I can’t quite decide if Chitty Chitty Bang Bang truly qualifies as camp or if it’s just bad. It is most certainly bad, though. Allegedly, this is a musical aimed at children, yet I can’t imagine a child being entertained by the almost 2.5-hour running time with all of the confusing characters and plot lines. And much of the music, including the dreadful title song that was inexplicably nominated for an Oscar, is already quite bad without adding the choreography of several production numbers to the mix. Even the names of most characters are silly. The title car, whose name derives from the noise its engine makes, won Grand Prix races for three years in a row before exploding in its final race. The two Potts children convince their poor unsuccessful eccentric inventor father, Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke), to buy the car and fix it up. It becomes quite an amazing vehicle, capable of converting into a sort of pontoon boat and into a flying machine. Given that the father is prone to devices that look positively Rube Goldbergian in nature (his complex machine for cooking eggs and sausages, for example), it’s kind of amazing that it can even run, much less float or fly. The carelessness of the children, Jemima and Jeremy, brings the daughter of the local candy-maker (played by the lovely Sally Ann Howe) into their father’s life; she almost hits them with her car and then takes them home to chastise their father for his poor parenting. Her name, Truly Scrumptious, is a nod to the ridiculous names of female characters preferred by the author of the book on which this film was based, Ian Fleming, perhaps better known for the series of James Bond novels. When Caractacus, Truly, and the two children enjoy a picnic on the beach, the father spins a bizarre tale about Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria and his desire to steal Chitty. The Baron kidnaps Grandpa Potts by mistake, hauling him off inside a “shed” that really looks more like an outhouse. When Caractacus and the rest chase the Baron’s zeppelin back to Vulgaria, they discover that there are no children there because the Baron’s wife hates them and has gotten them declared illegal. The Baron even employs a Child Catcher, portrayed by talented ballet dancer Robert Helpmann, and his role is the stuff of nightmares. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is all rather supremely silly, to be honest, and the music doesn’t help much. If you want to see how truly awful a production number can be, how one number can truly drag a movie to a halt, watch the big scene for the song “Toot Sweet,” a song about a new kind of candy. Thankfully, a large number of dogs interrupt the performance at the candy factory, just not quickly enough. The worst song, though, may be “Chu-Chi Face,” which primarily serves as a way to learn how much the Baron (Gert Frobe, better known as Bond villain Goldfinger) hates his wife (Anna Quayle, who comes closest to giving a truly campy performance, and the film is all the better for that). And I’ll need quite some time to forget the singing of Heather Ripley (Jemima) and Adrian Hall (Jeremy) about how, well, truly scrumptious Truly truly is. That song, in particular, is cringe-inducing, and young children tend to be poor singers anyway. To be fair, the movie does have a couple of good numbers. “Me Ol’ Bamboo” is a fun number that showcases Van Dyke’s dancing, but it’s really just a plot device that isn’t all that necessary and mostly just adds to the film’s length. And the staging of “Doll on a Music Box,” which manages to highlight Howe’s lovely voice and her ability to perform some elaborate choreography, works well until Van Dyke shows up to start singing another version of “Truly Scrumptious.” Oddly, Van Dyke doesn’t perform with an English accent, which is very puzzling given that almost everyone else in the cast is British, including Benny Hill as a toymaker in Vulgaria. And poor Howe’s character of Truly suffers the indignity of driving her car into a duck pond three times during the course of the movie, a sure sign that the filmmakers have exercised very little creativity. The insertion of an intermission only serves to make us endure more time waiting for this nonsense to end. I’ll resist the temptation to use a word that rhymes with Chitty to describe this film, but it certainly fits.
Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”)
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