WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY 1971 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2014/09/willy-wonka-chocolate-factory-1971.html
Do kids really like watching other kids in movies and on TV? I certainly know I didn’t. At least not what passed for kids in the TV shows and movies of my youth. My inability to relate to that hyperactive genus of freckle-faced precocity known as the child actor contributed to my childhood aversion to Disney, so-called “family entertainment,” and basically any film or TV program which trained its spotlight on adorable, towheaded moppets. Hence, I was nearly in my 30s before I got around to seeing Mary Poppins, Pollyanna, The Sound of Music, or The Parent Trap; all movies I've come to adore as an adult (ultimately the demographic most invested in the sentimentalized idealization of that trauma-filled age-span known as childhood), but which held little interest for me as a kid because I simply saw no connection between myself and those miniature adult-impersonators I saw onscreen. Take, for example, the TV sitcoms of my youth: Beaver Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver was a pathological liar whose wobbly moral compass and iffy common-sense could be effectively shut down by the feeble taunt of “chicken!”; those ginger twins, Buffy & Jody of Family Affair were like these too-good-to-be-true, animatronic wind-up dolls; Dennis the Menace was a well-intentioned but nevertheless misogynist, passive-aggressive sociopath; and don’t even get me started on that mayonnaise-on-white-bread-with-Velveeta-slices Brady Bunch clan.
Either absurdly goody-goody or possessed of an annoyingly thickheaded inability to ascribe consequence to action, these characters may have warmed the hearts of nostalgia-prone adults clinging to a revisionist revery of childhood as a time of mischievous scamps getting into adorable “scrapes,” and wide-eyed cherubs spreading sunshine and rainbows wherever they went; but I might as well have been watching The Twilight Zone for all their resemblance to the pint-sized Gila monsters I went to school with in real life.
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Of course, there were a few rare exceptions. Given my own dark disposition, I had no problem with the refreshingly odd Pugsly and Wednesday Addams on The Addams Family; I took considerable pleasure in Jane Withers as the hilariously bratty antithesis to the sugary Shirley Temple in 1934's Bright Eyes (“My psychoanalyst told me there ain’t any Santa Clause or fairies or giants or anything like that!”); and was perhaps most impressed by Patty McCormack’s Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, who was essentially James Cagney in a pinafore. And of course, one of my all-time favorites was the 1968 musical, Oliver! with its ragtag cast of underage pickpockets, thieves, and swindlers.
If anything is to be gleaned from this, it’s that, as a child, I longed for an alternative to these antiseptic images of childhood just as my parents yearned for something beyond the The Donna Reed Show/Father Knows Best model of family. Sure, kids can be sugar and spice and all that, but kids are also self-centered, very sharp, and crueler than most adults would like to admit. And childhood, while certainly a (perceived) joyous and carefree time when viewed from the perspective of adult responsibility and stress, is nonetheless a very scary period of life, fraught with anxieties and insecurities. Redeemed by resilience, curiosity, and a limitless capacity for hope and dreaming, I've long held that children, in essence, aren't really that different from adults. Author Roald Dahl understood this, and that is why the ofttimes frightening, marvelously witty and acerbic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (adapted from his 1964 book, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory) stands out as one of the few children’s movies from my childhood I recall with a great deal of fondness. Here was a terribly sweet children's movie that didn't need the sugar-coating.
Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka
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Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket
Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a straightforward fairy tale - complete with moral and happy ending - that takes place in a world where the fantastic and magical exists side by side with the prosaic and practical; in other words, the world as kids see it until we adults start to stick our noses in. One day Willy Wonka, an eccentric, reclusive, candy manufacturer around whose identity swarms mysterious Gatsby-like legends, decides to open the doors to his wondrous candy factory to five lucky winners of Golden Tickets he’s hidden in Wonka Bars shipped all over the globe. The winners and one guest receive a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate. The winners:
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Germany The gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner) and his mother (Ursula Reit, who always reminds me of an off-diet Elke Sommer)
England Spoiled Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole) and her salted peanut magnate father, Henry (the wonderful Roy Kinnear)
America Ill-mannered Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson) and her pushy, used-car salesman dad, Sam (Leonard Stone)
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America Rambunctious TV-addict, Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen) and his schoolteacher mom (Nora Denney)
...and most deserving, poor-as-a-church-mouse Charlie Bucket, who takes his beloved Grandpa Joe with him (and not his hardworking mom, but more about that later)
The four initial winners of the Golden Ticket are all comfortably well-off children (save for Veruca, who's loaded) whose want for the prize stems largely from a kind of entitled greed indigenous to comfortably well-off children. Only poverty-stricken Charlie (who has to attend school AND help his mother support four bed-ridden grandparents) harbors the dream of winning the ticket to improve his lot and that of his family. Thus, with sweet-natured Charlie the parable's obvious hero, and rival candy manufacturer Arthur Slugworth (Gunter Meisner) the villain, the four “naughty, nasty little children” must serve as emissaries of the film’s moral (our behavior and our hearts are the architects of our fate) and as foils for their unpredictable and mischievous host, Mr. Willy Wonka.
