor-made.

Liz Taylor Loves Jewelry
Flora Goforth is a widow who sports a huge diamond ring that (tellingly) cuts into her hand every time someone tries to hold it. It's Taylor's 1956 engagement ring from 3rd husband Mike Todd. Two weeks prior to Boom!'s 1968 premiere, Burton gifted Elizabeth with the famous...and much larger...Krupp Diamond.

Mrs. Goforth has been married six times; Taylor beat that number by one (Burton was husband #5). The one husband Goforth truly loved died in a mountain climbing accident. Mike Todd (whom the fan magazines were fond of claiming was Elizabeth's one true love) died in a mountain plane crash. It's difficult to argue that these fact/fiction similarities weren't exploited, because in the play, Goforth's husband dies in a car crash.   

Liz Taylor Loves To Drink
Enjoying what appears to be a glass bucket of Bloody Mary, Goforth subsists on coffee, cigarettes, codeine tablets, and alcohol. In real life, Taylor suffered from alcohol addiction and helped destigmatize the illness by being one of the first celebrities to go public with her rehab treatment. Boom! is rumored to have been a very liquid set.

Liz Taylor Loves Kaftans
Goforth reveals closets overflowing with colorful kaftans. In the late '60s and '70s (until she found Halston) it was the rare photo that did not feature La Liz in a flowing, colorful kaftan.

Other exploitable Goforth/Taylor parallels pertain to Flora being known for her beauty ("If you have a world-famous figure, why be selfish with it?"), and Flora being plagued by numerous health maladies. Taylor enjoyed poor health throughout much of her life, her paparazzi-attended hospital visits as numerous as red-carpet premieres.

John Waters has called Boom! a “failed art film,” which I think is a very accurate description. It’s just ironic that Boom! is a movie that never could have found financing without the star-system leverage of the Burtons attached, yet the duo's megawatt star-quality is precisely what turns so many scenes in Williams’ elegiac “poem of death” into The Liz & Dick Show. 

But I don’t really have a problem with that because I think I must be a little in love with Elizabeth Taylor. How else to explain my finding her to be both epically awful and some kind of wonderful in this ambitiously off-beat camp curio that feels more emotionally truthful the older I get?

No, Boom! is not a perfect film, it's possibly not even a good one. But it's a risk-taking film. And the risk-taking Burtons of fascinating flops like this one are infinitely more affecting and fun to watch than the play-it-safe Burtons of moneymaking snooze-fests like The Sandpiper.

What does BOOM mean? It's...

BONUS MATERIAL

Robert Redford portrayed Death as a kind young man who comes to ease an old woman’s (Gladys Cooper) fear of dying in the 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone titled "Nothing in the Dark." 

Divine Intervention
A favorite blogger writes about BOOM! as drag inspiration HERE

That's Tab Hunter embracing Divine in the 1981 John Waters film Polyester. Hunter appeared opposite Tallulah Bankhead in the second Broadway incarnation of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. British actress Hermione Baddeley starred in the original production which opened 11-months earlier. 

In 1997 a red-wigged actor Rupert Everett (My Best Friend's Wedding, Another Country) portrayed Flora Goforth to David Foxxe's Witch of Capri in a London production of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore at the Lyric Theater. 

Early casting considerations for Joseph Losey's film version (likely never moving past the discussion stage) were Simone Signoret and Sean Connery; Ingrid Bergman and James Fox. Donald Sutherland was wanted for the role of bodyguard Rudi.

BOOM! opened on Wednesday, May 29, 1968 at Hollywood's Pantages Theater. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2021

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG 1968

Last year, whenever I came across a review complaining about the 3½-hour running time of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019), my first thought was that none of these folks would have survived being a kid in the 1960s. Not at a time when Hollywood's most eagerly-anticipated family movies all wore their lengthy running times like emblems of prestige: Mary Poppins (1964): 2hr 20m; The Sound of Music (1965): 2hr 55m; Doctor Dolittle (1967): 2hr 32m; Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967): 2hr 33m; and Oliver! (1968): 2hr 33m.

