Land of the Pharaohs (1955)

Land of the Pharaohs brings out the nine-year old child in me who once had an overflowing obsession with all things Egyptian: pharaohs, slaves, tombs, treasures, mummies, gods, goddesses, rivers, deserts, the Sphinx, and the Great Pyramids. I had never been to Egypt before (and have never been since, to my dismay), but I was amazed that an exotic culture such as ancient Egypt could ever have once thrived on the face of this old, weary planet. The Great Pyramids, with their impossible height and stupefying structure, are indeed one of the seven wonders of the world, yet there has never been a definitive explanation as to how exactly they were built. Howard Hawks was one of the many who were in awe of this strange historical mystery. We watch Land of the Pharaohs today, and it is hard not to share his fascination.

The film is not a favorite among Hawks devotees, who dismiss it as an uneven anomaly in his career. It lacks the sympathetic characters that normally highlight his films, while the overlapping dialogue that fans had come to expect from him is replaced by a dry, hard form of dialogue that has been celebrated in modern times as camp. Hawks, who regarded Land of the Pharaohs as a failure in the years to come, explained about some of the film's sillier dialogue: "I haven't any idea of how a pharaoh talks, or behaves, or acts, eats, or makes love, or anything. I was just completely lost."

Hawks started out by bringing in one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, William Faulkner, to write the screenplay. Faulkner, who was just as dumbfounded about Egyptian dialogue, requested permission to do what he did best and simply get the pharaoh to talk like a Southern plantation owner. Hawks said what the hell and thought that was a great idea. Then Harry Kurnitz stepped in, suggested that it would be more appropriate if the pharaoh talked like King Lear, and reformed Faulkner's dialogue. Further contributions by another writer, Harold Jack Bloom, changed the pharaoh's manner of speaking even more- until a point was reached when Hawks was left with a screenplay that went in so many directions, it was almost more confusing than the labyrinth of the pharaoh's tomb.

All the same, I look at Land of the Pharaohs and I listen to the dialogue, and I see and hear very little worth griping about. There is no reason why this film should have failed as miserably as it did, at the box office or during future receptions. At 106 minutes, Land of the Pharaohs is also just the right length. No doubt Hawks realized that the story was hardly worthy of the sort of lumbering three-hour treatment that had so equipped Cecil B. DeMille's epics at the time and, thus, the film was cut down just short of two hours. The ravishing musical score by Dimitri Tiomkin is used fairly often, speeding up scenes that otherwise might have felt as if they were stuck in the mud.

What we were left with is a film that is surprisingly fast-paced. Not once does Land of the Pharaohs fail to engage our attention. Peter Bogdonavich, on the DVD commentary, clearly leaves the impression that he is not a fan of the film, and remarks at one point that he and Hawks were in agreement on the opinion that, despite many outstanding sequences, the film cannot be defended as a whole. I beg to differ: I would consider Land of the Pharaohs one of my favorite Hawks films precisely because it provided him with the chance to step out of his less adventurous, more conservative outer shell.

The film is mainly circulated around the development of the first Great Pyramid (we never find out how the second one came to be). We are introduced to the pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), who enters the picture returning from yet another victorious battle- this one having gone on for three months total. Coming home, he is greeted first by his priest Hamar (Alex Minotis), who is in the process of writing down a chronicle on the pharaoh that is almost surely never to be read; and then his wife, the Queen Nailla (Kerima), of whom he loves ever so deeply despite the fact that she has yet to conceive an heir for him. "Well, have I changed?" he asks, upon emerging from a bath to cleanse the gore and grime of the last three months. "Not very much", replies Hamar, who adds, "you're one war older, that's all". The frugal, thrifty Khufu is optimistic: "I hope to age by many more before my time is come. More wars, more treasure." The same day, Khufu finally makes the grand announcement to all of Egypt that an indestructible pyramid will be erected in his honor, to store his treasures and, eventually, his body, once his reign has ended. He is only in middle age, and already he is planning for his journey to the afterlife.

