WINNIE THE POOH: SPRINGTIME WITH ROO (Dir: Saul Blinkoff & Elliot M Bour, 2004).

WINNIE THE POOH: SPRINGTIME WITH ROO (Dir: Saul Blinkoff & Elliot M Bour, 2004).

A A Milne meets Charles Dickens in a weird hybrid from a time when Disney’s Pooh franchise had seemingly lost both direction and appeal. At least for anyone above pre-school age. Yes, this is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol re-told for Easter with, despite Roo’s billing, Rabbit as an Easter banning Scrooge.

Walt Disney first filmed Pooh in the animated featurette Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1966). Two more featurettes followed and were combined in the movie length compilation The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Reitherman & John Lounsbery, 1977). While some bemoaned the Americanization of Pooh and the replacing of Pooh’s hums with songs by Mary Poppins’ tunesmiths Richard and Robert Sherman, the original shorts were praised for their charming, whimsical nature, delicate storybook-esq animation and general faithfulness to Milne’s text. The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, an animated TV series not directly based on Milne, debuted in 1988. While a success, The New Adventures... marked a distinct change of tone for Pooh. Gone is the innocent charm of the featurettes and of Milne’s tales upon which they were based. Insecurity and doubt have crept into The Hundred Acre Wood. This is a new neurotic Pooh for the modern age. Sadly this mood continued through a series of theatrical and straight-to-video features, most notably the dark and downbeat Pooh’s Grand Adventure (Karl Geurs, 1997). Most of the latter Pooh movies are surprisingly melancholic as is this feature in which, after cancelling Easter, Rabbit is shown, via some heavy handed moralising, the negative impact his actions have on his friends.

At 65 minutes Springtime with Roo is mercifully short. The animation by DisneyToon Studios, while not up to the standard of the theatrical product, is bright and colourful but on the whole this movie is a rather joyless affair. Those wishing to indulge in Pooh would be best advised seeking out The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh or, better still, reading A A Milne’s original literary classics ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and ‘The House at Pooh Corner’.

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Movie number 49: The Beloved Vagabond (Curtis Bernhardt, 1936).

A British made star vehicle for French actor/singer Maurice Chevalier, The Beloved Vagabond is a silly soufflé of a musical comedy.

Frenchman lodging in London Gaston de Nerac (Chevalier), forsakes the love of his life to a wealthy Count who will pay her father’s debts and save him from financial ruin. Returning to France with his lodger’s son in tow, he hooks up with a struggling musician (an early role for future star Margaret Lockwood) and the three of them traipse across the country getting mixed up in some foolhardy japes, the details of which will be forgotten by the time the end credits roll.

Chevalier is the only French actor in a mostly British cast. None of the other players (excluding Chevalier) even attempt a French accent and the end result feels patently fake.

Your enjoyment of The Beloved Vagabond will largely depend on your tolerance for Chevalier who, let’s be honest, is a little bit of an acquired taste. It’s an okay movie, somewhat submarined by its preposterous plot. It’s lighthearted with plenty of musical interludes but, ultimately, feels like it should be a lot more fun to watch than it actually is.

THE WARE CASE (Robert Stevenson, 1938).

The Ware Case is a creaky crime drama from the early days of the Ealing Studios; the second release from producer and studio head Michael Balcon’s tenure.

It features none of the hallmarks and belongs to none of the genres of filmmaking generally associated with later Ealing. Not a comedy in their classic mould, nor a wartime drama or social-realist piece, and is presumably a holdover from the Basil Dean era.

Based on the play by G P Bancroft, The Ware Case opens with a courtroom sequence set in the Old Bailey where we find society scoundrel Sir Hubert Ware (Clive Brook) on trail for the murder of his brother-in-law, the events leading up to which are subsequently told in flashback.

It’s lighthearted enough and some of the dialogue is humorous but a romp this ain’t. The central character of Ware is an unlikable fellow and the rest of the characters are all a little too one dimensional to really relate to. As an example of embryonic Ealing it certainly has curiosity value but, to be honest, I found the whole thing rather dull.

Robert Stevenson directs with efficiency but shows little of the flair for the fantastic he would display in his later career association with Walt Disney Productions. Responsible for Mary Poppins (1964), The Love Bug (1969) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) among others, he would become the most commercially successful film director in Hollywood.

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RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET (Dir: Rich Moore & Phil Johnston, 2018).

A sequel to a Walt Disney Animation Studios feature is a rare beast. While the 1990s and early 2000s were plagued with cheaply made straight-to-video sequels (a few of which did gain cinema release) produced by the television arm DisneyToon Studios, no feature since the 2008 release The Little Mermaid 3: Ariel’s Beginning (Peggy Holmes) has bared this indignity.

