Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

 

 

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

 

In retrospect, an amazing thing about many of the films that have become beloved classics started out unloved, and this seems especially true in the genes of SF,F&H and other niche-audiences. There seems an assumed requirement of being cinema to be self-deprecating, even self-parodying, of offering only, “more of the same only different,” and that work that advances the form is distributed as a shark fin appearing in the placid waters of mundanity.

 

Within the niches, those that presented themselves most respectably on initial release were the ones that did the worst financially during their first run, while the unapologetically derivative and/or bluntly exploitive always knows where to find an audience. Still, the respectable do often find their audiences later. Suspensers like “Night of the Hunter” (1955) and “Peeping Tom” (1960) were reviled by critics, financial disasters, and damaged the careers of their Directors, but are now hailed Masterpeices. There are Children’s Films that are now classics, like “The Wizard of Oz” (1936) and this one, which had greater critical support, but though they didn’t lose money, they did unimpressively in their initial box office; in this case so unimpressively that Paramount Pictures decided against renewing its distribution deal when it expired seven years after its release. But like “The Wizard of …” TV turned this film into an annual family event, and now both films “Classic” status is permanently secured.

 

I’ve loved this film since childhood, and I know so will the very young of today. It is scary in places, but all Children’s Films should be scary in places, but this one’s appeal is more deeply, conceptually, dark -- it invites us to passively, gleefully, participate in acts of punitive and even corrupt Moralismisms. Children are Sadists, and this film understands that better than almost any other. Despite the changes in content and tone from the original book, this movie reflects Roald Dahl’s Misanthropic universe far better than any of his other film scripts. Dahl’s TV scripts are mostly based on his short stories, and were uniquely exquisite exercises in savage Sardonics (example “Tales of the Unexpected” (first aired 1979); but his movie scripts like “You Only Live Twice” (1967) , “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” (1968), & “The Night Digger” (1971) are all adaptations of the works of others, and did not share the same contempt for the shallowness of human ambition and disregard of idea that compassion that made his own work so deliciously wicked.

 

Ironically, though this most Dahl of all Dahl movie scripts, was largely the work of another. Dahl couldn’t make the studio’s deadlines so an uncredited David Seltzer penned most of what we see and hear. An enraged Dahl disowned the whole enterprise because he didn’t get to choose the Actor playing Willy Wonka (he would’ve preferred Spike Milligan over Gene Wilder), disliked the shift of emphasis off the book’s title character of the book, titled “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964) onto Character Willie Wonka, and disliked the changes in the ending (note: the ending wasn’t changed very much). It is for this reason that the book’s sequel “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator” (1972) will never be adapted to film.

 

I find it shocking how a lot of reviews don’t seem to get how nasty this film is at heart. Read these excerpts from “Top 10 reasons why ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ belongs on every Christian family’s must-see list,” from the on-line reviewer, “Christian Spotlight on Movies”:

 

“It is based on Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book with timeless ‘message’ that easily carries over to Bible stories.”

 

(Maybe because Bible stories like Noah’s Ark and Sodom & Gomorrah where God proves himself to a petulant, Genocidal, Monster.)

 

“Numerous social themes, most prominently the need for parental discipline.”

 

(Any person who believes that this film has anything to say about appropriate discipline of developing personalities should be sterilized and given long prison sentences for the good of a sustainable civilization.)

 

The film’s Moral arbiter is Willy himself, he’s deceitful, cruel, and capricious, a Mephistopheles who exploits both minor Character Flaws and very real Desperation to quite deliberately to lead strangers to their wildly excessive, humiliating destruction. He is also, by far, the most lovable person in the film.

 

And the film is almost halfway through before he is introduced. Before his appearance, we are given a picture of the difficult life of 14 year-old Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) whose extended family, notably without a father figure, is burdened with a lot of very old people, and live in farcically abject poverty. With notable skill, the filmmakers make their lives repellent, without ever losing their firm grip on sympathy and comedy; it’s one of those rare occasions in film manages in the same gesture to keep poverty both unsentimentalized and undehumanizing. Charlie has little to look forward to until bet his future on the most improbable of dreams--winning a Lottery.

