Category: Family film

Father of the Bride (1950)

Gentle, well-made comedy is elevated by a star turn from Spencer Tracy

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Spencer Tracy (Stanley Banks), Joan Bennett (Ellie Banks), Elizabeth Taylor (Kay Banks), Don Taylor (Buckley Dunstan), Billie Burke (Doris Dunstan), Leo G. Carroll (Mr Massoula), Moroni Olsen (Herbert Dunstan), Melville Cooper (Mr Tringle)

Apparently almost 70% of couples find wedding planning stressful. Perhaps they would be reassured to hear things haven’t changed much since the 1950s! Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) is a successful partner in a law firm whose domestic bliss is disrupted when daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) announces she intends to marry boyfriend Buckley (Don Taylor). With the support of her mother Ellie (Joan Bennett), Kay dreams of a big church wedding – and Stanley is left counting the cost while struggling with his sadness at his daughter growing up and flying the nest for good.

Father of the Bride delightfully takes a simple idea and mines it for as much comic effect as possible. The structure is simple: the build-up to and staging of the wedding, with all absurdities of such things as fussy caterers and exacting church wardens pointed up. There are minor bumps and hiccups, but nothing that would make a viewer ever seriously worry that all will not turn out well. Instead, the film riffs on the constant exasperation of a father watching the plans (and cost) of the wedding spiral ever upwards, as more and more extras pile on top of others.

Much of its success is linked to Spencer Tracy, excellent as the eponymous father. The role was written for him and Minnelli demanded he should play it when producers suggested a more comic actor like Jack Benny might fit the bill better. (Katherine Hepburn did not take on the wife, though I can’t imagine she would found much to engage her in Joan Bennett’s underwritten role.) The entire success of the film revolves around our connection with Tracy, something never in doubt with his skill and assurance.

Minnelli cements this with an opening shot panning across wedding debris before craning up to introduce us to a fourth-wall breaking speech of resigned weariness from Tracy. His narrative voice is returned to again and again, as Tracy shares a wry and exasperated commentary. Father of the Bride is a testament to Tracy’s comic chops, his mastery of the micro-reaction providing constant laughs, from a look of disbelief across a dining table to one of shock as the latest bill flies in. It’s a hilariously effective performance, in which Tracy embraces the ridiculousness of farce. Like a practiced comedian he spays himself (three times) while attempting to open a coke or kids himself into believing he looks dandy in a morning suit several years too small for him.

But the performance – and the film – really works because Tracy also communicate its humanity. In his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor (suitably radiant as Kay, and full of a forceful personality she surely inherited from her father), Tracy makes clear his love for his daughter and his sadness at an end of an era: he won’t be ‘the man’ in her life anymore. Even with small inconsequential moments (such as Kay ignoring Stanley’s appeal to wear a coat before fetching it immediately when Buckley suggests the same), Tracy shows sadness dance across his face. The wedding is awash with bittersweet moments, with Tracy as harried host desperately attempting to speak with his daughter one last time before she leaves. Father of the Bride through Tracy’s performance mines a great deal of quiet, genuine emotion from a parent struggling with a child grown up.

It’s a bittersweet thread Minnelli’s film keeps pinging away under the comedy. Minnelli seems an unlikely choice (you’d expect a Cukor or Capra), but his skill with composition adds to the film without overwhelming the slender story with flash. The opening shot of wedding debris prepares us for the hustle and bustle of the big day, where a parade of carefully choreographed background events in the Banks’ house is as skilled as the bustling crowds of the event. Minnelli gives a Dali-inspired flair to Banks’ pre-wedding nightmare (his feet melting into the ground and clothes falling apart) and he plugs into Tracy’s reactive skill to frame these off-the-ball moments for maximum impact.

Editing also helps accentuate jokes. On hearing his daughter intends to marry, Banks reflects with horror on who this suitor might be, a montage of assorted suitors (from athletic, to bookish, to dancing) spooling past us. (The biggest joke now might be how utterly safe all these suitors are, the sort of lads you imagine fathers today would be desperate for daughters to bring home). Minnelli also fades in and out on blurry close-ups on glasses to communicate both the passing of time and Stanley’s rising inebriation (after a growing parade of martinis) when the Banks meet with Buckley’s parents.

This sort of comic energy helps carry the film very effectively. Of course it is all very simple – the 1991 remake added more moments of crisis and obstacles for the characters to overcome – and that can explain why events sometimes feel stretched out even over its slim 90-minute run time. For all the film’s tagline (“Bride gets the thrills; Father gets the bills!”) suggests frustration on Stanley’s part, moments where he weeds through a huge invite list (525!) or bemoans paying for an orchestra no one is listening to are generally underplayed (perhaps it was thought we could only sympathise so much before starting to think of Tracy as a penny pincher?)

But, overall, the film works very well indeed, mostly due to Spencer Tracy’s hugely effective performance – funny, endearing, likeable and hugely relatable with a perfect balance between comedy and emotional depth. It would have been nice to have had more of a contrast between Stanley and Buckley – when Buckley turns up to a heart-to-heart with father-in-law clutching a briefcase full of his work, I immediately thought ‘never has a woman more clearly married someone like her dad’. But what the film aims to do it, it succeeds at. And that’s to have some good-natured, heart-warming fun showing how even stars like Tracy can find weddings stressful.

The Bishop’s Wife (1947)

Charming Christmas enjoyment in this rather odd angel comedy that wins you over

Director: Henry Koster

Cast: Cary Grant (Dudley), Loretta Young (Julia Brougham), David Niven (Bishop Henry Brougham), Monty Woolley (Professor Wutheridge), James Gleason (Sylvester), Gladys Cooper (Mrs Agnes Hamilton), Elsa Lanchester (Matilda), Sara Haden (Mildred Cassaway), Karolyn Grimes (Debby Brougham)

Newly appointed Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) is forgetting who he is. Now spending all his time with the hoi-polloi (led by Gladys Cooper’s grande dame Mrs Hamilton) trying to secure funding for a new cathedral he’s rather lost sight of things at home with his devoted wife Julia (Loretta Young). Enter, seemingly in answer to his prayers, angel Dudley (Cary Grant). Taking up a role as Henry’s new assistant – with only Henry knowing the Heavenly background of his guest – Dudley sets about helping those around Henry rediscover their spiritual joy in life.

The Bishop’s Wife is a gentle, unassuming film, all taking place in the week before Christmas. It’s heart-warming, seasonal stuff, competently directed by Henry Koster, who efficiently juggles gentle character conflicts with a reassuring moral message. There are some rather charmingly done magical special effects sprinkled across the film: Dudley uses his angelic powers to instantly sort reference cards, fly decorations onto a chair, dictate to a self-operating typewriter and guide a snowball through the air with all the dexterity of Oliver Stone’s magic bullet. As a gentle piece of seasonal viewing, it gives you everything you could want.

Such is its easy charm and seasonal sweetness, it almost doesn’t matter that it’s quite an odd film. It’s no real surprise Dudley isn’t on Earth to help Henry secure mega-bucks he to build a grand cathedral (especially since principle doner Mrs Hamilton is more interested in making it a tribute to her late-husband rather God) but to help Henry work out his real focus should be the ordinary joes of his community and his marriage. That he should make sure he prioritises a humble choir at small local church St Sylvester’s and keep in touch with the parishioners he used to dedicate his time to. And, above all, that he should find time in his bustling calendar to keep the love in his marriage.