Other animation studios such as Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky have regularly released sequels to their biggest hits with varying quality, but I was glad that Disney had abandoned exploiting their product in this way, especially as their last decade has seen a run of exceptional original movies, arguably their best since the Walt-era features. So it was with some trepidation that I viewed Ralph Breaks the Internet, the sequel to the excellent 2012 original Wreck It Ralph and I am happy to report that I was not too disappointed.

Ralph Breaks the Internet sees video game buddies Ralph and Vanellope Von Schweetz leave their respective games in Litwak’s Family Fun Center and Arcade and travel to the internet, initially eBay, in order to retrieve a spare part to repair Vanellope’s Sugar Rush game. On the way they visit the noirish Dark Net and unwittingly unleash a devastating virus but not before a sojourn in hyper-real racing game Slaughter Race and an encounter with the Disney Princesses in a neat cameo via the Oh My Disney website.

Yeah, the plot is slightly convoluted! This is where Ralph 2 suffers most in comparison to the original movie; the simple story of bad guy who wants to be good is simply more appealing, not to mention more streamlined, than what is on offer here. It also has a mildly unsatisfying conclusion and a slightly muddled message, a little at odds with that of the first film.

Still, Ralph Breaks the Internet is a lot of fun and is visually spectacular. While this movie doesn’t quite live up to the original it is certainly well worth 2 hours of anybody’s time and I guess bodes well for the next Disney Animation sequel, due for release in November 2019; a little movie named Frozen 2...

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Movie number 38: A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964). With the distinctive opening ‘twang’ of George Harrison’s Rickenbacker guitar The Beatles hit the ground running, chased by a horde of screaming fans. The world is changed forever. This is no exaggeration. A Hard Day’s Night is undoubtedly the most influential British film of the 1960s. Possibly of all time.

Supposedly depicting an average day in the life of the band, the plot concerns some nonsense about the shenanigans of Paul’s grandad (an excellent Wilfred Bramble) and the disappearance of Ringo before a live TV recording. But who cares about the plot? We are really here for the music and it is sublime. ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘She Love You’ and the title track all feature in this long-form prototype of the music video.

American Richard Lester pretty much invented ‘Swinging London‘ with his cinéma vérité directorial approach. Alun Owen’s screenplay is both witty and surreal and cemented the band’s lovable cheeky chappie personas in the public consciousness. The musical movies of Elvis and Britain’s own Cliff Richard all of a sudden seemed hopelessly dated in the wake of this film which 55 years after release still feels fresh and inventive. Within a couple of years it’s influence would be strongly felt in TV’s groundbreaking The Monkees. It would also encourage Walt Disney to insert a beat-combo vulture quartet into his classic animation The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967). Gilbert Taylor’s crisp black and white photography is beautiful and John, Paul, George and Ringo, while no actors, all hold their own among the more seasoned supporting cast.

Lester and The Beatles would reunite once again the following year for the less essential but still entertaining Help! After which the quartet would ditch movies, forgo touring and record the masterpiece Rubber Soul taking the art of the LP to higher standards than anyone before them and probably since.

KING OF JAZZ (Dir: John Murray Anderson, 1930).

Conceived as a star vehicle for bandleader Paul Whiteman, and featuring Bing Crosby in his first screen appearance, King of Jazz is a spectacular musical revue, innovative in both its use of sound and early two-colour Technicolor; a process in which blues and yellows do not photograph but the reds and greens look lovely. Such was the care taken with the colour photography that every frame of the movie looks beautiful.

As a revue there is no plot in King of Jazz, rather a series of musical numbers punctuated with short comedy skits. While the comedic segments may not have aged too well, the musical sequences are as wonderful as they are weird. Highlights include the rubber legged dancing of Al Norman in ‘Happy Feet’ and some incredible loose limbed contouring from Marion Stattler in ‘Ragamuffin Romeo’. Best of all is a magnificent performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, rendered ‘rhapsody in teal’ by the two-colour process. Here the entire orchestra is seated in the largest grand piano you have ever seen!

Although an expensive failure for Universal Studios on release, the film has since been reappraised. Thankfully so, as there is little else like it in Hollywood history.

Is King of Jazz a masterpiece? Not quite. But nearly 90 years after release it still makes for fascinating, not to mention highly entertaining, viewing. Anyone with an interest in 20s/30s band music and especially aficionados of early Hollywood will find much to enjoy.

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