And certainly not at a time when double-features were the norm, and theaters, under the guise of presenting "Top Family Entertainment," offered child-abuse programming like pairing the 2hr 25m Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with the 3hr 4m Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Such was the bladder-challenging bill at San Francisco's Castro Theater in the summer of 1969 when I was 11-years-old and saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the first time.

Click image to enlarge

A 1968 Christmas season release, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opened in San Francisco as a reserved-seat roadshow attraction (complete with overture, intermission, & exit music) at a then-steep minimum $3 ticket price. When it played regular engagements in 1969, its revamped ad campaign underplayed the musical and magical car angles and instead emphasized the comedic. Specifically highlighting Dick Van Dyke's silly pose and anachronistically (the movie is set in 1910) showcasing Sally Ann Howes' legs.   

Most roadshow films went immediately into wide release after their exclusive engagements were over (Continuous Performances! Popular Prices!), but the underperforming Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was swiftly yanked from screens after its poorly-reviewed initial run (The SF Examiner called it "abysmally saccharine"), re-emerging six months later as a get-the-kids-from-underfoot summer release in August of 1969. But by then, it was too late. Over the Easter holidays, America's fickle kiddie population had fallen in love with another four-fendered friend…Herbie, the matchmaking Volkswagen Beetle of Disney's The Love Bug. A case of love at first sight that saw the modest feature earning more than ten times its $5 million budget at the boxoffice while the heavily-promoted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang remained unable to recoup its $12 million budget. 

Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts

Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious 

Adrian Hall and Heather Ripley as Jeremy & Jemima Potts

Lionel Jeffries as Grandpa Potts

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the only children's book written by James Bond creator Ian Fleming. It's also the only non-Bond film made by James Bond franchise producer Albert R. Broccoli. Fleming's slight story of a family and their magical car was made into a grand-scale movie musical (at the time, the most expensive musical ever made in England) that is commonly (and accurately) described these days as a James Bond film for children.

This is certainly true of its story, which pits a good guy devoted to gadgetry (crackpot inventor Caracticus Potts) and a woman with an outrageous name (candy heiress Truly Scrumptious) against an eccentric villain (Auric Goldfinger himself, Gert Fröbe as Baron Bomburst). But the Bond connection also applies to the production team, many of whom began work on CCBB fresh from completing the latest Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). The screenplay for the Bond film was written by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang screenwriter Roald Dahl (with director Ken Hughes). Both Hughes and CCBB's Baroness Bomburst Anna Quayle, had just finished work on the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967).

Desmond Llewelyn, as garage owner Mr. Coggins.
Llewellyn portrayed "Q" in a staggering 17 James Bond films. 

But in 1968, the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang most eagerly sought to emulate was Disney's blockbuster Mary Poppins (1964). And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was so sincerely devoted to flattering Mary Poppins that it all but followed a blueprint. Same songwriters (Robert and Richard Sherman Sherman); same choreographers (Mark Breaux & Dee Dee Wood); same period (the book's contemporary setting was changed to Mary Poppins' Edwardian era); same casting (Poppins' Dick Van Dyke—mercifully, minus the English accent), and a Julie Andrews substitute (Sally Ann Howes). I've read that the producers sought to reunite Mary Poppins co-stars Julie Andrews & Dick Van Dyke. But unless the role of Truly was conceived as being significantly larger than its present incarnation, I find it difficult to believe Julie Andrews--a headlining Oscar winner at this stage--ever seriously entertained the idea of playing second lead to the actor who was her supporting co-star in her very first picture.

So intent was CCBB on duplicating Mary Poppins' winning formula; it features a copy of what has always been my least-favorite Poppins number: "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank." In this instance, the "comical old coots" sing the livelier but no-less-deadly "The Roses of Success."