But the methods used by Dudley – away from angelic magic over inanimate objects and his ability to know everyone’s names before they even open their mouths and cross roads in bustling traffic without fear – are a little odd. Aside from shoring up a few people’s spiritual strength, he essentially begins a campaign of seduction, giving Julia the sort of loving attention Henry hasn’t given her in ages. It’s a slightly bizarre holy campaign – the angel who uses the temptations of the flesh to save a marriage – but it’s done with such innocence a viewer almost forgets the odd idea.

It also just about makes a virtue of casting of Cary Grant as Dudley. In a part that feels tailor-made for Bing Crosby, surely Cary Grant is no-one’s idea of an angel (a slightly abashed, heart-of-gold, demon perhaps). Grant, to be honest, slightly struggles with the role – at times the complete decency of Dudley leaves him rather stiff and the Grant twinkle gets one of its most subdued outings in cinematic history. However, Grant’s naughty charm does make us accept a little bit more that Dudley might just feel a little more than he’s saying with his attraction to Julia (even if, the rules of films, tell us there is zero chance of an angel being a seducer).

It still manages to get the goat of Niven’s Bishop, who increasingly resents this overly efficient new presence in his life more focused on charming his wife than getting on with what he presumes he’s there for – securing funds for the Cathedral. Niven (originally cast as the Angel – but his raffish charm would have been as unnatural a fit as Grant’s), does rather well as a decent man crushed under expectations and duty who has forgotten the things that really matter. Niven has a very neat line in quietly exasperated fury, so buttoned-up and English (despite being American!) he can’t give vent to his real feelings but hides it under genteel passive aggression. He also sells a neat joke that he is constantly rendered literally incapable of saying out loud that Dudley is an angel.

Loretta Young, between these two, has the least interesting part, trickly written. It goes without saying that a feel-good product of 1940s Hollywood is not going to have the wife of a Bishop actually, genuinely considering straying from her husband (just as, I suppose, it can only go so far in suggesting Grant’s Dudley is sorely tempted to leave his wings behind). Young’s role leans a little too much into the patient housewife, just eager for her husband to embrace day-to-day joys at home and not lose himself so much in work, but she manages to make it work.

These three lead a cast made up of experienced pros who know exactly how to pitch a fairly gentle comedy like this. Monty Woolley is great fun as a slightly over-the-hill professor, who needs to be befuddled by a never-emptying glass to stop him wondering why he doesn’t remember Dudley from the lectures he claims to have attended all those years ago. James Gleason offers cheeky, down-to-earth humour and sensibility as a friendly taxi-driver, while Gladys Cooper once again proves she can give austere grande dames more depth than anyone else in the business.

It all makes for a gentle, rather sweet and charming film despite that fact that almost nothing in it really make sense. In fact, it frequently falters as soon as you consider any of the plot at all or any of the actions and motivations of its characters. But then, this is basically a sort of Christmas Carol where the Angel arrives to re-focus the (not particularly imperilled) soul of one man, with wit, charm and warmth – and if it feels odd that also involves inspiring envy and jealousy (deadly sins right?!) in a Bishop, I suppose we should go with it. After all, it’s Christmas.

Captains Courageous (1937)

Well-made, coming-of-age story with two very fine leads and a heart-tugging ending

Director: Victor Fleming

Cast: Freddie Bartholomew (Harvey Cheyne), Spencer Tracy (Manuel Fidello), Lionel Barrymore (Captain Disko Troop), Melvyn Douglas (Frank Burton Cheyne), Charley Grapewin (Uncle Salters), Mickey Rooney (Dan Troop), John Carradine (‘Uncle Jack’), Oscar O’Shea (Captain Walt Cushman)

Harvey Cheyne (Freddie Bartholomew) is a hard kid to like. Scion of Henry Ford-like American tycoon Frank Burton Cheyne (Melvyn Douglas) he’s an arrogant, entitled snob who believes he is deserves anything he wants because Daddy has never-empty pockets. The servants in his father’s estate can’t stand him, his prep school classmates only pretend to like him and even his teachers think he needs to be taken down a peg or two. Suspended from school, his father (upset at what his son has become) hopes a trip to Europe will help Harvey grow-up. But, en route, Harvey is lost at sea and picked up by the fishing boat We’re Here. Despite his objections, they have no interest in cutting short fishing season by three months to take him straight back and slowly Harvey finds himself rather enjoying fishing life, helped by his growing bond with salt-of-the-Earth Portuguese fisherman Manuel (Spencer Tracy).

Adapted from a Rudyard Kipling novel – despite what you might think, Harvey and his father are also American in the original – Captains Courageous is a surprisingly sweet coming-of-age tale, mixed with a surrogate-father-son relationship, well-directed by Victor Fleming and strongly played by the cast. The cast spent months bobbing up-and-down in a giant water tank to bring the film to the screen, and it’s a tribute to Fleming’s direction and Harold Rossen’s sharp camerawork that it often genuinely feels like a film pulled in from the seas like Manuel’s fishes.

It also has some wonderful chemistry between its two leads. Freddie Bartholomew, one of the biggest (and most skilled) child stars of the 30s, had a hard task here: appearing in virtually every scene, he has to turn a character who most viewers would love to give a cuff around the ear too, into a kid we end up admiring. Captains Courageous doesn’t shirk at stressing Harvey’s arrogant, self-absorbed unpleasantness: he treats the servants like talking furniture, brags about his editorship of the school magazine (a position bought for him by his father’s purchasing of their printing press) which he feels with dull articles (essentially ‘what I did on my holidays’) and shamelessly uses his father’s money to bribe people (including his schoolmaster, who he loans $50 to then casually mentions it would be great if the history test could be made easier).

He is, in short, a total brat and that only starts to change on We’re Here. Bartholomew’s trick is to do just enough to suggest a decent kid buried under the surface here, even when he’s demanding the ship turn round to take him home or assuming his ship-mates will settle into playing servants for him. He and the film slowly reveal his childish enthusiasm waiting for an outlet. With a distant father, you get the feeling Harvey felt acting like the pampered, entitled wealthy man was the only way to impress him. Captains Courageous is rather endearing in showing how he flourishes when faced with pushback by someone (Manuel) who gives him genuine attention, teaches him things and won’t take his nonsense (in the way nearly every other employee in his life does).

Bartholomew’s thoughtfulness, vulnerability and eager-to-impress energy makes for a great combination with Spencer Tracy’s jovial warmth as Manuel. Tracy – who won an Oscar – was later rather self-critical of his curly-haired ‘liddle feesh’ accented-fisherman, generously claiming his success was partly due to Bartholomew. But Tracy’s work here is endearing, funny and unforced, making Manuel a mix of big brother and father, full of energy and joi d’vivre, with exactly the sort of easy-going happiness in small things (catching a big fish, playing music, even swabbing a deck) that Harvey never has. Tracy also brings out Manuel’s strong morals and his respect for others – it’s no surprise that he has no truck with Harvey’s cheating in a fishing competition.