Khufu, you have to understand, doesn't want just any ordinary pyramid. His pyramid needs to be one that cannot be entered once closed off, so that to hold off all grave robbers and, especially, treacherous employees of the empire. To his knowledge, every architect in the country is unfamiliar with such engineering, all except for the bearded slave Vashtar (James Robertson Justice), a captured enemy who had once orchestrated the construction of strong defenses to hold off Khufu's forces in an earlier battle. But Vashtar proves difficult to cooperate with: not only does he bargain hard for the freedom of his people in return, but he is also an atheist, and he makes life difficult for all who are above his low working class. Faulkner's characterization of Vashtar is a reminder of another Faulkner character- the bitter cynic Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who ruthlessly condescended to his family members in the aftermath of a sibling's death. The acid-tongued Vashtar is, similarly, not afraid to offend even Khufu himself, and suggests that it would be wiser to have his treasures dumped into the ocean instead of spending years building a pyramid to store them in. "I could make you wish those words had not been spoken", rages Khufu. A cool, emotionless Vashtar shrugs, "unfortunately, you have need of my talent."

Construction will take years. Once finished, Vashtar's plan is to have all passageways sealed off with giant stones, each with a gap in the middle. Then, rocks connected to the stones will be broken off to emit sand, causing the gaps to close automatically. The concept is so simple, and yet so brilliant- one that Faulkner, Kurnitz and Bloom invented themselves. The project excites all of Egypt, and millions of workers (in the film's case, 10,000 extras) leave their homes to come and help. When little progress is made, whipping men are brought in, and the process becomes an agonizing chore. In the film's most extraordinary shot, Hawks pans the camera so that it spins around the landscape for an entire minute and a half, as we get a good look at each and every one of the extras hard at work. There is a question of whether or not the shot could actually be described as a long take (a boulder that appears halfway through the shot and takes up the whole frame was probably an itching spot used to allow Hawks to cut and proceed later), but no matter: it is an unforgettable shot.

Khufu gets a few more wishes granted with each passing year- including the son he always wanted, the young Xenon (Piero Giagnoni)- but this is not enough to hold back his impatience. Then in comes Princess Nellifer, played by Joan Collins with just the right dose of icy villainy to make drive-in audiences giggle, and just enough drop-dead sexiness to give a Catholic schoolboy an erection to last a lifetime. She has come to the pharaoh in place of her country's offering, which would otherwise submit her people to starvation, and she feels that her flesh would be enough for the pharaoh. Khufu would rather have both her and the offering. She declares that he must choose. As consequence for insubordination, he rips off her cloak and has her sent down to the chambers so that the guards can punish her with a good whipping in her bikini, Princess Leia style. I suppose that this was Hawks's idea of a whipping fantasy. Or maybe it was the fantasy of Faulkner: it evokes one of his novels, the mainstream thriller Sanctuary, in which the sweet and innocent Temple Drake is kidnapped by the rapist Popeye and later horrifyingly submitted to his sadomasochist demands. Nellifer only goes through about 2% of what Temple Drake had to go through.

Nellifer gets it easy, perhaps, during a later scene when, after getting slapped across the face by Khufu, she responds by ravenously biting at his wrist. Suddenly convinced (or perhaps aroused) by her absolute committal, he waives the offering of her country, keeps her instead, and then makes her his second wife- a position she enjoys exceedingly. He opens up the main room of treasures to her but draws the line when she asks to take a set of jewels from his private domain. It is in this scene when Hawks, who has up until then kept the camera at a distance, gives us a close-up of a disturbed Khufu, and Hawks wisely reduces the rest of the film's close-ups only to similarly pivotal moments. It is also during this scene when Nellifer puts her smooth sexuality to good use, daring the timid guard Treneh (Sydney Chaplin) to remove the forbidden jewels from her shoulders.

Elsewhere in the kingdom, another sort of hanky panky is taking place when Vashtar's agile son, Senta (Dewey Martin), rescues an injured Khufu in the aftermath of a hazardous collapse of boulders inside the pyramid; and Senta- despite confessing his illegal knowledge of the pyramid's layout- is offered a reward, and selects one of Nellifer's female slaves, the rebellious Kyra (Luisella Boni). She refuses to cook for him or Vashtar's friend, Mikka (James Hayter), until they both insist that she is not to be kept as their slave; suddenly, she is springing into action, spicing up their soup with black pepper, garlic and bay leaves. It is only predictable that she and Senta will soon fall in love, and their romance isn't really developed- but then again, why the hell should it be? Obviously their youth and all that bare skin is bound to generate some sexual chemistry sooner or later. Mikka nudges Senta: "Maybe you didn't do so bad after all!"