 

Within the wrappers of a popular chocolate bar are randomly (or perhaps magically) are five golden tickets, and one of the five bearers of said ticket will inherit Willy’s vast, Corporate Empire. The early sections of the film is dominated with deft satire of the out-of-control media coverage of the world-wide frenzy to pursue the pipe-dream, the craven conduct it inspires. Willy, a Howard-Hughes-like mysterious recluse, has willed that all five tickets land in the hands of children, and despite attempts by corrupt adults, that’s exactly what happens. But as the tale unfolds, Charlie and the other four ticket holders collectively prove that there is no real Innocence among children, they are just as corruptible as their parents. It is unsurprising that Englishman like Dahl chose to make fully half of the worst children the world from the USA (Denise Nickerson plays Violet Beauregarde from Miles City, Montana & Paris Themmen plays Mike Teavee from Marble Falls, Arizona) while there’s only one bad German and English girl (Michael Bollner plays Augustus Gloop from Dusselheim, Germany & Julie Dawn Cole plays Veruca Salt from Buckinghamshire, England), you see, in real-life Dahl a proud British snob, a spy during WWII, and likely persnippity about the fact that the Brits need their Former Colony to save their bacon. Meanwhile the nicer Charlie is of ambiguous nationality (though I think he’s supposed to be English, the young actor is a Texan, and much of the location shooting was in Nördlingen, Bavaria).

 

The film is blessed by fine performance all around, but three stand-out, Wilder as Willie and two of those three are Child Actors. Ostrum is strikingly handsome and surprisingly believable as the (compared to the others) innocent Charlie, his performance he rises above the threat of becoming saccharine. He is one of only two children that gets a his/her own song in the movie, "I've Got A Golden Ticket," which views collective aspirations in the film’s first half warmly, a stark contrast to pretty much everything else we’d seen. After this film, he as was instantly in high demand as an actor, but this would prove to be his only film role, even at that tender age he decided he didn’t like the profession and grew up to become a Veterinarian.

 

On the other end the spectrum is Julie Dan Cole as Veruca, who is wicked good as the worst of the lot. She’s a surly, self-centered, spoiled brat who rudely demands instant satisfaction for a myriad of facile desires from her hen-pecked father (Roy Kinnear). She’s hilariously selfish, a delight to watch even though you know if she was really in the room with you, you’d want her dead. As she exits the film (dropped down a garbage shoot into an incinerator) she get’s to be the only other child with her own song, a marvelous Anthem to Narcissism and Impulsiveness called, "I Want It Now."

 

The five children, each with one parent or guardian, appear at the doors of the shuttered and mysterious Wonka factory. It had been introduced earlier in the film, Charlie lives quite near it, and was presented as a place of dark mystery. In the first scenes a beggar by the gates had scarily intoned:

 

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushing glen,

We dare not go a hunting,

For fear of little men.

You see, nobody ever goes in...

And nobody ever comes out.

 

But on the day of the factory’s reopening, the mood is celebratory, with music and applause as the gates open. And then our first image of the mysterious Wonka...

 

The celebration falters as we see a lone, bent, frail old man limping towards the crowd, uncertainly supporting himself with a cane. The children are unable to hide their disappointment and the grown-ups look confused and concerned. Then, Willy’s cane gets stuck in the cobblestones of the drive, he loses him balance, falls forward...

 

And triumphantly somersaults back to his feet, revealing a virile young man with a wide, exuberant smile.

 

Producer David L. Wolper and Director Mel Stuart held Auditions in New York at the Plaza Hotel and both said they knew from the second that Actor Wilder walked in, he was the guy for the part. “He had the sardonic, demonic edge that we were looking for.” Actor Wilder essentially wrote the above scene as part of his negotiations with Director Mel Stuart. When asked why that prat-fall would be so important to his performance, he replied, "Because from that moment on, whenever I do anything nobody will know whether I'm lying or telling the truth."

 

This scene, and how it evolved in pre-production, demonstrates Wilder’s incredibly intuitive understanding of Willy’s Character. The whole second half of the film is anchored by this brilliant, Golden Globe nominated, performance. Willy was written to be devoid of empathy, unpredictable, very bizarre but also an articulate wit (his dialogue is peppered with reference to Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Keats, etc). What Wilder brought to the role that was the merger of a child’s breathless enthusiasm with anarchism, allowing the completely unpredictable Character to be clearly defined and an instant object of identification for the younger audiences. That identification allows him to remains un-Threatening to the children watching the movie, even though his is a Monestrous Threat to any child within his reach. Like his audience, he delights in his own naughtiness, but will not tolerate it in others. Repeatedly he makes half-hearted calls of admonishment to the children who break his rules, all the while eager for them to suffer their comeuppance that he is actively helping along.

 

The factory proves a Magical Wonderland, brimming with sight-gags and impossibilities. The coat-hangers are hands that come out of walls; a room that shrinks to a point because of forced-perspective, but then the door, which we’re surprised to discover is so tiny, opens into a massive antechamber; an office containing halves of everything including a roll-down desk, a chair, a file cabinet and a clock; an interior garden with a rolling green pasture, oversized mushrooms, lollipop trees and a river of chocolate, all of it deliciously edible.

