Interminable musical that was, sadly, the last live-action
feature that Walt Disney put into production.
Apparently, a lot of people love it and remember it fondly, but I found
it so tritely cornball that I couldn’t imagine sticking out its full three-hour
running time. Not one of the songs is
memorable, and it’s so sickeningly saccharine that it makes Mary Poppins –
(the success of which this was obviously intended to emulate) – look like a Sam
Peckinpah film. Affable Fred MacMurray
is a fine actor, (particularly when directed by Billy Wilder), but Disney had
him do his ‘befuddled dad’ thing so much that it makes it hard to believe that
MacMurrary wasn’t just phoning it in most of the time. Worse yet is way-too-happy, way-too-smiley,
smiling-til-it-hurts showman Tommy Steele as the butler/narrator. His toothy mugging into the camera during the
film’s opening scenes is enough to really make you hate life and re-think being
a Disney fan. The film is based on a
true story about some eccentric millionaire who became a successful profiteer
when World War I broke out and whose biggest problem is deciding which entitled
rich kid his daughter should marry. How
all this warrants a three-hour musical is a mystery to me.
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