In fact, Manuel’s response to this (deep disappointment, throwing the competition and firmly telling Harvey he’s no fisherman) is exactly the sort of firm-but-fair parenting, with a moral education, that Harvey needs. But Manuel is also a fierce defender of him when he admits his mistakes and also offers the sort of direct, in-person support and regard for Harvey that his own father failed to do. (There is a lovely reaction shot from Tracy – one of the best reactors in movies – of warm pride when Harvey admits blame). The two actors have a natural, easy bond which is genuinely endearing. Manuel even becomes as keen for the boy’s good opinion (bashfully clamming up when Harvey reacts with shock to his talk of ladies). Captains Courageous allows Tracy to be as playful, loose and fun as he ever has.

The staging and design of the fishing boat is marvellously done, the actors having clearly (and impressively) done their homework around the tying of knots, casting of lines and rowing of oars. Lionel Barrymore gives a fine salty sea-dog (with a hidden heart of gold) as the captain, with Mickey Rooney echoing him as his eager son and John Carradine scowling as Manuel’s rival fisherman. There is a genuine sense of energy and vibrancy in all the fishing and sailing scenes (despite some, at times, less than convincing back projection), with Captains Courageous more than holding its own with epics of the sea.

Of course, you are not perhaps surprised that the film is also heading towards a tragic end, as so many coming-of-age tales do. But it’s extremely well-done and, thanks to the playing of the cast carries real emotional impact, not least through Bartholomew’s and Tracy’s poignant performances. There is also a mature and tender coda to Captains Courageous about the nature (and difficulties) of fatherhood, adding further depth to a character study of a young boy that genuinely sees him grow and develop in a way that feels neither sickly sweet nor forced – and has a real warmth and joy to it. Full of impressive staging and with a wonderfully played relationship between Bartholomew and Tracy, it’s a fine, heart-warmer turned tear-jerker.

Doctor Dolittle (1967)

The biggest crimes of this musical disaster is that is both hugely dull and thuddingly charmless.

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Rex Harrison (Dr John Dolittle), Samantha Eggar (Emma Fairfax), Anthony Newley (Matthew Mugg), Richard Attenborough (Albert Blossom) Peter Bull (General Bellowes), Muriel Landers (Mrs Edie Blossom), William Dix (Tommy Stubbins), Geoffrey Holder (Willaim Shakespeare X)

Sometimes you think a film can’t possibly be as wretched as its reputation says. And then you watch Doctor Dolittle. This musical monstrosity, charmlessly adapted from a series of children’s novels, nearly sunk 20^th Century Fox, losing millions (but still gaining nine Oscar nominations due to relentless lobbying by the studio). It’s not aged well: syrupy, over-long, lacking in any magic and, most damningly of all, crashingly dull over its bum-numbing runtime. Nearly everything either went wrong or is wrong with this.

Its plot is both tediously straightforward and frustratingly vague. In 1845, in the postcard-village setting of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, eccentric Doctor John Dolittle (Rex Harrison) has become fluent in every animal tongue there is. Some think he’s a crazy misanthrope – after all his house is packed with every type of animal you can name and he spends the day chatting to them and being rude to humans – but others think he’s charming. (Sadly, you may find yourself siding with the former.) He dreams of finding the legendary Great Pink Sea Snail (for reasons that are never quite clear) and eventually heads on a whimsical journey with some new-made friends.

Doctor Dolittle’s principal crime, perhaps the reason why it has so few defenders, is that it’s at heart a very boring film. It takes nearly fifty minutes for even a trace of the plot to kick-in, then it meanders around a side quest of returning a seal to the sea before rushing the final act about the Great Pink Sea Snail. Really nothing much happens, and the stakes feel tiny: there is the vague danger that the unflappable Dolittle might get banged up in an asylum and (I suppose) the outside chance the native tribe of the floating island they encounter might sacrifice them, but that’s about it. Essentially, the film assumes that to entertain the family market, a bit of whimsy, a lot of Harrison nodding and “I see”-ing to animals and a few tunes (some of which are hummable) was enough to keep the kids happy. It’s not.

Any poor child strapped down to watch this light-weight confection, puffed up with an epic run-time and large-scale sets, will find themselves wading through as much animal shit as the film’s stars did on set. There is, at a push, one memorable sequence in Doctor Dolittle: Richard Attenborough’s circus master launching into a high-tempo musical number as he marvels at the pushmi-pullyu Dolittle is trying to flog him (the animal itself is so painfully obviously the front of two panto horses stitched together, I can only assume Attenborough was stunned by Dolittle’s cheek). Attenborough sells the heck out of this (to be honest) bland ditty, committing no end to its high-kicking energy (I like to think Fleischer immediately thought “that’s the guy I need to play John Christie”).

Attenborough can’t really sing or dance but at least he can give a good impression of someone who can. Harrison doesn’t bother. Of course, Harrison was arriving on this fresh from the glory of My Fair Lady where he had worked out it was possible to become a rich musicals star by talking with a bit of rhythm. Doctor Dolittle is set up for him to do the same, talking through his numbers – the problem being none of them are as good as anything by Alan Jay Lerner (who was supposed to write this, before he pulled out). Harrison murders a series of songs that might just have passed muster with an actual song-and-dance man. The low-point is early on as “Talk to the Animals” degenerates to Harrison literally bellowing at point blank range to a field of sheep and cows.

Dolittle has been further set up for Harrison to coast by essentially retrofitting his character into Henry Higgins #2. Dolittle shares all of Higgins’ misanthropic, obsessive tendencies only this time without someone like Audrey Hepburn to make us like him. His character is infuriatingly inconsistent, not least in his attitude to animals. The guy respects animals so much, he won’t eat meat but is perfectly happy to sell the pushmi-pullyu to a circus but then rescues a trapped female seal from the same circus? (I really hope this isn’t due to any feelings he has for said seal. Harrison whispers what sounds suspiciously like a love song to the seal while it’s dressed as a lady, even kissing the poor animal. This is probably the only kids film you’ll see to softly imply bestiality is a way to live your life).

There isn’t really a single interesting or particularly likeable character in Doctor Dolittle. Presumably thinking every kids’ film needs a kid, Dolittle (and we) are saddled with William Dix’s Tommy Stubbins, the sort of vomit-inducing stage-school brat most kids actually watching the film would love to pinch lunch money from. Anthony Newley can at least sing and dance, even if he is stuck with a bland Orisih accent (not helped by Harrison’s envy on-set leading to several of Newley’s scenes being cut). Samantha Eggar is utterly hamstrung by playing a character whom no one involved in the film can decide is Newley’s love interest (age-appropriate) or Harrison’s (because he’s the star) so sort of makes her the partner of both of them (so Dolittle can also claim to be the first kids’ film that promotes polyamory, making it quite advanced).

