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WHERE’S THE HAPPY? Though the rarest roadshow out of Walt Disney, released via Buena Vista, is 1959’s The Big Fisherman, the second rarest is 1967’s The Happiest Millionaire, based on Philadelphian moneybags Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, and would be one of the last movies about which Walt was personally engaged. In lieu of Theatre of Absurd animation, this intended male version of Mary Poppins has the eccentricities of pet alligators, chocolate cake diets and, in real life managing to attract some 300,000 adherents, Athletic Christianity. Any movie featuring Fred MacMurray as a musical millionaire is going to be in some trouble from the start, and more than occasionally he brings forth the worst of Walt’s boyish Americana philosophy—heavy in promoting those bible class turtle-neck sweatshirts—and throughout viewers wait in vain to see whatever it is making him the happiest, yet, even as he evaporates right in front of us, he’s not the major setback. It’s Tommy Steele, an all-teeth horror show who proves the camera can’t hide the awful truth: he has the dumbfounding temerity to make ingratiation a bummer attribute, though the moviemakers could have chosen someone as bad or worse, like his twin Michael Crawford, who’ll do equal damage in Babs’ Hello, Dolly. As the elementary-level script avoids the issue of MacMurray’s fondness for the alligators and how they’ve been domesticated, there really isn’t much charm about Steele dragging old George by the tail. (Disney would never have allowed what might have given audiences some whoop-de-doo—a bit of Steele being gobbled up for lunch.) With three of the most deigning voices in moviedom—Greer Garson, Geraldine Page, and Gladys Cooper (who gets caught reading her lines)—you hope for some bordering-on-PG bitchfests and the closest to wish fulfillment is the G-rated “There are Those,” pitting nouveau riche Page against old money Cooper. In flaming orange, Garson must have called in Lucille Ball’s hairdresser; Cooper needed to fire hers; and Page, in swirls of blond curls, owns the fashion runway, on which Bill Thomas’s Oscar-nominated costumes permit her dowager not only to “love spectacle” but to be one. In addition to being draped in glad rags, she struts around in phony accent, snobbism and shoots squints of disparagement at MacMurray as he sings opera. The music and lyrics by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman aren’t memorable, except for the swiping: “Fortuosity” is pirated from The Sound of Music’s “I Have Confidence” and unabashedly lifted from both Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady is “Let’s Have a Drink On It.” While there are a few shots worth looking at (included below), the sets have an overbright conventionality, like 60s TV holiday specials, and the cost-conscientiousness as well as the boxed-in staging by hack director Norman Tokar helped to substantially reduce the movie’s box office lure as a hardticket. (According to Motion Picture Herald, M.P. Daily and Film Daily, it pulled in $5 million, roughly 1/6th of the gross of Mary Poppins.) Lesley Ann Warren’s first movie and in béret she channels Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass. With Hermione Baddeley, John Davidson (singing an impossible dream entitled “Detroit”), Joyce Bulifant and with Paul Peterson and Eddie Hodges who duet the number “Watch Your Footwork” and then wisely disappear. Though A.J. Carothers’ script is adapted from the Kyle Crichton play (starring Walter Pidgeon), movie lovers would not be wrong in suggesting some of the material and the idea it be a musical might have been borrowed from J. Lee Thompson’s 1955 musical comedy An Alligator Named Daisy, with Diana Dors, Stanley Holloway and Stephen Boyd. The roadshow version of The Happiest Millionaire running 172 minutes and available on DVD; other prints at 118 minutes, 141 minutes and 159 minutes. In Spherical. (Opening 10/11/1967 at the Michael Todd, running 9 weeks.)p> Oscar nomination for best costume design. ROLL OVER IMAGES
Text COPYRIGHT © 2008 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