But Hollywood wishes do come true, and when released, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang did indeed have critics comparing it to Mary Poppins…unfavorably on all counts. In his memoirs, even star Dick Van Dyke joined the chorus, citing that he felt Hughes was the wrong director for the job and that the film ultimately failed to capture the magic of Disney's classic. Given that Ken Hughes would go on to direct the Mae West travesty Sextette (1978), perhaps Van Dyke has a point. Falling short of its fantasmagorical expectations, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang joined the ranks of Camelot (1967) and Paint Your Wagon (1969) as representative of a form of "Bigger is Better" filmmaking whose era was nearing its end. But time has been kind, and in the 50-plus years since its release, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has emerged from the shadow of Mary Poppins enough to be hailed as a beloved children's classic judged and appreciated on its own considerable merits. A far cry from the days when my attempts to recommend the movie to schoolmates were met with chants of "Shitty Shitty Bang Bang." 

Anna Quayle and Gert Frobe as Baroness & Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria

Seeing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for the first time on a double-bill with Around the World in 80 Days was quite the thrill and nowhere near the backache challenge for my 11-year-old self as I would find it today. Though I confess to having fallen asleep during part of Around the World in 80 Days (one moment Shirley MacLaine hadn't yet entered the movie, the next, there she was in that balloon), by and large, as long as the Jujyfruits and popcorn held out, I was a happy camper. 

The only big musical I'd seen at this point was Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), so without prior visions of Mary Poppins dancing in my head, I thought Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the most extraordinary movie I'd ever seen. I was utterly wowed and enchanted by it. On an enormous screen and with glorious stereophonic sound Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a storybook fantasy adventure come to life. It seemed to have everything: action, laughs, chases, comic schtick, rousing songs, zany characters, romance, dance, spectacle, and a big wooly sheepdog named Edison. It even had a bit of a dark side.

Robert Helpmann as The Child Catcher
I was too old to find this legendary kindertrauma character scary at the time. But as an adult, I've often wished (usually when I'm in a restaurant or on a plane) such a service existed.

I remember being very taken with Potts' kooky Rube Goldberg-style inventions (the work of Frederick Rowland Emett), particularly that ingenious breakfast-making machine I still would love to own. But what stands out most memorably is the titular automobile itself. Designed by Academy Award-winning production designer Ken Adams under what must have been no small degree of pressure to live up to the laundry list of glowing superlatives ascribed to it in the title song, the magical car dubbed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is every bit the iconically miraculous motorcar the movie needed it to be. 

Critics were tough on the film for what they asserted were disappointingly primitive special effects for a movie of this size and expense (they may have had a point, as Chitty's budget was equal to or larger than that of another 1968 release, Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey whose special effects had set a new standard), but back then I didn't notice or didn't care. When Chitty turned into a boat, or the first time it took wing, just the sight of it (crude special effects and all) hit a fanciful, fantasy nerve in me. I remember getting such a goosebump charge out of it.   

Custom cars were all the rage on TV in the '60s; the George Barris-designed automobiles on Batman, The Monkees, The Munsters, & The Green Hornet were big hits with the young set. But even amongst these memorably snazzy machines, Ken Adam's whimsical design for the flying, amphibious Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stands out with class and distinction. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang two more times that summer, by then paired with Heaven with a Gun, a truly awful Glenn Ford western made bearable only by its being half the running time of Around the World in 80 Days. And in all these years, my love of it as a cheerful, brightly-colored confection as sweet and loaded with empty calories as anything whipped up by the Scrumptious Sweet Company, has only increased. I say empty calories because Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a delectable film that, for all its whimsy and charm, has always engaged my spirits more than my heart. The story—essentially a kidnap/rescue adventure fantasy—is fun in a cartoon kind of way…full of activity and "business" meant to entertain and amuse. But the screenplay keeps the characters at a bit of a remove, their personalities and goals presented so cursorily that the movie never touches me or gives me waterworks in the manner of The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

It's not entirely true that nothing in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang gives me waterworks. For some reason, the duet performance of "Doll on a Music Box/Truly Scrumptious" gets to me every time. It's a lovely courtship dance in a film skimpy on romance. So when Truly breaks character at the end to give Caractacus a loving smile, I always melt. 