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WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM I love the setup and structure of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The first half of the film being rooted in reality...well, a charming kind of storybook reality. After all, we’re asked to accept that Charlie’s four grandparents have not set foot out of the bed they all share for twenty years. The second half of the film is a pure flight-of-fantasy wherein a common childhood dream comes to life: a visit to a magical candyland that’s part Disneyland, part amusement park funhouse, and part house of horrors (adults tend to forget how much kids enjoy being frightened and gleefully grossed-out). From the start, the film does a great job of piquing interest in Wonka by having him discussed, Citizen Kane fashion, at length before he even makes an appearance. It also gives us a likeable and sympathetic hero to root for in Charlie, who’s saved from being a totally pathetic character by being blessed with a loving, if oddball, family. Conflict rears its head in the form of the other four Golden Ticket winners, who may be amplified versions of archetypal bratty kids, but, with the possible exception of Veruca, are not malicious or mean-spirited, just self-centered. (Even the awful Mike Teevee precurses questions to his host with a polite, “Mr. Wonka….” )
Touring the candy factory in the S.S. Wonkatania
The two halves of the film complement one another nicely. The first half is appropriately dingy and sentimental (bordering on cloying), setting the stage for the second half , which, in mirroring the unpredictable spirit of Wonka himself, explodes into a colorful, anarchic phantasmagoria that plays gleeful havoc with the genre expectations of the children’s movie. In fact, one of my favorite things about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is that it is such a sublimely nasty twist on the traditional tolerant celebration of childhood precocity that fuels so many films intended for children. Wonka’s factory‒ a place where anything is possible…an environment wherein the laws of reason, logic, or physics
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don’t apply‒ recall those marvelously anarchic Warner Bros. cartoons. The at-odds, adversarial byplay between Wonka and the kids evoking for me the comic clashes between Bugs Bunny (unflappable, always one step ahead, just a little screwy) and Daffy Duck (unchecked id combined with brazen self-interest).
While panic reigns, Wonka watches Augustus Gloop's probable drowning in the chocolate river with detached, intellectual curiosity. Mrs. Gloop's outburst ("You terrible man!") never fails to crack me up.
PERFORMANCES People are fond of pointing out that Roald Dahl was not very fond of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, no doubt due to the extensive rewrites his adapted screenplay was subjected to by an unbilled David Seltzer (The Omen), and the shift of the story’s focus from Charlie to Wonka. This point would be persuasive save for two things: 1) Dahl’s heirs stated he would have liked the 2005 Tim Burton version (a film I found to be irredeemably wretched, so, so much for tatse), and, 2) With rare exceptions, an author’s ability to write a book doesn't mean a hill of jellybeans when it comes to understanding what makes a film work (see: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and Stephen King). As far as I'm concerned, to place the focus on anyone but Wonka would have been sheer folly, especially if you're lucky enough to land an actor as inspired as Gene Wilder to take on the role.
Willy Wonka, as envisioned by Wilder, lives up to the alliterative suggestion of his name by being quite wonky indeed. Dressed in anachronistic high style, he sports a madman’s mane of wiry locks yet keeps his wits about him at all times; is enthusiastic and excitable as a child, yet remains unflappable and unflustered at even the most lifethreatening (to the children, anyway) occurrences; and has bright, inquisitive eyes that can be warm and paternal one moment, wild and certifiably insane the next. A genial host, he’s witty, sharp, sarcastic, and not particularly childfriendly, and seems singularly disinterested in being the surrogate parent and disciplinarian for the transgressions of his misbehaving guests.
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"What is this, a freak out?" The brilliance of Wilder's portrayal is that we expect the mystery surrounding Wonka to be cleared up when we meet him, but instead, it only increases. I don't care how many times or in how many ways Warner Bros. tries to wring income out of Dahl's book; Gene Wilder is the one and only Willy Wonka
Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974) would expose Wilder's comic genius to a broader audience, but even at this relatively early juncture in his career, his performance is nothing short of Oscar-worthy. Creating an unforgettable, one-of-a-kind character (his Wonka is loveable and scary, frequently simultaneously) Wilder is the main reason the film works at all, and the primary factor in why the film has endured for so long after its initial flop release. Thanks to Gene Wilder's ingenious brand of insanity, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has become a genuine children's classic. (Although Wilder was nominated for a Golden Globe, the film received but one Oscar nomination: for Best Original Score.)
