As Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is my all-time favorite movie, I, of course, eventually began to ask myself what other movies its director made. Much to my surprise, Mel Stuart had quite a range!
And much to my surprise, my loving this movie had nothing to do with my love for Willy Wonka, because, aside from a certain light touch, the two movies are nothing alike.
Elliott Gould plays a doctor that, on the surface, seems to have it all. He has a satisfying job, loves his kids, and has a pretty wife (Brenda Vaccaro, who has wonderful comic timing). Until, of course, he and the missus start to drift apart and he begins to have affairs. At this point in the movie, I thought my sympathy for the character would drift as well, but much to my surprise, I sympathized with him all the more because we see that deep at his heart, he is not a ladies' man, but a lost soul.
The editing by David Saxon (the same editor Stuart used in Willy Wonka) makes the story and characters all the more irreverent and funny, especially when stock footage is incorporated as punchlines to gags that could have just fizzled out. This completely caught me by surprise because, although I am well-acquainted with how important editing is to a movie, I had never seen a movie with a conventional story rise so far above its conventionality due to its editing.
At first, I found the sad, poignant ending unsatisfactory. But the more I thought about it, the more I loved it because it was better than a happy ending-it was true to the characters from the first frame to the last, and that is much more important. Nobody in the movie is really a bad guy, the characters just don't always get along, and this will ring true to a lot of people. This movie did not deserve its own obscurity.
(As a final bit of trivia, look for the moment where Gould reads Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to his kids! My guess is, Stuart knew he was going to make Willy Wonka at the time and put this in as an Easter Egg, but I just about jumped out of my chair when I saw this scene. It was also a perfect demonstration of the Gould character's love for his kids. He may not be perfect, but we never stray in our affection for him, because a man who cares for his kids is a hard man to hate...)