Maybe my dry eyes are because, as children's movies go, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's emotional stakes are kept on a low boil. Both The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins saw lonely children reclaiming their fathers thanks to the spunky intervention of Julie Andrews, and in Oliver!, a severely brutalized and exploited orphan finds a home. But Chitty Chitty Bang Bang presents us with a cast of characters whose lives may not be perfect when the film begins, but are far from unhappy. Caractacus is a widowed fantasist whose inventions come to naught, but his loving children's belief in him is unshakable. And I couldn't have been the only kid who thought Jemima & Jeremy had it pretty sweet living with minimal parental supervision out there in the country in a picturesque windmill crammed with toys and gadgets made by a fun dad. 

You Two
Caractacus Potts and his two unaccountably British children. Though Potts' father and children speak with English accents, Dick Van Dyke, still stinging from criticism of his problematic Cockney accent in Mary Poppins, only agreed to appear in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang if he could forgo the accent.

Even Jemima & Jeremy's quest to rescue the junked Chitty from the fiery furnace is a low-wattage conflict due to the notion of Chitty being a sentient machine is never fully developed (she shivers at the mention of being melted and rescues the family at moments of danger, but has no personality to speak of) not mention the kids are ready to abandon their salvage mission when it appears doing so will cause their dad undue hardship. However, one thing the film gets right is granting the frosty Truly Scrumptious character a thawing-out musical number with the children. What's ideal about the casting of Sally Ann Howes is that she's pretty in precisely the way a child can relate to...like a teacher one develops a crush on. By the end of the number, it's been firmly established that Jeremy & Jemima need a mom, and we in the audience can identify with them in their wish for Truly and their dad to fall in love.

Benny Hill as The Toymaker

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I didn't like movie musicals very much when I was young. No fewer than 13 musicals were released in 1968 (3 by Elvis alone!). To this day, I could kick myself for passing opportunities to see current favorites like Funny Girl, Finian's Rainbow, and Star! in their original release. But what I did like were cars. Toy cars, model cars, and, after seeing the 1967 theatrical re-release of The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), flying cars. Fred MacMurray's flying Flubbermobile captivated me to no end, so when Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came on the scene, the car was the primary attraction for me. Nowadays, my absolute favorite things about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are its songs and musical sequences. The eleven songs by Robert and Richard Sherman (showcased by Irwin Kostal's brilliant orchestrations) are catchy and hummable and have aged remarkably well. Not a clunker in the bunch; the entire original score is splendid...even the dreaded "The Roses of Success" has started to grow on me.

Toot Sweets
This pitch-perfect musical pitch meeting is a visual delight. The candy factory set is an eye-popper, and I still get woozy with vertigo when I see those dancers up on that narrow ledge near the rafters. 

Me Ol' Bamboo
CCBB's answer to Mary Poppins' "Step in Time" is this rousingly entertaining and athletic number in which clever choreography takes center stage. Production on the film was shut down for a week due to 41-year-old Dick Van Dyke sustaining a leg injury while performing one of the dance routines (sources vary as to whether it was this one, the most likely suspect, or "Toot Sweets"). 

Chu-Chi Face
My partner never saw the film, but when I played this song for fun in my dance class, the silly lyrics and comical vocal performances of Gert Frobe & Anna Quayle made it one of his instant favorites. When we finally watched it together, he was so surprised by its ironic staging (cloying terms of endearment are exchanged amidst the Baron's many unsuccessful attempts to kill the Baroness). I don't think the number ever made much of an impression on me as a kid, but because it never ceases to make my sweetheart laugh, this sequence has become my most-replayed favorite.

Though Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was one of the more eagerly-anticipated releases of 1968, when award season rolled around, only the music of the Sherman brothers (their first non-Disney score) garnered any attention...no wins, but attention. Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for that irresistible earworm of a title song, and a second Globe nomination for Best Original Score. 