Later scenes swallow the characters up in a perilous series of fiascos. Hawks smuggles in a scene of unbearable suspense when a charmed cobra snakes its way towards young Xenon, forcing the courageous Queen Nailla to commit an act of sacrifice. After this- an assassination attempt by none other than a jealous Nellifer- proves successful, Nellifer takes once step further when she sends her muscular servant Mabuna (played by an actor who, strangely, was uncredited by Warner Bros) to assassinate Khufu so that Nellifer may take his place, and rule as Queen. During this portion of the film, we realize just how cunningly Nullifer has all of the men in her life wrapped around her finger. Earlier we saw her telling Khufu to "choose" between her and her country's offering. Then she presents the ill-fated Treneh with the same dilemma: "Look at me, and choose. Either I am yours and you help me, or I go on without you. Which is it to be?" The choice that Treneh makes results in the film's only swordfight, between him and an ailing Khufu, while a pleased Nellifer watches from the shadows as the two men foolishly fight for her love.

Bogdonavich, in the DVD commentary, is admittedly correct when he adds that it is hard to care about who wins this fight. Both men are antiheroes, but unlike Paul Muni's murderous Tony Camonte in Scarface (1932) or Bogart's vigilante detective Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946), Hawks is unable to get us to care about what happens to either Khufu or Treneh not just in this scene, but at any time in the film. Although Hawkins's performance as Khufu is a commanding one, there is not enough madness in the character to allow us to sit back and marvel as with, say, Muni's portrayal of Camonte; and Chaplin plays Treneh as little more than a stupid sidekick who salivates over a set of T & A, and pays dearly for it.

Really, the most interesting characters in all of Land of the Pharaohs are Vashtar and Senta, the enslaved father and son who find themselves working to build a structure for one man, and find out for themselves how to survive in the midst of its centennial chaos. James Robertson Justice, as Vashtar, gives perhaps the best performance in the entire film as the radical thinker and architect, who daringly teaches Senta the layout of the pyramid and lobbies for the liberation of his people, even when he must face the possibility that he may or may not have to be locked up inside the pyramid once it is finished. Dewey Martin is effective, too, as Senta, who has witnessed the pyramid's construction ever since his childhood and grows up to be not an idiotic teenager, but an intelligent rebel on the verge of sexual awakening; the casting of Martin was wise because he had previously worked with Hawks on The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Big Sky (1952). Of the film's main characters, Nellifer is the only one who truly captures our interest, perhaps because of the real-life infamy of Joan Collins herself, or perhaps because Nellifer is one of the rare villainesses of Hawks's films who does a handy job of getting what she wants. Only at the last minute does Nellifer get her just desserts- in one of cinema's most famous climaxes of trickery and despair.

Despite Hawks and his own fans looking down on Land of the Pharaohs in the decades to come, we can at least somewhat be thankful that the Hollywood filmmakers who idolized Hawks would go on to cite the film as a reference for their own works. Scorsese recycled the love triangle of Khufu, Treneh and Nellifer- albeit much more successfully- for the love triangle of Sam Rothstein, Nicky Santoro and Ginger McKenna in his overlooked masterpiece Casino (1995); and Spielberg recycled the sand-in-stone technique for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), one of the many tongue-in-cheek moments in that film (and references to cinematic history) that was easily missed by oblivious young moviegoers. And even when Land of the Pharaohs may indeed be an anomaly in Hawks's career, I still wouldn't hesitate to champion it as one of my favorites of all his works. Like many a great Hawks film, it's expertly directed, beautiful to look at and, most importantly, it gets to the point. Asked once by Bogdonavich if Vashtar's final line ("We have a long way to go") was meant to foreshadow the fate of humanity, a droll Hawks- not one for subtlety- concluded, "Well... that particular phase of humanity".

Finian's Rainbow (1968)

I believe that Jack Warner was setting Francis Ford Coppola up to be the next Orson Welles when he hired the 29-year old film school scholar to direct Finian's Rainbow. Like Welles, Coppola didn't have much of an impressive resume at the time, but already he had been given the keys to the kingdom; and while it is true that Welles had a bit more freedom with Citizen Kane- he was allowed to choose both the project and the cast members- Coppola, whose only credit before then was the low-budget comedy You're A Big Boy Now, was still lucky to have the chance to direct a major Hollywood production.

