Born Free

Even though it's the Independence Day holiday in the United States, this being a Saturday TCM is continuing with the Two for One programming in prime time. Tonight's guest is songwriter Diane Warren, and the first of her selections is Born Free, at 8:00 PM.

Born Free is one of those movies where you probably know the basic plot synopsis already. And, to be honest, there's not a whole lot more going on in the movie beyond a basic synopsis. In the 1950s in what is now Kenya, George Adamson (Bill Travers) works as a game warden working to keep the national parks safe from poaching and keeping the locals from being harmed by wildlife rampagaing outside the parks. He lives in one of those well-appointed lodge-type houses together with his wife Joy (Travers' real-life wife Virginia McKenna) and a bunch of people working together with the responsible department for wildlife management.

One day out on patrol, George and some of his crew are attacked by a lioness and are forced to shoot in self-defence. Unfortunately, they discover the reason the lioness attacked was because she was a mama lioness defending their three cubs. It would be inhumane to shoot the cubs, so they take the cubs back to the lodge and start caring for them in the expectation that one or more zoos are going to come along to take the cubs when the time comes.

Everybody becomes attached to the cubs, whom Joy has named, with Joy becoming most attached of all. And then a zoo does come, but can only take two of the cubs. So the Adamsons keep the youngest and smallest cub, named Elsa, and continue to raise it. Elsa is relatively tame, but the freedom that the Adamsons give Elsa is the sort of thing that's bound to cause problems of mistaken identity. Worse, Elsa's lack of interest in hunting the other wild animals is going to disrupt the local balance of nature such that the wild animals can predate against the villagers.

After one such incident where Elsa more or less incites an elephant stampede, the government really starts to tighten the screws on the Adamsons giving Elsa over to a zoo. That, and there's policy that George is supposed to take a mandatory sabbatical away from his current posting. The fact that he's already survived a bout of malaria is another indication that the government policy might in fact be the right one. But in any case, it puts a pretty hard deadline on the question of what to do with Elsa.

Joy is horrified at the idea of Elsa in a zoo, so she comes up with the crazy idea that Elsa can be taught to hunt in the wild, and dammit, she and George are going to do just that so that Elsa can be integrated into a tribe. This is pretty much what the entire final third of the movie deals with.

Born Free is, as you probably know, based on a true story, with the book and movie coming out before the end of the Adamsons' story, which doesn't quite have a happy ending. The movie was filmed on location, which is a big plus, as the cinematography is mostly quite lovely apart from a few insert shots of wildlife on stampede. As for the story, a lot of people have called Born Free a family movie, a designation with which I'd largely agree. But at the same time, the story feels like one of those things that's clearly simplified like a young person's guide to history. Some people will find the story in Born Free to be a bit too pat and simple, although those people will probably not be children. Well, that is the children who can handle the fact that there are predator and prey animals and that this is shown about as explicitly as one could do in a mainstream movie of the 1960s.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Another movie that I recorded some months back is coming up on TCM today: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, at 5:15 PM. So I made a point of watching it to do a post on it here.

Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke) is a widower inventer in circa-1910 England who has a past as a racecar driver. But his car suffered a fiery accident and is now junk, so he's been reduced to various inventions, none of which work, while trying to raise his two children Jemima (Heather Ripley) and Jeremy (Adrian Hall) and living with a grandfather (Lionel Jeffries) who in the present day would probably be considered to have dementia.

One of Potts' inventions that has failed is a type of candy that unfortunately has holes in it, from the sugar being boiled to the wrong temperature, as Truly (Sally Ann Howes) tells him. She's a woman rich enough to have a car of her own and drive it, she having picked up the kids from the junk dealer since they were supposed to be in school. In any case, it's clear that Truly and Caractacus start off on the wrong foot.

On the bright side, it turns out that the candy does have some use to it. All those holes mean tht it can be used as a flute, making it a novelty candy. Potts goes to see the local candy manufacturer, Lord Scrumptious (James Robertson Justice) about selling the rights to manufacture the candy to him, which would bring in some royalties to the Potts family. It's here that we learn that Truly is in fact Truly Scrumptious, daughter of Lord Scrumptious, which would explain why she knows about candy.

Potts gets the money to buy back his racecar from the junkyard, tinkering with it and actually getting it to run, so he takes it down to the beach for a picnic with his two kids. Truly has shown up there as well, and the kids like her, not having a mother of their own. They invite her to picnic with them, and eventually Dad starts telling the kids a story about the ship that's just offshore.

The story is that the ship is a pirate ship sent by the head of Vulgaria, Baron Bomburst (Gert Fröbe). He's learned about Potts' car which is a magical car that has the power to float and fly, and he'd like that car for himself. So he sends of spies to get the car. They're bumbling, so they accidentally capture Grandpa instead, forcing Caractacus, Truly, and the kids to fly over in the car, named "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", to Vulgaria to rescue Grandpa.

Meanwhile, the Baron's wife (Anna Quayle), hates children, so she's outlawed them and all of the children are in hiding, which is why the villagers are horrified when Jemima and Jeremy show up. A toymaker (Benny Hill) hides them, and eventually helps Potts and Truly rescue all of the kids.

When Ben Mankiewicz presented this one back in July, he quoted a critic from, I think, Time magazine who wrote that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was "a movie for the ages... the ages between 5 and 12" and went on to savage the movie. I'd have to say that it's easy to see why a critic would write something like that. The movie runs way too long for a story like this, at 147 minutes. Albert Broccoli, who had been producing the James Bond movies, brought in the Sherman brothers from Disney to write songs for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and if you don't care much for Disney music, you're going to hate the musical numbers here. Unfortunately, I'm one of those people who doesn't care much for the Sherman brothers songs, which repeatedly bring the movie to a screeching halt.

Worse, what's supposed to be the fun part of the story, when Dad starts telling the kids about Vulgaria and the movie turns to fantasy, doesn't come until over an hour into the proceedings. I understand the need for a set-up to introduce Dad and Truly, but there's also a long scene at a carnival that could have been excised, along with one or more of the musical numbers.

Still, if you've got young kids, they may enjoy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And then irritate you for weeks with the songs.