Disney jumped on the musical roadshow bandwagon using people who'd served them so well before: the Sherman brothers, Fred MacMurray, Norman Tokar. But the end result doesn't click.
By jove this was a hard slog. I mean it goes for almost three hours. Three! There's an intermission and everything. Mind you I guess Mary Poppins was 140 minutes.
People say this was an attempt to repeat Mary Poppins which would have made sense - I feel it was their go at You Can't Take It With You, the adventures of a madcap family.
The Poppins element is in the form of Tommy Steele, who Disney apparently wanted to play the Dick Van Dyke role in that film. Here he's a butler who joins the family.
And Steele is fine - toothy and energetic and he suits the Disney world - but his character is a problem. You don't need him in the film, you could cut him out totally and it wouldn't make any difference.
The film at its heart is about Jon Davidson romancing Lesley Anne Downe (both are fine, by the way, very All American and sweet) - he gets involved in her madcap family, they get engaged, his bitchy mother Genevieve Page tries to stop it. That sort of story works - it did for You Can't Take It With You. You jazz it up with antics of other family members.
But instead they pad it out with stuff involving Steele (a few numbers, he and Davidson go drink together) and ignore the rest of the family - there's some brothers at the beginning who disappear, and Greer Garson literally just kind of hangs around. If they wanted to use Steele they should have made him a son or something (surely the accent could have been explained away?)
There's some okay tunes and numbers but they've bloated what should be a simple story and it's hard to get through. I also feel Fred MacMurray isn't entirely well cast as a loveable eccentric - he's perfect as someone a bit vague and absent minded, as in The Absent Minded Professor - but this character feels as though he needed more drive. Brian Keith say, who did a lot of work for Disney, would have been a lot more fun - you can imagine him boxing and so on.
Still, it's not terrible, just hard work to watch. And it is wholesome family entertainment.
No comments:
Post a Comment