 

Willy tells one of the children not to get too close to the stream and then “accidently” pushes him in. The boy doesn’t know how to swim.

 

After removing one child and one parent from the film, there’s a boat ride that proves the movie’s scariest moment. They go into a dark tunnel and boat’s speed increases, soon seemingly impossible fast, and Wonka, with a sinister placidity gradually mutating into a screaming fit, narrates his guest’s growing panic in a sing-song:

 

There’s no real way of knowing

Which direction we are going

...

Not a speck of light is showing

So the danger must be growing

While the fires of hell are blowing

Is the grisly reaper mowing

YES! The danger must be growing

 

The walls of the tunnel are filled with horrifying images: a chicken’s head being cut off, a centipede crawling across a face, a lizard eating bugs, flashes of death and decomposition.

 

Willy starts subtracting Cast members with the methodical dedication. This film came out only three years before the first true American Slasher Movie, “Black Christmas” (1974, from Canada) and definitely shares some of the elements of the “body count” movie aesthetic. In a Slasher Movie, where the Killer typically has no identity and the violence is heavily Sexualized, the Audience’s identification with the aggressor is created through camera work that mimics the Killer’s POV; with this “G” rated, family-friendly, version of Mass-Slaughter, it’s the warmth and generosity of Wilder’s performance that encourages us to Indict ourselves in the accumulating Violent Felonies. He earns our loyalty and eternal devotion, much like he has earned the same from the creepy, Slave-Labor, Dwarves in his factory, the Ooompa Loompas, whose orange skin suggests that safety standards are non-existent and they all have been inhaling massive amounts of industrial toxins while they happily sing:

 

Oompa Loopa Doopa Dee Dee

If You are wise you listen to me

...

If you’re not greedy, you will go far

And you will live in happiness to happiness too

Just like the Ooompa Loopa Doopa Dee do

 

Despite Author Dahl’s resentments towards the film adaptation, here he did bend to Hollywood. In the original novel, the Ooompas were a Slave-Race from “darkest Africa” and Dahl was unsurprisingly accused of Racism. In the film their Orange Skin and Green hair make them complete Fantasy figures. Dahl actually went back and revised that aspect of the book after the film’s release to save him troubles in the future.. Truly, Willy is our culture’s answer to Heavenly Leader & Eternal President Kim Il Sung who was so beloved by those he Starved and Murdered.

 

The wickedness of Willie is best demonstrated in the climactic scene, when Charlie discovers Willy is denying him his prize over the smallest of slights, a heart-breaking injustice to commit against a boy who has no future, and Willy arrogantly defends his capriciousness with the small-print legalese in a contract Charlie had never seen nor signed. Having been pulled through the ringer and then slapped in the face, Charlie feels compelled to identify with his aggressor and guilty supplicates himself before the Monster ...

 

Which brings about the happy ending as we find out it was just another one of Wonka’s Punitive Integrity Tests. Wonka gives Charlie everything he wanted, but only after obtaining proof that the boy was willing to grovel before him first. (Another interpretation of the film’s Moral is that Honesty is the Best Policy, but I’m not buying it).

 

Like many beloved Classic, “It’s a Wonderful Like” “Wizard of Oz” the film initially underperformed, and like those films I compare it to, it found new life on TV. Families watching it together on in one’s living room year-after-year became a sort of tradition. It took maybe a decade after its release to become the phenomenon it remains today.

 

But even from the beginning, it was a Critical Darling. It was nominated for an Oscar for “Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score” (losing to “Fiddler on the Roof”).

 

The big hit was "The Candy Man," a catchy tune that those of us who were children in the 1970s can still quote by more than forty years later. In the film sung by Character Bill, the Candy Shop owner (Aubrey Woods), but the version that became a Hit was sung by Sammy Davis Jr, who had wanted the Bill role, but turned down because he was so famous, he may have been distracting.

 

My favorite song though is Actor Wilder’s rendition of "Pure Imagination," which Wonka sings to Charlie after finally giving him the keys to the kingdom, and which got a surprising revival in the “Happy 5th Birthday Again” commercial for AT&T, which may be the loveliest ad in the history of television, though for the life of me I don’t know what it has to do with the product.

 

The film was a remade in 2003, I saw it, choose to ignore it, and so should you. A prequel was made in 2023, I haven’t seen it, but it got positive reviews.

 

Trailer:

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971) Official Trailer - Gene Wilder, Roald Dahl Movie HD

The boat scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zail7Gdqro

The above-mentioned TV commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPnKL_i2ya0