1968 was the same year in which the rest of the still-undiscovered "Movie Brats" were busy slaving off on complicated independent features in order to gain entrance into Hollywood: Scorsese had wasted the entire year filming Who's That Knocking at My Door, which was so unmarketable that it had to be shifted off to sexploitation audiences just to yield any sort of profit; De Palma was working on Greetings, in hopes that the counterculture would point him to a promising headstart; Spielberg was vomiting every morning before trudging off to the humid set of Amblin; and George Lucas, hot off finishing his student picture THX 1138: 4EB, was suddenly out of work, and turned to Coppola for help. So, with a veteran cast and crew, a story that had dazzled Broadway two decades before, and a new friend in Lucas, Coppola was hitting the stride. Only after Finian's Rainbow went through a series of troubling production problems and, then, flopped at the box office (it was up against Wyler's Funny Girl), did Coppola find himself at the bottom again.

Coppola has had a habit of thinking negatively about much of his earlier films. Despite admiration from his fans, he complains that there should never have been sequels to The Godfather, that Apocalypse Now never quite turned out the way he hoped it would be and that, although there were gems in both the 80's and 90's, he felt bound by a studio system that was literally trying to break him down into a banal director-for-hire. How surprising is it, then, to look at the 2005 DVD edition of Finian's Rainbow, which is introduced by a merry Coppola singing the first verses of "Look to the Rainbow", with all the cheer and hamminess of a bellowing Burl Ives. You never would have guessed that Coppola went through hardships during the making of this film. Indeed, as we find ourself humming along to the classic Lane and Harburg songs- the unforgettable "How Are Things in Glocca Morra", the romantic "If This Isn't Love", the somewhat annoying "That Old Devil Moon", the catchy "When I'm Not Near the Girl That I Love" and others- we are left with the feeling that Finian's Rainbow is a film close to Coppola's heart.

Finian's Rainbow stars the great Fred Astaire, in his final Hollywood musical role, as Finian McLonergan, an enchanting old Irishman who leaves behind the "doom and gloom" of his homeland to find sanctuary in the States. During the opening titles, we see images of Finian and his daughter Sharon (a lovely Petula Clark) traveling throughout the New World as they pass by a couple of the Seven Wonders (the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon), and this introduction gives us a sense of the film's majestic scope. The truth is that these opening scenes were filmed not by Coppola, but by a young Carroll Ballard with doubles for Astaire and Clark; Warner Bros had denied Coppola the request to film the project in Kentucky, so the rest of the shoot was fixated primarily on the Warner Bros backlot (one of the leftover set pieces of Camelot was even reserved). However, this is never apparent when viewing the film, and Coppola successfully creates the illusion that everything we are watching is real.

After a long journey, Finian and Sharon arrive in lush Rainbow Valley, Missitucky, which is, not coincidentally, located about two miles near Fort Knox. Finian has a theory: if he can just bury a crock of gold in the forest soil, it will result in the sprouting of dozens more crocks of gold and, henceforth, the American Dream. The task isn't as difficult as it sounds because Finian already has a crock of gold in his possession, and he intends to bury it as soon as possible. The only problem is that it is a stolen crock of gold, and before Finian realizes it, he is being followed by the crock's rightful owner: the leprechaun Og (Tommy Steele), who disguises himself as a suspicious-looking shrub before finally revealing himself to a skeptical Finian.

"You can't be a leprechaun- you're too tall!", Finian muses. "I know!", Og whines, "and I'm getting taller!" Luckily, Finian has already buried the crock, and the McLonergan theory of economics is working just as he planned: he and Sharon have impressed the local vagabond Woody (Don Francks) by literally making money grow on the trees, thus saving Woody's land from foreclosure just in the nick of time. Soon, Finian has become the business partner of Woody, who begins falling for Sharon, and all seems well for the town. The only thing getting in the way, really, is the town's bigoted Judge Rawkins (Keenan Wynn), who doesn't like the fact that Finian and Woody are hiring African American employees; and that damned leprechaun Og, who does a Rumplestiltsken act by trying himself to make a move on Sharon.