Oddly the animals themselves feel like rather minor characters. I assume this is because the production wanted to use real animals (since the times it uses puppets, they are breathtakingly unconvincing) but real animals have the unfortunate problem of not being actors. The most prominent animal, an irritating macaw called Polynesia, talks fluent English anyway so the others hardly need Dolittle’s skills. This even caused a slight kerfuffle on launch: the promotion had led with pictures of Dolittle riding a giraffe, a scene first cut then hurriedly shoved back in as part of a pointless montage on the island, after complaints.

Most of all, Doctor Dolittle feels like a charmless chore to watch. Nothing is sweet, nothing is charming, the hero is frequently a stand-offish jerk and you get no sense anyone really wants to be there. Which is, apparently, the case as during its hideously long production, the animals caused nightmares (everyone got shat on multiple times, which at least prepared them for the film’s critical reception), the Wiltshire village used for the location collectively lost its rag as over-running shooting meant no trace of the modern world was allowed in for months on end, and Harrison (allegedly) behaved like a total tit (at one point Christopher Plummer was signed up to replace him, then paid his full agreed salary after Harrison agreed to continue).

Doctor Dolittle trudges, inevitably, towards its chocolate-box finale – but anyone still watching will surely long-since ceased to care about anyone or anything involved in this mess. A later stage adaptation did salvage some of Leslie Briscusse’s songs, but nothing else was saved from this disaster that killed stone-dead nearly everyone’s careers. It really is as bad as they say.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Nicholson gives a scintillating performance as a self-loathing soul in this searing drama

Director: Bob Rafelson

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Robert Eroica Dupea), Karen Black (Rayette Dipesto), Susan Anspach (Catherine Van Oost), Lois Smith (Partita Dupea), Ralph Waite (Carl Fidelio Dupea), Billy “Green” Bush (Elton), Irene Dailey (Samia Glavia), Toni Basil (Terry Grouse), Helena Kallianiotes (Palm Apodaca), William Challee (Nicholas Dupea), John Ryan (Spicer)

Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) is a man out of place. From a family of musical prodigies, groomed from childhood to become a leading concert pianist, he now works as an oil rigger out West. Turns out Robert isn’t content anywhere: he’s too rebellious for the upper-classes, too contemptuous to be part of the working classes. His life is one of running away, moving from place-to-place, avoiding emotional responsibilities, commitment and honesty, constantly seething with feelings he lacks the ability to process, unable to know what he wants with a self-destructive chasm a mile wide that swallows anyone that gets near it.

Five Easy Pieces is an intelligent, quiet, thoughtful character-study of a man who defies all possible labels and doesn’t fit comfortably into any pigeon-holes. Heavily influenced by the European artistes of the 60s, it’s a film that engages with class alienation in America more than almost any other, placing at its heart a man who refuses to compromise with anyone (to his own detriment) and whose selfishness and willingness to hurt other people constantly challenges the level of sympathy we are willing to give him. Despite this though, Rafelson has created a quiet domestic tragedy, with a man at its heart who is both unbearably selfish and unendingly vulnerable and scared at the world, who only knows how to react with bursts of resentful anger and whose instinct is to run away when things get either too tough or too involved.

Five Easy Pieces splits into three acts: the first sees Robert quietly snobbily bucking up against the working-class environment he’s chosen to live in; the second the long car journey to his family home while he struggles to find outlets for his tension; the third his return to the upper-class environs of his family where he can’t hide his contempt for their closeted privilege. What’s consistent is Robert is as constantly ashamed of himself as he is of his environs: a man of class and culture who longs to be working joe, a manual worker who yearns for sophistication around him. Robert’s tragedy is he can never square this circle.

It’s a role that calls for an actor at the top of his game, which it gets with Jack Nicholson. There is a moment near the start, where Nicholson does a little half-pivot skip while going round a corner into this home. It’s a small moment, but it’s a flash of something playfully real and endearingly childish that explains why we bear with him, even while he’s blowing things up around him. Nicholson’s performance is extraordinary. Robert has a constant simmering tension to him, but it’s a born of deep personal discontent. Nicholson perfectly brings to life a man constantly trying to seem assured, carefree and cool – but always with a nervous fear of what people think of him. Do the workers, and his friend Elton, realise he’s as posh as he is? Will his family look down on his waitress girlfriend?

One of the things Nicholson brings so brilliantly to Robert is his unease with talking: sure, he can barnstorm a self-righteous speech, but when it comes to actual conversation or talk about personal emotions he’s as timid and lost as a child. The idea of having roots is anathema to him (he’s perfectly willing to abandon Rayette when he thinks she’s pregnant) but it’s clear he also wants to belong somewhere. His tragedy is, as soon as he finds himself part a community all he feels is contempt for them – as if, like Groucho Marx, he can’t imagine joining a club that would have him as a member.

In fact, it becomes clear, Robert probably hates himself. He dismisses his accomplishments: inveigled into playing piano by his brother’s fiancée Catherine (a lovely performance of misguided sensitivity by Susan Anspach) he responds to her emotional reaction with dismissive rage, belittling his playing and questioning her feelings. It’s a mark, again, of the vulnerability and sensitivity Nicholson balances in this tempestuous, angry man that after this takedown we still believe she goes to bed with him. The tension of Robert’s loathing of himself never needs much to be released in anger against strangers: be it ranting at cars pointlessly blaring horns in traffic jams or an argument with a waitress who refuses to bring him toast that ends with glasses thrown petulantly across the floor. Nicholson never lets the pain of dealing with the world escape from Robert’s eyes, even when he’s at his most abrasive.

Robert’s inability to place himself in either world is perfectly captured in his relationship with waitress and would-be country singer Rayette, played with an endearing honesty and affection by Karen Black. If Robert could compromise, they would be well-suited: they both love music and share a sense of rootlessness. But he makes no real room for her. He can’t hide her contempt for her liking the wrong sort of music (country is no Chopin), he fills their house with little touches of art and scoffs at her inability to appreciate them; then he defends her working-class-honesty against his family’s snobbish friends while also being mortified by her artless, uneducated conversation among his family.

Fundamentally, Robert only cares for Rayette in relation to how she makes him feel about himself in the moment. She is a safe, undemanding comfort blanket – someone who will accept anything from him. His first instinct before returning to his family is to ditch her. Nicholson (in a superb sequence) shamefacedly mutters apologies between angry self-justifications while packing his bags – before a burst of self-loathing in his car sees him return. He then drags her across country only to park her at a motel while he sees ‘how things are’, clearly hoping she may decide to head home without him. When she instead turns up, he’s as ashamed of her as he as of his family’s wealth.

Like his siblings, Robert has never really grown up. His kindly sister Tita (a beautiful performance by Lois Smith) bounces around with enthusiasm, twiddles with a ping-pong bat with teenage glee while she flirts with her father’s nurse and seems utterly cossetted from the outside world. His brother Carl (Ralph Waite, very funny) has the distracted air of a natural eccentric, who has never had to engage with reality. But are they that different from Robert, who has a childish tantrum when he loses a bowling match? Five Easy Pieces suggests a difficult, distant relationship with his domineering father (now confined to silence in a wheelchair) in an astonishingly raw scene from Nicholson – but goes far from giving Robert a pass, his self-destructive self-loathing being far more of an inbuilt character flaw.

