Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) – M. Stuart

I read the book (by Roald Dahl) to the kids and they were very taken by its wonders and its humour (and I hoped that its morality tale would sink in).  Therefore, I was curious to see how they felt about the movie version (the one from my childhood, not the later Johnny Depp remake) which I recalled fondly, despite some vivid early nightmares featuring Oompa Loompas.  I worried a bit that the movie’s images might come to dominate what they saw with their own imaginations but it seems not to be the case -- the kids voted for the book over the movie.  But perhaps that is always what happens when you read a book first?  To recap, little Charlie Bucket longs for a golden ticket that will give him a tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and a lifetime’s supply of sweets – but there are only five such tickets in the world, hidden underneath the wrappers of Wonka chocolate bars.  Of course, after suspense is built, Charlie does find a ticket and he and his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) are taken on a magical and sometimes scary tour of the factory by Mr. Willy Wonka himself, played with a serene sense of perfect ambivalence by Gene Wilder.  Wilder is easily the best thing about the movie, giving exquisite line readings (whether absurd or menacing or bemused), although the various rooms in the factory do have a candy-coated funhouse charm to them.  Surprisingly, the film didn’t seem childish or particularly dated, although the haze of nostalgia might be clouding my judgment.  I had forgotten however that this was a musical (apart from the scary songs sung by the Oompa Loompas after the bad children are dispatched with) and the various songs (including “Candy Man”) work to bring out the fantasy elements of the film.   Of course, the book didn’t have the songs and some of the episodes are different (squirrels not golden geese, for example).  Most significantly, Charlie and Grandpa Joe don’t break the rules in the book.  However, this twist does add more suspense to the film than the book and gives Wilder a chance to turn Charlie’s grim disappointment into ecstatic amazement, something that every child (and adult) deserves to feel at least once.