The best failed movie Disney ever made was The Happiest Millionaire. The talent is there and the movie begs to be compared to the practically perfect Mary Poppins, but Poppins has London and the Millionaire has Detroit.
QED.
How you can fail to entertain with Greer Garson and Fred MacMurray is hard to imagine. The music by the Sherman brothers is often as good as the best of Poppins (Fortuosity, Let’s Have a Drink on It, Let Them Go). He did not make many movies, but I challenge you to see Tommy Steele once and not find yourself fascinated. He is manic, talented, and funny looking. That’s a compliment, not an insult. Like Bob Hope, his physical appearance makes a person laugh.
Any given scene is brilliant (the first and last twenty minutes especially), but the whole is less than most of the parts. One gets the feeling that the dying Walt could never quite decide what they were trying to say. Mary Poppins is Saving Mr. Banks, but The Happiest Millionaire killed Mr. Disney.
I am reminded just now of this film because I just watched a more recent film by two of America’s finest: the Coen Brothers.
If you love classic Hollywood, then their most recent film, Hail Caesar, would appear bullet proof. It is a gentle homage to 1950’s film making. Some reviewers complain that they airbrush Hollywood blacklists about communists in the industry, but the truth is that they do not take communism seriously at all. Communism was killing millions of people, but Hollywood was worried that dupes for mass murderers like Stalin might not get another script writing job. The Coen Brothers paint these folks, aiding some of the most wicked people ever to live, as harmless goof balls selling out their country for ideas they did not understand.
At least that would be what they would be doing in a film with a discernable plot. This film is beautiful, each shot is like a piece of delicious boxed candy, but the movie is a box with chocolate, Turkish Delight, and health bars all in one package. It is hard to know what all the well shot scenes amount to as a movie.
Is it an homage to simpler, though no less damnable, sin?
Does it point to the power of faith? Or is it mocking faith? Probably not the latter, but whatever it has to say about the former is lost in scene after scene from 1950’s movies that would be more interesting than the movie we actually end up watching. George Clooney is bloated and pompous. . . heading to Shatner land while the rest of the “star studded” cast is wasted.
There is nothing wrong with the film and the last ten minutes is very moving, but that is all you can say. There will almost always be something better to do than to watch Hail Caesar.
Both films point to the necessity of the job that anyone who creates, including writers (!), fears: the editor. During my dissertation, the brilliant “first reader” put twenty pages in the trash can just by drawing an “x” through page after page. They were not needed.
Happiest Millionaire had no editor. Hail Caesar had no editor. They indulge themselves or at the very least try to cover up vacuity with volume.
This does not work.
It doesn’t work in our lives either. Less can be more.
God sent me a great editor in the lovely form of Hope, the fairest flower in all of Christendom. She presses me to concision and my failures are less than they would be if it were not for her. When she first started chopping away, her cuts made me sad. Good stuff got lost and columns don’t have bonus discs.
Then I recalled films like The Happiest Millionaire and stopped complaining. Less could be more. So it is with our lives. God edits and the cuts seem cruel, but they are for the best. Our lives are as long as they must be to tell our stories and no longer. He does not pad, add gratuitous pain, or play to the audience. God gets to the point, Paradise, as fast as He can.
He never overwrites.
Thanks be to God.
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