Emmy Award-winning TV star Dick Van Dyke had the opportunity to display his versatility as an actor, dancer, and singer in several iconic movies. He made his film debut opposite Janet Leigh in Bye Bye Birdie (1963), his likable persona transferring easily to the big screen. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I'd allowed a lot of time to pass between viewings of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, this recent revisit stirring up dust clouds of nostalgia of such density as to fairly obscure my awareness of what I might have once characterized as the film's flaws. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn't changed, but in the last few years, my appreciation of the value of good, old-fashioned schmaltz, cornball comedy, and sweet-natured sentimentality has. One doesn't have to try very hard to draw contemporary parallels to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's child-caging Vulgarians and the tyrannical, childishly petulant, tantrum-throwing Baron Bomburst. And indeed, it's for that very reason that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's liveliness, tuneful good cheer, and elemental, storybook sweetness (and silliness) proved to be just the right "happy endings" spoonful of sugar medicine I needed to make the waning days of 2020 a little easier to deal with. (There go those Mary Poppins comparisons, again!)

BONUS MATERIAL:

Two of my favorite stars from Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971) appear briefly in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: British cinema icon Barbara Windsor (top photo) and dancer Antonia Ellis (bottom photo, far right)

Ballet star Robert Helpmann (The Child Catcher) with Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948)

Actress/dancer Paula Kelly (Sweet Charity) dances to an instrumental rendition of the Oscar-nominated title song "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" at the 41st Academy Awards. It lost to "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair.

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2020

MIDSOMMAR 2019

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for analysis. 

Like every other Black family I knew growing up, I was raised in a household that normalized living with a savagely tortured semi-naked white man. On the wall of the hallway leading from our living room to my bedroom hung an ornately-framed painting of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross. This meant that the first thing I saw each morning and the last thing I saw before bed was the gruesome spectacle of a bearded, emaciated man captured in the throes of unspeakable agony from having spikes driven through his hands and feet, and thorns crammed into his skull. This nightmare tableau was illuminated by a tubular electric light attached to a heavy, gilt-metal frame, and, as it was one of those lenticular, Vari-Vue™ prints much-coveted among the Catholic set at the time, when you stood in front of it and moved side to side, Jesus’ pleading, heavenward-cast eyes would close and open.

That the painting’s over-the-top kitschiness disturbed me more than the pious torture porn it depicted speaks to why, in later years, my Catholic status graduated to lapsed. I always had a problem with what I came to view as the religion's glorification of suffering and the preponderant role violence plays in children's spiritual instruction. The alignment of violence and morality makes it all too easy to convince people to accept, justify, and even legitimize all manner of cruelty, repression, and brutality. Provided there's the reassurance of said carnage being carried out in the name of a perceived sense of righteousness, a presumed moral authority, or unquestioning fealty to religious dogma.

In the minds and hearts of many, the humane assumption exists that spirituality and violence represent a paradox and that they are inherently and at once at odds with one another. In the alternatingly glorious/grotesque very grim fairy tale that is Midsommar, director Ari Aster posits the dualist theory that spirituality and violence are, in actuality--and as one finds in all aspects of nature--symbiotically linked. Intensely and inextricably joined...dark and light, despair and joy...the winter and summer of human experience.

Midsommar's first image, which serves as a panel-curtain opening for this pagan passion play, is this disturbing mural by Taiwanese artist Mu Pan. Its content is impossible to comprehend the first time you see the film, but revisiting it reveals that the entire plot of the film you're about to see is laid out in drawings that take us from winter to summer. This spoiler is the first of the film's many instances of foreshadowing.

Director Ari Aster hit a horror home run with his breakout film debut Hereditary (2018), a harrowing shocker about a dysfunctional family crumbling under the weight of grief, mental illness, and the insidious machinations of a demonic cult. By contrasting the chaotic dynamics of an unstable family with the regimentally orderly rituals of a Satanic sect, Hereditary drew discomfiting parallels to the intersections of religion/cult, devout/fanatic, and tradition /predeterminism. 

With Midsommar, we see Aster continuing to explore the world of single-word titles, family dysfunction, cultism, mental illness, how we process grief, unhealthy relationships, and the shriek factor of head trauma. The focus of this, his unsettling and sure-footed sophomore effort, has four American grad students visiting a Swedish commune to witness a 9-day midsummer celebration. The plot places Midsommar as a contemporary blood-descendant of Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk-horror classic The Wicker Man. But where The Wicker Man contrasted Christian extremism with pagan zealotry, Midsommar sees Aster casting his twisted gaze on our culture of isolation and souls left untethered and adrift in the pursuit of individualism. Then, provocatively juxtaposing it with the spirituality-based interdependence of a Swedish pagan commune. 