If Finian's Rainbow tends to break out of its old-fashioned shell and feel rather modern in its filmmaking technique at times, this may be due to the choreography of the musical sequences. According to Ronald Bergan's biography of Coppola, Warner Bros had, at Fred Astaire's insistence, hired experienced choreographer Hermes Pan to stage the dancing numbers. Midway through production, however, Coppola, disappointed with the results, fired Pan and, then, took upon himself the incredible responsibility of choreographing the dance sequences himself. For the most part, the dancing present in the finished film is lively and seems professional, but sometimes Coppola's radical directing can get out of hand; during key moments of songs, he employs birds-eye helicopter shots and the frantic positioning of characters on trains, horses and treetops, as if to distract the viewer from what is actually taking place. To be sure, the dancing in Finian's Rainbow is entertaining throughout, but Coppola, who once admitted that he "knew nothing about dancing", is clearly a novice with this frenzied sort of musical theatre.

No doubt that when audiences attended a Fred Astaire release back in the day, they cared about one thing: dancing, and lots of it. At sixty-eight, Astaire looks great for his age in Finian's Rainbow, and his dance moves remain unparalleled; in his big number, "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich", we see him skipping down roads, climbing up ladders and piling up warehouse boxes, and we know right away that he hasn't lost his stuff. There's only one problem with Astaire's numbers in the film, and the fault is not that of Coppola, but of the studio: upon the film's release, Warner Bros made the mistake of blowing up the original 35mm print to 70mm, in an attempt to go from normal screen ratio to the widescreen ratio and, thus, in a few of Astaire's dancing numbers, the camera cuts off his feet. In the director's commentary on the DVD, we can hear Coppola wincing as Astaire's tap shoes come dangerously close to moving down and out of frame with each passing sequence. What fun is there in a Fred Astaire that we can only see from the knees up?

Aside from these flaws (and, perhaps, the film's overlength, at 144 minutes- perhaps about ten or twenty minutes too long), Finian's Rainbow is a great film; one of Coppola's "flawed great films", to be exact. Not only is it interesting for granting us the chance to watch Coppola slowly evolving into a Hollywood master, but it is also, quite simply, a damn fun story. When the original musical aired in 1947, it was considered ahead of its time for its support of black rights; twenty years later, it was now considered behind the times. LBJ had just plugged affirmative action into the U.S. Constitution, the Black Panthers had risen to power and the black people was a runnin' wild- in short, the protection of Martin Luther King Jr. was no longer needed. Surely Finian's Rainbow, as a tired old Broadway play, must have looked pathetic at the time. As a film, on the other hand, the story could be given new twists relevant to the times. Thus, the film's African American hero, Howard (Al Freeman, Jr.), an educated botanist, is wisely modeled by Coppola after Stokely Carmichael, and Howard is seen as a fearless patriot who can rally others to "sit" in protest when all else crumbles. When Howard grows a mentholated tobacco but fails to get it to burn when smoked, he takes up a job as Judge Rawkins's butler and, in the film's biggest laugh, decides to try out for himself the stereotypical "shuffling" movement, weaving slowly from left to right while a hysterically impatient Rawkins cries out for a glass of julep.

Rawkins himself gets a taste of his own medicine. When he threatens to foreclose the McLonergan property due to its employment of blacks, an outraged Sharon declares, "I wish you were black!" Her wish, thanks to the faraway crock of gold buried in soil, suddenly comes true, and Rawkins comes running out of his limousine and into the forest with a blackface even more ghastly than that of Al Jolson. In a sense, Keenan Wynn has the most fun in the entire film as Rawkins, as he goes from racist monster to life-loving spirit. Some of the most pleasurable moments of Finian's Rainbow occur when Rawkins teams up with a Bible-quoting African American barbershop quartet (missing its fourth member due to a recent "temptation"), and they heartwarmingly accept Rawkins as one of their own. Elsewhere in the film, Og, who has soon reached the point of being 90% mortal and still without his crock of gold, gives up on Sharon and instead lusts after the mute Susan the Silent (Barbara Hancock), whose presence occurs just in the right place at the right time- as Sharon is locked up in a burning barn with Woody on suspicions by the townspeople of witchcraft. When Og finally does find his long-lost crock, he discovers, to his dismay, that only one wish remains. Should he wish himself back to Fairyland, or should he remain mortal and instead make a wish to clear Sharon's name? There's a moment when he ponders the dilemna, looks over at a rather sexy Susan the Silent, ponders again and then, watch, as that horny, goofy grin appears on his face: "Fairyland was never like this!"