Any fan of The Bad Seed should find Julie Dawn Cole's vitriolic Veruca Salt a sheer delight
THE STUFF OF FANTASY By the way, did I mention Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a musical? No, I didn't, but that's because I was saving it for this section. At a time when movie musicals were becoming as bloated as Violet Beauregarde at maximum blueberry transformation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory successfully bucked the trend toward entertainment elephantitis (as much as a film deemed to be a boxoffice flop upon release can be called a success) and came up with an appealing, bite-size musical that for once didn't overwhelm its story and characters. The songwriting team of Anthony Newly and Leslie Bricusse (Goodbye Mr. Chips, Scrooge!) reined in their usual tendency toward over-sophisticated melodies (although Cheer Up, Charlie, a real snoozer and always my cue to visit the snack bar, somehow made the cut) and came up with a score of tuneful, engaging songs possessing the
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simple, sing-song lilt of nursery rhymes and grade school. Best of all, each is staged in a clever, intimate scale that avoids bringing the proceedings to a halt and instead draws you deeper into the characters and storyline.
Director Mel Stuart wisely rejected the suggestion to expand the rousing "I've Got a Golden Ticket" into a large-scale production number that spilled out into the streets, a la 1968s Oliver!
Those around in 1971 can attest to the unavoidability of Sammy Davis Jr.'s grooved-up version of "The Candy Man" played 'round the clock on the radio at the time. And though it reached No.1 on the charts and became one of Davis' signature songs, its popularity and omnipresence failed to garner the song an Oscar nomination (for that matter, neither did the splendid "Pure Imagination") or boost public interest in the poorly-promoted film. (Willy Wonka's visually unappealing initial-release poster and non-existent marketing campaign clearly reveal that Paramount didn't have a clue how to sell it).
"The Candy Man" is sung by Aubrey Woods (here shown giving an inadvertent jaw realignment to a little girl who didn't know her cues) as Bill the candy shop owner. Both Anthony Newley and Sammy Davis, Jr. angled for the part. Once again, can we give it up for the wise decisions of Mel Stuart?
THE STUFF OF DREAMS I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in 1971 when it was released, largely at my older sister’s prodding. Then being unfamiliar with either Roald Dahl or the book (which I’ve since read it, and, as much as I love it, I find the film a vast improvement), Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory sounded far too much like Toby Tyler: or Ten Weeks with a Circus, a cornball 1960 film serialized on The Wonderful World of Disney that exemplified a great many of the things I hated about children’s movies. I was 13-years-old at the time, realism was all the rage, and the movies I most wanted to see in 1971 were Klute, Carnal Knowledge, Straw Dogs, The Devils, and Play Misty for Me; certainly not a treacly kiddie musical set in a candy factory.
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Those catchy Oompa-Loompa songs are near impossible to dislodge from one's memory
Lucky for me my parents put their foot down; it was either Willy Wonka or stay home. As this post attests, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was one of the happiest surprises of my youth. It's a children's movie made by people who, like me, had perhaps grown tired of the conventions of the genre. It's funny in a lot of sharp, adultcentric ways (the Wonka-mania vignettes are real gems), its dialog is witty, and its characterizations frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. And while there's a great deal of sweetness and sentimentality to the story, it never feels forced or phony. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory never ever made me cry when I was a kid, but now as an adult, each and every time I watch it, I get an attack of waterworks when Wonka, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe are flying over the city in the Wonkavator.
Nowadays, when children indulging in bad behavior are rewarded with reality-TV contracts or celebrated by YouTube hits; I guess a movie like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory really pushes a few nostalgia buttons of my own. In today's culture-of-cruelty climate, where reality shows teach us that the-end-justifies-the-means if that end is fame or fortune; I can grow pretty sentimental about a story where a little boy is actually rewarded for doing the right thing. Wonka: But Charlie...don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted. Charlie: What happened?
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BONUS MATERIAL Fans of Joan Crawford's 1967 circus epic, Berserk will recognize Bruno the clown (George Claydon) as one of Wonka's Oompa Loompas. Fans of Lost Horizon (1973) will recognize the dubbed singing of voice of Liv Ullman in that film (Diana Lee) to belong to Charlie's mother (Diana Sowle) as well. In 2013 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was turned into a West End musical. (Although the title suggests little or no connection with the film, the show's score of all original music does include the Newley/Bricusse composition. "Pure Imagination.") Available on iTunes. There are tons of sites devoted to trivia, production info, and hidden-joke theories surrounding Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. My favorite is the groundswell movement devoted to proving that Charlie's beloved Grandpa Joe is basically a selfish, lazy slob without a conscience. Precipitated by his first character-revealing response when Charlie is asked by his mother where he got the loaf of bread for dinner (suitable for a banquet, I'm sad to say): "What difference does it make where he got it? The point is, he got it!" and further exacerbated by his "magical" ability to get out of bed when there's something fun to do (aka, not work), a persuasive case is made against lovable Grandpa Joe throughout the web. Check out this link: Why Grandpa Joe is a Jerk , then, if convinced; join the "I Hate Grandpa Joe" Facebook page.
Copyright Š Ken Anderson
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