Florence Pugh as Dani Ardor

Jack Reynor as Christian Hughes

Vilhelm Blomgren as Pelle

William Jackson Harper as Josh

Will Poulter as Mark

Midsommar begins in winter. The heavy snowfall obscures the film's opening titles, forecasting the emotional cold front piercing the nearly four-year relationship of New York graduate students Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) and Christian Hughes (Jack Reynor). Christian, an anthropology student with a sub-major in waffling and gaslighting, has been angling towards a breakup for a year but lingers out of fear of the alternative. Dani, an anxiety-prone psychology student who pops Ativan to cope with panic attacks and dysfunction-stress linked to her family in Minnesota, is an exposed nerve so steeped in denial about Christian’s emotional abuse she fails to notice half the content of their conversations consists of her apologizing. 

Alas, at the precise moment when it's most evident that the dissolution of this relationship would be the healthiest outcome for all parties involved, a devastating tragedy sends Dani into an agonizing spiral of grief and despair. And in an instant, we realize the bonds of emotional neediness and the shackles of guilty resentment will be added to this already toxic union.   

(Top) Christian consoles a traumatized Dani after the death of her entire family, his face betraying his feelings of entrapment. On the rare occasion when men in movies are shown bearing any of the emotional weight of a relationship, it tends to be depicted as a burden (1971’s Play Misty for Me [pictured] and Fatal Attraction -1981 come to mind). But male-gaze identification is subverted in Midsommar—as Dani’s anguish speaks more eloquently than Christian’s “good guy” sense of aggrieved obligation.

Six months later—winter to summer—finds Dani still traumatized and frozen in the process of her bereavement. Meanwhile, Christian, by way of a profoundly hurtful and pusillanimous move, is on course to forging a passive breakup by surreptitiously accepting an invitation from fellow anthropology student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) to join friends Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter) on a trip to Hårga, Sweden for study. When Dani accidentally discovers Christian’s plans, only codependency and utter isolation account for her accepting his brazenly reluctant, 11^th-hour invitation to join them on their all-boys excursion. In an amusing touch that feels deliberate for a film in which the necessity of family is a major theme, scenes depicting the journey to Pelle’s “hometown” perfectly capture the traditional joyless torpor of "Are we there yet?" family vacations.

In an inversion of colonial tradition, Josh, a Black anthropology student, is conducting a study of a primitive white culture. The side-eye he's giving here is due to Pelle's veiled response to Dani's foreshadowing statement, " See that, Pelle, you've managed to brainwash all of your friends."

The arrival of the Americans to the hippie-like village of Hårga, a sunny paradise of smiling faces and flowers! flowers! everywhere, signals Midsommar’s entrance into The Wicker Man folk-horror territory. And if that sounds like a spoiler, it is. Midsommar’s horror doesn’t come from the shock of the unexpected (although there’s plenty of that to go around) so much as the dread of the foreordained and perhaps inevitable.

Since we know we’re watching a horror film, the depiction of Hårga as an idyllic, welcoming place of tranquility is discordantly unsettling from the get-go. A feeling compounded as details of the lives and traditions of the Hårgas come to light via elaborate ceremonial rituals that grow increasingly bizarre. Things initially perceived as benign—those wide-eyed smiles, the blissed-out solicitousness—take on a sinister air as the village’s overriding atmosphere of compliant conformity begins to feel less like being in the presence of worshippers of ancient pagan religion and more like being trapped in the clutches of a hyper-cheerful death-cult.

London lovebirds Connie and Simon (Ellora Torchia & Archie Madekwi) are guests of Ingemar (Hampus Hallberg). That the affable, baby-faced fellow's invitation masks a petty personal grievance (outside of the ethnic targeting thing) makes him one of the film's most amusingly creepy characters.