In fact, Robert suffers from an ennui that suggests he will never be happy wherever he lands – and he lacks either the self-knowledge or willingness to change. Above all, and it’s clear in every frame of Nicholson’s searing performance, Robert is a man who despises some part of himself so much, that all he can feel for those who show him warmth is contempt. After all, if he doesn’t care for him, why would anyone do so? It’s a pattern that is destined to leave him forever unhappy, forever hurting people, for ever lashing out. It’s a brutal honesty that makes Five Easy Pieces in some ways one of the bleakest, least hopeful of American films.

Ratatouille (2007)

Delightful and heart-warming cooking comedy with added rats – a Pixar gem

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Patton Oswalt (Remy), Lou Romano (Alfredo Linguini), Ian Holm (Skinner), Brian Dennehy (Django), Peter Sohn (Émile), Peter O’Toole (Anton Ego), Brad Garrett (Auguste Gusteau), Janeane Garofalo (Colette Tatou), Will Arnett (Horst), Julius Callahan (Lalo), James Remar (Larousse), John Ratzenberger (Mustafa), Teddy Newton (Talon Labarthe)

They say anyone can cook – but surely they don’t mean a rat can cook? But in Ratatouille that’s what we get: the greatest chef in Paris is a rat. Remy (Patton Oswalt) has a sense of taste and smell that’s light years ahead of his fellow rats. While they happily munch on rotten food, Remy longs for food that’s actually good. Separated from his family, Remy finds himself in the Parisian restaurant of legendary late chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett). There Remy’s natural instincts make him the secret brains behind the growing success of young Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano), who overnight moves from dish cleaner to chef. His secret? Remy of course. Can they keep their secret in the face of the suspicion of head chef Skinner (Ian Holm), Linguini’s growing romance with fellow chef Colette (Janeane Garofalo), and the threat of a damning review by feared critic Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole)?

All this comes together in Brad Bird’s delightful confection, a superb dish where every flavour is perfectly balanced and all ingredients are seasoned to perfection. (I promise this won’t all be full of cooking puns.) It’s absolutely wonderful good fun and on top of that, it’s a real heart-string tugging treat. Ratatouille takes a fantastical set-up (a cooking rat manipulates a talentless chef’s body through precise hair pulling) and then throws in ounces of carefully judged comedy with real emotional pathos. Ratatouille never fails to make you laugh but then hit you with tear-inducing sincerity. The film is a total delight.

What Ratatouille is really about is truth. Being true to yourself, embracing the things you love, and the struggle to find acceptance for that, be it from family or the world around you. It’s the subtext behind Gusteau’s message that anyone can cook. This is not about anyone being able to crack an egg into a pan: it’s about good food coming from a person loving what they do and wanting to share that love with someone else. Remy – an utterly delightful voice performance by Patton Oswalt – wants to experience good food, but as a rat the home of good food is always the place he’s most likely to find himself skewered by a trap.

Remy loves food in a way that the rest of his rat family – lead by his tough-as-nails father Django (Brian Dennehy) – can’t even begin to understand. They see food as just fuel. Who cares which flavours complement each other or even if its fresh? To them Remy’s extraordinary sense of smell is only useful for his ability to detect poison before it hits their mouths. And they can’t even begin to understand Remy might want more. But the very idea of heading to a kitchen – or interacting with humans who, to the other rats, get their kicks from slaughtering rats in their thousands – they can’t even begin to get their head round. Why can’t Remy be happy snuffling in the gutter?

Linguini (a very sweet, nervy Lou Romano) also has burdens of expectations that he can make a career in the kitchen. Anyone can cook – except for Linguini, who has no interest in (let alone flair for) flavours. The relationship between man and rat is beautifully done– even though neither can speak the other’s language. (In a neat touch, while we hear the rats talk – every human in the film just hears them squeak.) To Linguini, it doesn’t matter that Remy is squeaky vermin, what matters to him is that Remy is a master at what he does. But, Ratatouille gently asks: can hiding your true self make you happy in the long term?

Linguini’s success shows another side of being true: as fame goes to Linguini’s head, he starts to forget he’s the muscle not the brains of the operation. What will eventually alienate his growing relationship with fellow chef Colette (a wonderful Janene Garofalo) is not that he’s working with vermin to make the food, but that he’s lied to her about his skills. Something particularly tough since, like Remy, she has had to fight tooth and nail to live her dream in a male-dominated industry.

Accepting your true self and being happy in your own skin are themes our two villains also juggle with. Head chef Skinner (hilariously voiced with impotent rage by Ian Holm) has lost any love he once had for cooking, marketing his former mentor Gusteau as the face of a brand of cheap ready-meals (“with dignity” he absent-mindedly requests, as Gusteau is drawn as a burrito for the latest packaging) and his interest is only in turning a profit. The face of mass-produced, soulless fare, he’s the perfect antagonist of a film that praises lovingly crafted individualism.

And our other villain? Played with a beautifully plummy relish by Peter O’Toole, Anton Ego – drawn with a grey-faced, sepulchral chill – despairs that any food can meet his standards and seems to have forgotten somewhere along the line that excellence comes from love. Unlike Skinner though, Ego is (at heart) an idealist who may no longer quite remember what he is searching for – but will embrace it when he finds it at last. Ratatouille’s finest moment – always brings a tear to my eye for sure – is Ego’s being reminded at last what made him fall in love with his passion in the first place, perhaps one of the finest moments in Pixar’s long history.

Ratatouille’s emotional content and its themes of truth and acceptance are at the heart of its success, complemented always by the superb score from Michael Giacchini, crammed with Parisian inspiration. There is more life in this animated marvel than in hundreds of live-action films. And the animation is breath-taking: from the kitchen a marvel of pristine, gold and steel surfaces, via the sewers bringing back memories of The Third Man, to the visual imagination of Ego’s coffin-shaped office or the cobbled together rat colony (made from various bits of rubbish). Brad Bird’s flair (and Ratatouille is a wonderfully directed film) also carries across to his electric chase scenes through the streets and rivers of Paris, and the undeniable tension of watching Remy maneuverer his way around a kitchen without being detected.

Bird’s film though really succeeds because it has a warm-hearted love for all its characters and a heartfelt and appealing message for us to be the people we want to be, not what those around expect us to be. And who can’t relate to that? Throw in the sort of unexplained comic magic of watching a naïve young man having his body moved about by a cuddly rat sitting under his chef’s hat and with Ratatouille you onto an absolute winner. Bon appetit!

Wonka (2023)

Charming but light confection that repackages Wonka into a Paddington type figure

Director: Paul King

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Willy Wonka), Calah Lane (Noodle), Keegan Michael-Key (Chief of Police), Paterson Joseph (Arthur Slugworth), Matt Lucas (Gerald Prodnose), Mathew Baynton (Felix Fickelgruber), Sally Hawkins (Mrs Wonka), Rowan Atkinson (Father Julius), Jim Carter (Abacus Crunch), Natasha Rothwell (Piper Benz), Olivia Colman (Mrs Scrubit), Hugh Grant (Lofty), Rich Fulcher (Larry Chucklesworth), Rakhee Thakrar (Lottie Bell), Tom Davis (Bleacher)

What did Willy Wonka do, before the factory and the carefully stuffed golden tickets in selected chocolate bars? According to Paul King’s amusingly light confection of a film, he was just a guy with a sweet box and a dream, befuddled by the big city. A bright-eyed, naïve young man, Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) is swiftly bested by the Chocolate Cartel and conned into a life of servitude by his landlady Mrs Scrubit (Olivia Colman), after not reading the contract small print. But Wonka’s invention, good cheer and alliance with put-upon fellow Scrubit victim, orphan Noodle (Calah Lane), sees him turn adversity into cartel-smashing triumph.