It's a joy to think about how far Coppola has come- the magic he has left behind in American cinema for over forty years now, his gargantuan successes and flops, his kindness, his bad tempers- and one can't help but morbidly gape at the fact that he has survived it all. In recent years, with Youth Without Youth and Tetro, he has finally found the chance to start making the personal, independent films that he was not able to make for three decades. That doesn't mean that one should regret the more big-budgeted, less personal films that he has given us, for many of them are and always will be spectacular. In the final scene of Finian's Rainbow, as a down-on-his-luck Finian bids a heart-tugging farewell to Sharon and the rest of the townspeople and heads off to the fields, listen on the DVD commentary as a bemused Coppola reacts to the sudden appearance of a Volkswagen on the distant road. Apparently, it was caught in the frame by mistake. The question you might be asking is, how could the guys on the cutting room floor miss a car as a big as that? I wouldn't know. Personally, I like to think of Finian's departure as the departure of the studio system as we all knew it, as the 1960's began reaching its close and left the executives searching in vain for the next generation of bright young filmmakers. Then, out of the blue, they found Coppola. In Finian's Rainbow, Coppola is the Volkswagen.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

The movies are so much more different when seen through the eyes of children. In our youth, we spend a great deal more time looking than we do listening, and the visuals matter more to us than the words. Every now and then it takes an animated film made for children to remind adults of this important necessity. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is one of those films, partially because the animation is so vivid and, partially, because the logic expressed by the characters is justifiably childlike. Winnie the Pooh and his colleagues, after all, started out as bedtime stories. When author A.A. Milne told his real-life son Christopher Robin of Pooh's adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood, he made sure to tell these stories with a child's interpretation of such adventures. When The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh was released in 1977, the filmmakers remained faithful to Milne's approach.

Take for example one of the first scenes in the film, when the Narrator introduces us to Winnie the Pooh. The Narrator starts off by explaining that Pooh "lived under the name of Sanders". Adults have their own definition of what such an expression might mean- but, to a child such as Christopher Robin, the definition is something more literal: it means that "Sanders" was a name pasted above Pooh's doorway in gold letters, "and he lived under it". So, rather than give a lecture on what it really meant to "live under the name of Sanders", Milne realized that it would be far easier to elaborate in the way that a child might interpret the expression. Sort of like the "Bedtime Worries" episode of The Little Rascals, when Spanky assumes that "kidnapping" is when "kids go to bed and take a nap".

Take, also, a scene later in the film, when we are first introduced to the immortal Tigger, who invades Pooh's home in the middle of the night. Tigger is quite certain that he is one of a kind. "Then, what's that over there?" Pooh asks, pointing to Tigger's reflection in the mirror. Tigger carefully observes his reflection and, yes, he even admires it. Pooh suggests that it may be another Tigger. But Tigger puts his foot down; it may look like another Tigger, but it just isn't. Tigger, like the average child, would sooner insist that he is correct than he would back up the situation with facts. For Tigger, it should already be obvious from the very beginning: he's the only one.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is a compilation of the first three original Winnie the Pooh animated shorts created by Disney in the 1960's: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (1966), in which Pooh unsuccessfully attempts to raid a honey tree and, later, finds himself stuck in the front door of Rabbit's house; Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968), in which Pooh first meets Tigger in the middle of a monstrous storm that is ravaging the Hundred Acre Wood; and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974), in which Rabbit organizes a conspiracy plot with the sole advantage of getting Tigger to quit his bouncing habit. Walt Disney himself had supervised over the first short film, which had been released the year of his death.

In fact, the studio's involvement with the franchise dated back to 1961, when Disney optioned the rights to Milne's books. It had always been Disney's plan to have the three short films released first, and then, once the public got to know the characters well, release a feature film in which all were combined. A decade later, after Disney had passed on and after all three of the short films had been released, directors Wolfgang Reitherman and John Lounsbery, who had also helped on the short films, finally proceeded to make Disney's original vision come true and release a feature film.