There’s a scene in Woody Allen's Hanna & Her Sisters where Max Von Sydow's character comments on having just seen a TV program about the Holocaust: "Intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. They can never answer the question 'How could it happen?' It's the wrong question. The question is, 'Why doesn't it happen more often?'"

In Midsommar, Aster uses nature’s inalterable earth schedule of changing seasons and the phase cycles of the sun to metaphorically comment on humanity’s own predetermined…even destructive…cycles. We accept that it is in our natures to seek connection, community, family, faith, and the shared expression of love and sorrow. But is it also an equal part of our human hard wiring to be desirous of and susceptible to codependence, collectivism, religious populism, and moralized violence? The blood-stained global record of history repeating would say yes.

"You're out of the woods, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night. Step into the sun,
step into the light." Midsommar's The Wizard of Oz moment.

Hereditary was my favorite film of 2018, so after seeing Midsommar’s poster (it seems like ever since Naomi Watts in tears served as poster art for 2007’s Funny Games, crying faces came to replace screaming faces on horror movie posters), I was uncommonly stoked for its June 24, 2019 release. 

My reaction to seeing Midsommar for the first time was a kind of mental loss of equilibrium. So much of it played out like an extended anxiety dream I had to watch it twice just to appreciate how Aster built such a compellingly unique and disturbing film out of what is essentially a dramatization of a psychotic break (Ari Aster is the king of Nervous Breakdown Horror). The movie is so hallucinatory and weird that when my partner and I watched the 24-minutes-longer director's cut a year later (it was his first time, my fourth), he was certain the film would end (like The Wizard of Oz) with everything revealed to have been a dream.

The difference between the theatrical and director’s cuts lie chiefly in the latter’s ability to expand on a few themes (the cult viewed through the prism of white supremacy and Anglo-European nativism, for example) and provide broader context and insight into the unhealthy dynamics of Dani and Christian’s relationship. 

Swedish actor Bjorn Andresen as Dan, a man at the end of his Harga life cycle in Midsommar. At age 15, Andresen portrayed Tadzio, the symbol of youth in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971). 

I loved every minute of Midsommar. So grateful that once again Aster was expanding the concept of what "horror" films can be and impressed by how...no matter how far out the film went...the psychological drama remained the most dynamic and moving element.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Loaded with challenging themes and disturbing images, there’s so much to unpack in Midsommar. It's hard to even nail it down to a single genre, much less walk away with a singular sense of what it’s all about. Like Jordan Peele’s US (2019), Midsommar is a puzzle of a film that, by staunchly refusing to explain itself, courts ambiguity and invites multiple interpretations. As one of the film’s creators remarked in an interview, what one comes away with after seeing Midsommar has a great deal to do with what one came to it with. 

At its most elemental level, Midsommar is a story about the worst breakup on record. Many saw the film as a woman's journey of empowerment, leading to a cleansed-by-fire finale that brings our heroine the love and acceptance of a chosen family. At a price.

Another view places Midsommar as a tortuous treatise on the need to feel, express, and process grief. Dani's impulse to repress her feelings so as not to scare Christian away with her neediness is a denial of her humanity. This denial of humanity was emphasized when I watched this film during the summer of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests. Impressed by how seriously grief and bereavement are treated in Midsommar, I reflected on how Black grief is minimized in American culture. Its psychological & emotional scars are trivialized in favor of the societal fixation on needing to see a display of the traumatized forgiving and embracing their abusers. An encouragement to see the oppressed move quickly past their pain and grievances to affect a superficial unity. Just like many a toxic relationship.

Another persuasive take is that the film explores the pernicious allure of religion and cultism to the vulnerable. Drawing black comedy parallels between the elements of dysfunctional personal relationships (codependency, brainwashing, control, isolation, making self-negating sacrifices) and religious addictions. This view finds the ending to be far from a happy one, as Dani is seen to have traded one codependent attachment for another.

Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) tapped into the reality of the danger white spaces pose for Black lives. This perspective sees Midsommar equating the all-white commune's obsession with blood purity (and its quick dispatch of the ethnic couple Connie & Simon) as reflective of the current climate of exploit-then-erase racism, anti-immigrant nationalism, white supremacy, and the proliferation of hate groups. 

The thing that grounds all these scenarios and makes them work, no matter how high-flown or fantastic, is the emotional truth & depth of the character of Dani. As written, and especially as portrayed by the remarkable Florence Pugh, Dani’s recognizable humanity tethers Midsommar’s nightmare landscape to an authentic, shared emotional reality that anchors the film to the real world.

Another cryptic entry: In a drugged haze after being crowned May Queen, Dani hallucinates seeing her dead family at the festivities. The loving look from her father contrasts dramatically with the harsh stares of her sister and mother. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Memories of my Catholic upbringing kicked in big-time watching Midsommar, specifically concerning the role sadistic violence and death play in Hårga tradition. Like the grisly Christian artwork that greeted me each morning as a child, the walls throughout the Hårga village are covered with violent biblical/religious imagery. In the film, every ritual human sacrifice and blood offering to the gods share one thing in common: cruelty seems to be the point. That none of those sacrificed are dispatched mercifully or in even remotely humane ways (indeed, some methods appear to be needlessly sadistic) reminded me of when, as a youngster, I was told that stories in the Bible were so violent and full of death and suffering because they wanted to convey God's wrath and power. A sort of "Scared Straight" method of discouraging sin. 

Midsommar proposes something similar in suggesting that the violence embraced in the Hårga rituals is a form of acknowledging nature's power and ultimate dominance. Fine, but then the human element enters into it. When we learn that resentment is a motive behind Ingemar's sacrifice selection, the point is reinforced that people have always twisted and perverted spirituality and religion to fit their own needs, justify their prejudices, and morally rationalize their innate brutality.

In many ways, the commune of Harga is an outdoor iteration of the Old Dark House horror movie trope: a handful of characters confined to a large, often haunted, house, discover its limited avenues of exits during the traditional finale that has the sole survivor running through the house looking for escape. In The Stepford Wives, another movie about an epically terrible breakup, when Katharine Ross recognizes the danger she's in, her escape is thwarted by the hemmed-in confines of a dark mansion. Turning another horror trope on its head, in Midsommar when Christian awakens to his peril, he finds himself equally trapped, but in wide-open spaces and in broad daylight. 

It's so nice to be insane. No one asks you to explain.

The above line is a lyric from the 1975 Helen Reddy song "Angie Baby" and clues you into my particular take on Midsommar's famously ambiguous final image. I take the position that mental illness has always been a struggle with Dani (when Pelle asks her if she’s studying psychiatry--Dani: “Psychology. That’s how you know I'm nuts.” Pelle: “Yeah. Also, that funny look in your eye”). Given Dani's family history (her sister's bipolarism), the emotional toll of her family's death (Dani's anguish is laceratingly deep), and what she 'settles for' in her relationship with the emotionally unavailable Christian, all indicate that she is in no mental condition to process the horrors visited upon her psyche at the commune. Something in her would have to give in order to make sense of all gory the madness. 

It's my opinion that Dani has most definitely lost her mind at the end (a descriptive passage from the screenplay reads --"She has surrendered to a joy known only by the insane" ). Still, it appears her break from reality brings her a freedom and sense of peace heretofore elusive in her life. It also places her among and on even footing with the demented Hårga death cultists with whom she has finally found love, community, family, and acceptance. 

It’s a monstrously sad/happy ending quite fitting with Midsommar's perversely optimistic view of fatalism. I don't see how any sane person could keep their sanity long in Hårga (and it's unlikely they would ever have allowed her to leave and possibly tell others about this place of ritual murder), so, in its way, the ending is also quite merciful to Dani, a character I came to like and care a great deal about over the course of the film. I agree with those who have called the ending horrible and beautiful.

It is. Just like Midsommar.

Here's something to chew on: Midsommar ends on something like the 4th or 5th day of a 9-day midsummer festival! What the hell could they have lined up next on the schedule?

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2020