It might be clear from that paragraph that the Willy Wonka of this film bears very little resemblance to the figure from the Dahl original who happily allows children to face dangerous punishments in his factory. King’s film has some flourishes of Dahl in its character names and eccentricities but, in terms of tone, it takes far more after his successful Paddington films than anything Dahl wrote. Wonka himself, in his accident-prone naivety, decency and fundamental sense of fair-play, is certainly a figure in the shadow of Peru’s most beloved bear, with the film swiftly also giving him a version of Paddington’s eccentric surrogate family and increasingly comic traps to get out of.

Wonka isn’t really Dahl and doesn’t bother to begin to explore how on earth the man we see here might become the character from the books. Does that really matter? I suppose not. I guess you need to judge each film on its merits, and while the Dahl purists are unlikely to consider this fitting for the great storyteller, I’d point them instead towards Wes Anderson’s gorgeous short films, which are a true blast of Dahlish delight.

Wonka instead is a sweet, bouncy, family-friendly musical with a hero designed to appeal to all ages, carefully set in a non-descript European-ish location that combines elements of multiple cities, regions and periods (so much is the film a higgledy-piggledy fantasia combination of places, all enhanced with CGI, that it’s a surprise to see Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera appear in the film’s conclusion unadjusted and intact). It’s packed with songs – which, if I’m being honest, are mostly clever and decent than catchy or memorable – and is set in a world where corrupt monks and police detectives will bend any rules for another chocolate fix.

At the heart of all this, Timothée Chalamet gives a sprightly and engaging performance. Chalamet dials up the eccentricity of Wonka, creating a character that is whimsical but caring, an innocent abroad who just can’t understand why people would be cruel or lie. Chalamet throws himself into some effective singing and dancing, and generally lands the role pretty much in the sweet spot between sickly sweet and deliciously more-ish. It helps a great deal that he develops a brilliant sibling chemistry with Calah Lane, who is street-smart and a lot of fun as an orphan whom the world has taught to be cunning and creative.

King crafts a number of set-pieces that fit this revisioning of Wonka as a song-and-dance man at the heart of an Arthur Freed-style musical. There is a fine word-play packed song (as Wonka searches for effective rhymes for Noodle) in a giraffe pen, a balloon-carried number in the skies and, best of all, a very funny work song sung by those poor unfortunates conned by Mrs Scrubit into a lifetime of debt. This surrogate family, by the way, is a neat illustration of King and co-writer Simon Farnaby’s trick of turning potential one-note characters into people you care for, ably embodied by Jim Carter as a stuffy accountant, Natasha Rothwell as a bouncy seamstress, Rakhee Thakrar as a nervous telephonist and Rich Fulcher as a past-his-best comedian.

Much like his Paddington films, Wonka takes place in a world of minimal threat. The villains are largely comic – Olivia Colman surely will spend most of the next few years duelling with Helena Bonham Carter to land toothy, sweaty grotesques roles like Mrs Scrubit – with the Chocolate Cartel in particular making a droll collection of smugly superior types, ably played by Paterson Joseph, Matt Lucas and Matthew Baynton. Their operations take place in a surreally complex underground base (under a cathedral guarded by chocolate-obsessed monks naturally), built around a vault full of liquid chocolate. Following the structure of both Paddington films, naturally this becomes the site of an act four heist by our heroes.

Wonka frequently feels a little too often like it is simply repeating and representing stuff that had worked well for King and Farnaby in the past. (You also feel that about the casting of Hugh Grant as an Oompa-Loompa – fundamentally that is the joke, although Grant delivers it repeatedly marvellously.) While few people do this sort of thing better than them, you feel Wonka offered the chance to be something more rather than a spiritual retread of the superior Paddington films.

It’s a film that never quite finds it own identity, or really finds a Dahlish uniqueness. It settles, happily, for being a feel-good confection, a charming series of scenes and songs delivered with just the right level of enthusiasm and glee by a cast who look like they are having a marvellous time. It’s charming enough and I enjoyed it, but I can’t say I loved it like I do Paddington 2. I can’t help but feel that’s because the emotional connection isn’t there. Wonka himself, repackaged as he is, is a little too odd to be as adorable as the Bear, and without really, deeply, caring for Wonka the film itself doesn’t carry the impact it should. It’s entertaining, but it didn’t win a place in my heart.

The Lion King (2019)

Soulless, heartless remake designed to make Disney as much money as possible

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Donald Glover (Simba), Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (Nala), Seth Rogan (Pumbaa), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Scar), James Earl Jones (Mufasa), Alfre Woodard (Sarabi), Billy Eichnor (Timon), John Kani (Rafiki), John Oliver (Zazu), Florence Kasumba (Shenzi), Keegan-Michael Key (Kamari), Eric André (Azizi)

We all like to pretend Disney is the custodian of our childhood dreams – that they exist on to give us even more gorgeous memories to treasure. Bollocks. It’s a corporate enterprise existing solely to create more money for shareholders. If you were in any doubt, cast your eyes across The Lion King, a bottomless collection bucket for the God of Mammon. There is literally no reason for this film’s existence, other than to lure people into the cinema for the express purpose of removing their pennies from their pockets and dropping them into Disney’s McDuck vault for the next time the shareholders want to take a dip.

Seen the original? Then you know the plot. At least Disney’s previous nakedly commercial “live-action” remakes of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin had the decency to introduce a few new plot elements so there was at least a little bit of surprise content. Even if it was tedious stuff like the Beast’s Tardis mirror to the past or the Genie’s love interest. Here the extra 15 minutes is made up solely of padding, dreadful unfunny comic and utterly unnecessary extra characters who make literally no impression (Timon and Pumbaa now run a sort of hippie commune).

Disney made huge play out of the fact this is a “live action” Lion King. That’s the selling point. So proud of this were they, that they were hilariously pissed off when the Golden Globes nominated the film for Best Animated Film. But nothing in this film is real, or live action – except, as Favreau later bragged, the first shot of the film showing the sunrise. Everything you see here is created in a computer: from the tufts of Mufasa’s mane to the grass that dances in the breeze. Far from watching a live-action film, this is an orgy of CGI wizardry that constantly pats itself on its back for the hard work and detail that went into its creation. Who cares if the result has no heart?

Because that’s the case. The Lion King is a soulless cultural abomination. It is almost entirely a shot-by-shot remake, with the only changes being the occasional introduction of new (less good) dialogue. The characters have the same conversations, with less snap, laughs and emotion. It’s the sort of film-making karaoke some people like to call affectionate homage, but instead feels like pandering and no-one having the guts to change even the slightest moment from the original. How hard would it have been to match the plot, but find new ways to film it? This however matches shots, camera moves, angles, edits – the whole damn thing. If you had a choice between seeing the Mona Lisa or watching a computer do a Mona Lisa paint-by-numbers, which would you choose?