The film is so satisfying, first of all, because of the incredible voice talents. If Disney had not found the right voice for Pooh, how could we connect? The voice had to come from somebody who could speak in a dialect that was lacking in maturity but gaining in its requests for sympathy. So with great luck it was that Disney found Sterling Holloway, who, up until that point, was not very well known by audiences, although some might have known him as a familiar face (he appeared as one of the family feuders in Michael Curtiz's 1960 adaptation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). The timid-voiced John Fiedler, best known at that time as Juror #2 in Twelve Angry Men (1957), was selected to be the voice of Piglet, and in some ways found the character that his image would be associated with for the remainder of his career. Disney screenwriter Ralph Wright, who had contributed to the dialogue for Peter Pan (1953) and Lady in the Tramp (1955), was chosen to voice the moody donkey Eeyore. A young Clint Howard provided the voice for Roo. Other voice talents, including Junius Matthews as Rabbit, Hal Smith as Owl, and Sebastian Cabot as the Narrator, were hired probably because they had previously worked with director Reitherman on other projects (Matthews on The Sword in the Stone, Smith on The Jungle Book released a year later, Cabot on both of those films). Reitherman's son, Bruce Reitherman, voiced Christopher Robin for the feature film's release, since the character had been voiced by different actors in each of the three short films.

None of the voice talents in the film, however, exceed that of Paul Winchell, who more or less steals the show as Tigger. A former television star who had worked with personalities ranging from Dick Van Dyke to Lucille Balle, Winchell was, like Holloway and Fielder, a familiar face to audiences. But it was with the role of Tigger that Winchell found his calling. It is not an easy role at all; it requires the voice actor to talk fast, sing well, pronounce exhuberantly and add memorable sound effects. The average voice actor would probably struggle for hours trying to say, "TTFM, Tah Tah For Now!" with the most precise punch and effect. Winchell makes it sound easy. From 1968 to 1999, he was the unseen performer behind Tigger's voice, and during that entire period, his voice rarely sounded the least bit aged. Ironically, in his spare time, Winchell was also an inventor, and has been alleged by some to have created the first artificial heart (which the invention's attributed creator, Dr. Jarvik, has denied).

The three individual segments of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh are filled with sequences that you may remember from your childhood, or sequences of which you may never have forgotten and have kept to this day. Consider the unforgettable image of Pooh using a balloon to fly up to the nearby honey tree while disguised in thick mud. Other memorable images come to mind: a sinister little yellow jacket on a tree branch laughing at Pooh's misfortunes with a swarm of bees. Pooh's rear end sticking out of Rabbit's front door, which Rabbit curiously tries to turn into a moose sculpture. The inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood rallying together to rescue Pooh, and launching him clear out over the book's pages and smack-dab into the hole in the honey tree.

There's more. Tigger making his first grand entrance into the film by bouncing Pooh, hence confirming his statement that bouncing is what Tiggers do best. Pooh talking to himself in the mirror, armed with a cork rifle and directing his reflection to patrol the other side of the room. Christopher Robin throwing a "hero" party for Pooh and Piglet. Rabbit getting lost in the mist of the woods and growing paranoid at the constant noise made by a hungry caterpillar and a pack of bullfrogs in the dark. Tigger getting stuck up in a high tree and, after coming down, being humiliated after Rabbit bans him from ever bouncing again. Or the pesky Gopher (hilariously voiced by Howard Morris), who always pops up in the wrong place at the wrong time; when the other characters lambast him for failing to be much help, he always reminds them that he's "not in the book". The list goes on.

Of the three segments, The Blustery Day is unquestionably the finest. With its falling houses, raging floods and wild waterfalls, this segment offers the most excitement. Best of all, it includes the infamous "Heffalumps and Woozles" nightmare sequence, which, although quite clearly a clone of the "Pink Elephants" sequence in Dumbo (1941), is nevertheless a dazing mind trip at the heart of the film. Masterfully tuned by Richard and Robert Sherman (who also score the other many catchy songs of the film), this sequence features dazzling images of Pooh fleeing from a parade of Woozles in soldier uniform while Heffalumps dance in sticky pools of honey and the Honey Pots themselves instruct Pooh to "beware" of impending danger. Along with that, characters Tigger and Piglet are introduced for the first time. It's no surprise that The Blustery Day won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film- as a short film, it is close to incomparable.

One of the elements of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh that makes it unique amongst its studio predecessors is the constant habit of the characters of breaking the fourth wall. This device was hardly present in the three individual short films, but it is used in this feature film as a way of weaving the three stories together into one. Sebastian Cabot's grandfatherly Narrator gives us the impression that we really are turning through the pages of a long storybook, and each of the three segments is treated like one of the book's three chapters. When The Honey Tree segment closes, the Narrator is preparing to turn the next page until he is stopped short by a hungry Pooh ("I haven't finished yet!"), who then changes his mind when the Narrator informs him that he is in the next chapter. At the conclusion of The Blustery Day, when the Narrator reveals that the following chapter is going to contain "a great deal of bouncing", an exhausted Piglet panics and flees from the scene, claiming that he must get home and attend to unfinished business. Most cleverly, the Narrator even intervenes at a crucial point in the Tigger Too segment, right when it seems that there is no hope of Tigger getting down from the tree.

