The Wonderful World Of The Brothers Grimm (1962) Watching this again, we couldn't help exhaling a sad sigh for its producer, the legendary fantasy master, George Pal.........
After toiling for decades creating sci-fi/fantasy masterpieces for rock bottom budgets,("The Time Machine", "War Of the Worlds") Pal finally got himself a genuine top-of-the-line Grade A studio project........a reserved-seat-with-intermission epic, lavishly funded by MGM.......
Today, the film exists primarily as an odd curiosity......as one of two narrative fiction films that employed the complicated, laborious three-camera, three-projector Cinerama process......(the other being MGM's other reserved seat jumbo, "How The West Was Won".....
Cinerama, never more than a carnival show trick, was doomed from the start as a format to use for feature films. The camera shot its image on 3 separate film strips, requiring 3 separate projectors to throw the combined, synchronized image across a wide, curved screen.......
Close-ups, a major part of any filmmaker's tool kit, couldn't be done in a Cinerama camera, resulting in the entire movie photographed in medium-long shots.......(fine for Cinerama travelogues, but ruinous for storytelling movies, keeping the audience watching it from a distance......)
Even worse, the 3 in-synch projector presentation divided up the screen into Left, Middle, and Right......with the borderlines visibly obvious......and damned annoying. (Even when the image is re-assembled for TV viewing, you can still still see the triple-division) (After 'Brothers Grimm' and 'How The West Was Won', Hollywood abandoned the process itself, but retained the 'Cinerama' brand by shooting films in single camera Ultra Panavision, which still looked suitably impressive when thrown on to that huge curved screen.....and minus the damned tri-sectioning)
Unfortunately, Pal's epic had some other artistic problems in addition to filming with the ungainly Cinerama camera. His Brothers Grimm, the fairy-tale dreamer Wilhelm and nose-to-the-grindstone Jacob are blandly played, respectively by Laurence Harvey and Karl Boehm.......two colorless, uninteresting actors......(unless they're playing psychos, like Harvey in "Manchurian Candidate" and Boehm in "Peeping Tom")
The brothers' storyline, a rather skimpy thing about them trying to write a nobleman's family history, functions as a wrap-around for Pal's direction of three actual Grimm tales, "The Dancing Princess", "The Shoemaker And The Elves" and "The Singing Bone".......(studio war-horse Henry Levin directed the bio scenes with his usual machine-like disinterest)
So let's just deal with whole reason anyone would even watch this film.......the fairy tales.....
The Dancing Princess Lots of stuff to enjoy here.......the ever athletic Russ Tamblyn as a nimble-footed woodsman who takes on a King's challenge to find out where the Royal Princess (Yvette Mimieux) sneaks off to evert night.....(he faces a head-chopping for failure). And just like the Don Henley song, all she wants to do is dance, dance, dance. This one features a rousing Gypsy Camp dance number, glorious 'Mr. Magoo' hamming by Jim Backus as the King.......and the whole purpose of making this movie in Cinerama - Tamblyn's wild, ride as he hides on the back of the Princess's coach while it careens along narrow paths......the Cinerama equivalent of a theme park rollercoaster ride.....
The Shoemaker And The Elves Laurence Harvey pops up himself as the elderly shoemaker and to his credit, he's way more convincing as an old guy than when he's the supposedly over-excited Wilhelm Grimm. The elves, naturally, are played by George Pal's veteran troupers, the stop-motion animated Puppettoons and they're always a joy to watch.
The Singing Bone Pal loved directing comedy hambones and what a pair of them he had in Terry Thomas and Buddy Hackett.......playing a cowardly knight and his much put-upon loyal squire. (In our dream version of this movie, we'd cast these two goofballs as the Brothers Grimm too)
Terry and Buddy take on a beautifully rendered stop-motion dragon.....(primitive, we realize, when compared to today's CGI, but damn, this dragon sparkles!) And a wonderfully weird, slightly macabre windup......
In the finale of the Brothers Grimm section, we also fondly recall the sweet sentimental sequence where a gravely ill Wilhelm hallucinates a gathering of his most famous fairy tale characters......fearful of impending death, he assigns them all their iconic names....(Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Red Riding Hood.....the usual suspects)
It's a long, lumpy bag 'o toys, this movie........and we don't know how MGM ever expected kids would have the patience to sit through the largely dull Harvey-Boehm biographical scenes, but it still served as a cinema milestone for the unsung, under-appreciated George Pal.....even hobbled by the glaring flaws of Cinerama, his imagination, love of fantasy and gentle heart still shine through.
3 stars (***)
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