It also feels like no one stopped for a second during their self-congratulatory film-making to ask one or two obvious questions. Firstly, I don’t think its racist to say this, but to my eyes most lions look the same. No real effort has been made to distinguish any of them from each other (with the obvious exception of Scar) – this particularly effects the lionesses who all essentially look the same. Secondly, one of the first things you’ll notice about most animals is that they have inexpressive faces that do not display emotion and that they have mouths that have not been designed for talking.

With an animated lion you can get round this. You can draw a look of fear on Mufasa’s face because you aren’t limited to only using the facial movements that a real lion can. Their faces can shift and change to match the emotions of a real person – they can look happy or sad, cynical or sarcastic, joyful or mournful. You can’t do this with a real animal, because animals don’t have expressive faces. The whole cast of The Lion King have stiff, stationary faces that never react to the emotional events around them. They often can’t even move their mouths to properly replicate speech (Favreau starts to get round this by having as much of the dialogue delivered off camera as possible).

What you end up with is a series of robotically cold shots of animals not emoting, mechanically going through the emotions to replicate a masterpiece. Mind you, perhaps it’s a good thing that the film tries to rip-off the original as much as possible because whenever it does its own thing it thuds face-first into a pile of animal dung. Pumbaa is given a hideously on-the-nose line about “I can’t stand bullies” (to replace his “they call me Mr Pig!” battle cry). Eichhorn, Oliver and Rogen litter the film with unfunny fourth-wall-leaning references which stink of over-indulged recording booth improv. A few songs are butchered (most noticeably Be Prepared) and several musical cues are reworked in a way that dramatically reduces their impact. Even the obligatory new song is lacklustre and weirdly tonally wrong for the moment it’s used.

The cast struggle, never quite sure how they should approach the content. Spare a little sympathy for Ejiofor, stuck trying to follow one of the greatest vocal performances of all time – but his response to this is to bend himself into all sorts of shapes to be as different from Jeremy Irons as possible. The result is an underwhelming Scar, who lacks presence, menace, or the glorious manipulativeness of the original. Other actors are flat-out fails, most particularly Eichhorn who turns Timon an unlikeable bitchey whiner. Only John Kani really does something that feels like a good mix of homage and original work as Raffiki – he’s one of the few genuinely African voices in a film that loudly “prided” itself on its mostly African-American cast, but still has all the lions speaking in reassuringly American accents – and casts white actors into almost every non-lion role.

But that’s a side note. The Lion King is a ruthlessly, exploitative attempt to make money. Which it managed to do to an enormous degree. So, I guess it hardly matters that surely no-one will be watching it in five years’ time. Or that its CGI created lions are expression-free automatons existing in a shiny world of non-reality. Or that the entire enterprise is a heartless, soulless, nakedly commercial stare deep into the belly of a conglomerate that sees people as nothing more than ATM machines. The Lion King is an abomination and will take pride of place in Hell’s multiplex for all time.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Warm Christmas fable will make you want to believe in Santa all over again

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Maureen O’Hara (Doris Walker), John Payne (Fred Gailey), Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle), Natalie Wood (Susan Walker), Gene Lockhart (Judge Henry X Harper), Porter Hall (Granville Sawyer), William Frawley (Charlie Halloran), Jerome Cowan (DA Thomas Mara), Philip Tonge (Julian Shellhammer), Henry Antrim (RH Macy), Thelma Ritter (Peter’s mother)

Santa Claus is a sweet little story we were told as kids, all part of buying into the magic of Christmas. How can we have been so silly as to think a jolly fat man with a red coat and flying reindeer delivered our Christmas presents? It’s the sort of fantasy adults are primed to burst like an over-inflated balloon. As a tribute to the earnest joy of believing in childish things, Miracle on 34^th Street should also be the sort of thing the adult in us can’t wait to mock. Instead, its warmth and good-natured sweetness carries you along and makes you want to believe.

It’s the build-up to Christmas, and Macy’s in New York is working overtime to bring the magic to its customers (and turn a tidy profit). Macy’s Day Parade director Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara) is relieved when Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) takes the place of a drunken parade Santa and then occupies Santa’s Grotto in the store. Kringle is exactly the sort of guy you picture when you think of Santa – and, on top of that, claims to be Santa himself, much to the discomfort of Doris who doesn’t believe in all that stuff and certainly doesn’t want her daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) to. But when Kringle finds himself in court, fighting against being committed to an institution, with only Doris’ boyfriend Fred Gailey (John Payne) to defend him, can he prove there is a Santa Claus and it’s him?

Seaton’s film is an adorable delight which is funny and good-natured enough to avoid the trapdoor of sickly sentimentality. It’s a film about adults getting back in touch with the giddy delight of believing childish things. It flags up every cynical objection – and then gently suggests we’d be happier forgetting them. After all, what’s the harm in allowing ourselves in a few harmless flights of fancy – why should everything be measurable? Kris Kringle comes up against the hard-headed: harried mothers, businessmen, judges and lawyers and wins them over with his genuineness and warmth. He makes people want to believe – and doesn’t that, in a way, make him Santa?

It helps a huge amount that Edmund Gwenn is perfectly cast. Piling on the pounds and facial hair, Gwenn looks the part but also is the part. His performance is kind, considerate and bursting with warmth and good cheer. In a performance full of light, unforced playfulness, Gwenn gets the level of sweetness just right. A squeeze or two more and you would choke on the schmaltz of the whole conceit: but Gwenn is so adorable the audience wants to believe in him as much as the characters.

Especially as this Santa melts some of the cold commercialism of our modern Christmas. Miracle on 34^th Street has a lot of good-natured fun at how Kris confounds the latent money-making of Christmas. On hire he’s instructed to memorise a list of preferred products to push on children. Instead he points mothers towards competing stores where they can get the exact gift they want or pick up better quality goods than at Macy’s. Of course, the concept proves so popular with customers that RH Macy is confounded by the goodwill it creates in his customers (and the huge sales it will lead to from their loyalty). Even other department stores start doing the same.

It’s one of the recurrent themes of the film: Kris brings out the best in people. Maybe not always for the right reasons: the shop-owners who want money, the judge who wants re-election. But it shows what benefit a little bit of good can have in the world. Kris also shows how little touches of consideration can change lives. There is a truly heart-warming moment where Kringle meets a Dutch orphan who simply wanted to meet Santa – although her adopted mother warned her Santa can’t speak Dutch. Much to her surprise, Kris launches into fluent Dutch, to the delight of the child. Miracle on 34 Street has several moments where the unstudied delight of children is captured to great effect, not least Natalie Wood’s delighted response to discovering the reality of Kringle’s beard (it also, to be fair, has several fairly cloying child actors).