I was quite fond of the Pooh characters in my childhood, but at some point growing up I began asking the question: why is the Hundred Acre Wood so lacking in female characters? Some of us grow up falsely believing that Rabbit is a female, perhaps because he is a gardener and often acts like the angry old lady next door (or maybe because Junius Matthews's voice gives us the impression that we're hearing an actress speaking, even when it's really a male actor the whole time). After years of pondering this, I wonder if maybe the reason goes all the way back to Milne's books. When Milne told these stories to Christopher Robin, he was probably aware that young boys much prefer their heroes to be masculine, and would rather do without the female sidekicks- that may explain why the only female in the Hundred Acre Wood, Roo's mother Kanga (soothingly voiced by Barbara Luddy) just so happens to be a maternal figure. The Hundred Acre Wood, after all, is really just a universe that Christopher Robin has created in his own imagination, and for all we know, Christopher Robin isn't even at the right age to go to school yet. Girls are going to be a part of his later life- i.e., the part of his life when he'll be too old to daydream about the Hundred Acre Wood and will most likely abandon Pooh and his pals for good.

Now, that is the cynic's way of predicting what is to become of Christopher Robin and his relationship with Pooh and company. But the ending of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, animated by then-Disney animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, is a complete contradiction to this theory. They base the ending of the film on the final chapter of Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner, which depicts the final parting between Christopher Robin and Pooh (this same sequence was later recycled in the excellent 1997 direct-to-video sequel Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin). Because Christopher Robin is about to head off to school, where he will learn about such subjects as "where a place called 'Brazil' is", he tries to console Pooh by teaching him about the process of "doing nothing". Doing nothing, as Christopher Robin explains to Pooh, is when you respond, "Oh, nothing", when people ask you about your activities for the day, and then "going out and doing it". Pooh thinks that this sounds like fun. Christopher Robin further tries to ease the pain of this final parting by making Pooh promise to be at his side even by the time he reaches the age of 100. "How old will I be by then?" Pooh asks, to which Christopher Robin responds, "99".

What makes this such an appropriate ending for The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is that it is, in some ways, about the death of one's childhood. Like Christopher Robin, all of us eventually gave up childish things- and most of us, after reaching the middle school age, also gave up interest in Winnie the Pooh. Strangely, as we become adults, our interest in characters such as Pooh are revived all over again- not necessarily for the same reasons we had as children, but because we look at them through somewhat overly complicated views, such as this article of mine. We can't help it, though. Family authors are truly gifted individuals. They reach out to the youth and help them to take their first steps. Family filmmakers have to undergo a similar challenge, but with each passing decade the family films get more immature. Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros Animation and DreamWorks Animated Studios all sold out at one point. What if modern animators were to turn to the influence of Disney's original "Nine Old Men", including Wolfgang Reitherman, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas and the like?

Wolfgang Reitherman (1909-1985) was one of the underrated Disney filmmakers. Some would blame him for the decline of Disney's magic touch after the 1950's, which, indeed, was not one of the studio's highpoints. A few of Reitherman's films (The Sword in the Stone, The Aristocats, Robin Hood) are rightly regarded as interesting misfires. But Reitherman's lasting accomplishment of dragging Disney safely through the catastrophic Nixon-Ford era should not be ignored. The studio endured, and some of Reitherman's films rank among its best. 101 Dalmations (1961), The Jungle Book (1967), The Rescuers (1977) and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh are all great films, and the Reitherman-produced The Fox and the Hound (1981) was arguably the last Disney masterpiece created before the studio reached a brief dry spell in the mid-1980's. With The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Reitherman's greatest accomplishment was something rather sentimental: he made Walt Disney's dream a reality. He directed a feature film based on Milne's characters, and the whole world fell in love with them. Those who dismiss Pooh as just another childish thing, I'm afraid, have lost their imagination and need to go catch it. As adults, we have our own way of exploring the Hundred Acre Wood; there is no need for us to fiercly attend to our gardens and lock ourselves up in our homes the way Rabbit does. "Why did I ever invite that bear to lunch?", he whines at one point, "why oh why oh why?"