Eventually the forces of darkness – led by Porter Hall’s twitch-laden store “psychologist”, whose bullying self-importance makes him the only person Kringle dislikes – insist we all put away childish things and chuck Kringle in an asylum. Miracle on 34^th Street segues into a Capra-esque court-room drama (it’s hard not to detect touches of Mr Deeds Goes to Town) which pits Kringle’s home-spun honesty against legal cold professionalism. The clash becomes a delightful headache, as both the Judge and DA confront outraged children at home who can’t believe they are putting Santa on trial. It’s a great gag: who wants to be the judge who rules categorically Santa does not exist?

Alongside these gently amusing courtroom shenanigans (with John Payne doing an excellent job as Kris’ inventive lawyer) the film balances an endearing domestic plot. There is the inevitable will-they-won’t-they between Payne and O’Hara (if there is a bit of slack you need to cut the film today, it’s in Fred’s pushy wooing of Doris, including corralling Susan). But also, can O’Hara’s all-business professional, who’s raised her daughter with a Gradgrindish obsession with facts, melt her heart and allow both of them to believe a little bit? O’Hara handles this softening with all the consummate skill of a gifted light-comedian, while Gwenn’s delightful interaction with Wood’s precocious Susan, keen to access a world of imagination she’s never really known, is perfectly done.

it becomes a film about the power of believing. In our modern age we become expected to only base decisions on cold hard facts. Doris has taught her daughter to doubt imagination as a weakness to protect her from disappointment in the world (she is after all divorced, quite daring for a 40s family drama). But its also made Susan less likely to invest in faith, to open herself up to hopes and dreams. Its recapturing the ability to believe in something and be enriched by it that becomes one of the film’s richest messages.

It would be incredibly easy to poke fun at the good-natured naivety of Miracle on 34^th Street, where businessmen are money-focused-but-decent and lawyers are amiably ready to indulge Kris with a smile. But it’s a film that zeroes in on an in-built nostalgia for simpler times in all of us. We’ve all been little Susan, sitting in a car desperately wanting to believe in the magical. It’s a film that demonstrates the eventual emptiness of cynicism, encouraging the audience to just put all that aside for 90 minutes and remember what it was like to be a child again. Throw in with that Edmund Gwenn as the definitive Santa and it might just be one of the greatest Christmas films ever made.

The King and I (1956)

Deliberately artificial adaptation, powered by star performers and sumptuous set-design

Director: Walter Lang

Cast: Deborah Kerr (Anna Leonowens), Yul Brynner (King Mongkut), Rita Moreno (Tuptim), Terry Saunders (Lady Thiang), Martin Benson (Kralahome), Rex Thompson (Louis Leonowens), Patrick Adiarte (Prince Chulalongkom), Carlos Rivas (Lun Tha), Alan Mowbray (Sir John Hay), Geoffrey Toone (Sir Edward Ramsey)

In its glistening, stagy exactness The King and I is the most traditional adaptation of Rodger and Hammerstein to hit the screen. A (questionably accurate) memoir by Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) about her experiences as a tutor to the children of King Mongkut of Siam (Yul Brynner) in the 1860s, was repackaged by the musical hit-machine duo into a charming culture clash, with a garland of unspoken romance across the top. Anna wants to help the king improve and develop his kingdom – but also clashes with his ideas about his antiquated ideas and (above all) his treatment of concubine Tuptim (Rita Moreno), who is in love with servant Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas). Can the King and Anna reach an understanding?

The King and I is one of the grandest, most artificial looking films you will see. No attempt has been made by anyone to even pretend we are not watching events play out on a series of massive, elaborately decorated soundstages. It all looks gorgeous of course, brightly coloured sets filling the frame. Even the scenes ‘outside’ – on Anna’s ship or the palace grounds – drip with ostentatious artificiality.

This impression is only increased by the mediocre direction of Walter Lang. A reliable studio B-movie hack, Lang sets the camera up in the equivalent of the front row of the stalls. While he can frame a scene efficiently (his centring in the final shot of the king’s hand is neatly done), Lang provides no originality, flair or real visual interest, all that supplied solely by the sets. He either misses beats or misunderstands jokes (the accidental flashing of the English ambassador is crying out for a beat of titillation from the old guy). It’s quintessential widescreen hackwork of the 50s, where the focus is on wowing the people with the money, bright colours and massive sets they couldn’t get from the little box in the corner. On that basis, a director who sets the camera up to get as much of that seen as possible all the time, fits the bill.

Besides, the film’s two most distinctive features didn’t really rely on Lang anyway. The King and I’s grand Thai-style ballet based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin was visualised and choreographed by Jerome Robbins (with Lang setting the camera stationary in mid-shot to capture it all). This ballet is, by the way, a masterclass of expressive visual originality (with its swirling use of masks, sheets and banners) that sticks out like a sore thumb in a film as visually flat as this one.

The other was of course Yul Brynner’s star-turn as the King. Brynner’s performance of the role on Broadway had transformed his career and years of honing it on stage meant he was the master of every beat of its eccentric energy. Brynner is magnificent, bombastic, proud, grand but also subtly playful, surprisingly timid and strangely shy. Brynner’s performance with its theatrical touches (the striking pose and the “et ceteras”) could be seen as overplaying, but actually fits perfectly with a man constantly, deliberately, putting on a show.

Brynner really shows the more thoughtful, quiet man under the surface, worried about his kingdom’s future. The earnest autodidact, who lies on the floor reading books. The eager-to-impress man who swots up on topics of conversation to impress the English ambassadors and hands a prompt sheet to Anna to work them into conversation. The careful flirt who only allows flashes of his romantic interest in Anna show. It’s a clever, grand but very human performance. Brynner had wanted to direct (and, rumour has it, partially did so) but settled for a Best Actor Oscar instead.

He also sparks extremely well off Deborah Kerr, buried under some truly might dresses (so heavy, that Kerr allegedly lost twelve pounds over the course of filming). Kerr turns a potentially stodgy part into a woman who is independent but not judgemental, forward-looking but diplomatic and very careful about allowing any expression for romantic feelings. Although her singing is dubbed by Marnie Nixon, it’s Kerr’s engaging sprightliness that carries a lot of the drama. She and Brynner’s chemistry also ensures the scenes between the two of them are by far the film’s highlights.

Most of the faults of The King and I can be traced to the musical itself. There isn’t much in the way of plot. The quiet will-they-won’t-they bond between Anna and the King is partly because that’s the nature of these things, but partly because the musical doesn’t really give them much material to work with. Virtually every character other than these two feels like either a sketch, a plot function or a stereotype, with the actors given almost nothing to work with. Impressive as the ballet is, it essentially takes up almost 15 minutes of screentime without advancing the plot or the themes of the film at all. Thematically the film explores very little, either on social progress in Siam or its place in the world. The film rushes towards a conclusion that feels like it comes out of the blue.

But then people aren’t watching The King and I for its social commentary or thematic depth. They are watching it for some hit songs, impressive production values and charismatic performers. You certainly get that and if the overall shape of the film feels rather loosely plotted and doesn’t go anywhere, that’s neither here or there. And of course, it’s a triumph for Brynner (who, late in life, dedicated his final years to performing the role, racking up over 4,600 performances), whose confidence and star-quality carries thing. Pretty, fun, not deep but pleasant – but then that’s Rodgers and Hammerstein for you and if that’s for you, this is the film for you.