MadCap's Reel Thoughts - "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" (1971)

If you want to view paradise

simply look around and view it!

Anything you want to, do it!

Last for fifty years?

There's nothing...to it!

Yeah, that's right. This year marks the 50th anniversary since the North American release of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory! Granted, of course, I'm about five days late on the delivery, but what do you want? Schedules are a pain!

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a film based on the Roald Dahl children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As is fitting for a film production about a children's book, the idea for the film came from a child. Specifically, producer Mel Stuart's daughter Madeleine brought the book to him and asked him to make a film out of it. Working together with long-time collaborator David L. Wolper, they managed to raise the capital needed for the film by essentially conning Quaker Oats into buying the rights to the book in order to make the film and then promote a candy bar. Yes, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is not the only film that was started over a candy bar: Willy Wonka pulled it off fourteen years earlier and in a far less meta sense than this joke actually covers.

This is the reason why the film is called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, all for the sake of promotion. Movies are magic, everybody!

In an interesting break from tradition, Roald Dahl was even placed in charge of writing the screenplay with both he and Wolper coming to the decision that it would be a musical! Thus, the race was on to find the perfect man to play Willy Wonka. The producers looked into people like Fred Astaire, Joel Grey, and even the then-sitting Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, which really would have been crossing the streams in more than one way had he been cast.

Even the original six members of Monty Python were trying to get the role, although none of them were believed to have the level of fame necessary for the international audience to be drawn in. However, the stars aligned and we received the late, great Gene Wilder. He took on the role for reasons...I'll get into in a bit.

Look at that! The Oompa Loompas look like real people and not photocopies of the same guy! 

Getting in with the plot, it's actually quite a bit of screen time before we see Mr. Wonka himself. The focus is more on Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum), a young boy living in a lower class family with his widowed mother (Diana Sowle) who has the worst musical number in the entire film and his four bed-ridden grandparents...three of which are not important and the fourth is his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson), who is just the worst.

Seriously, I know everyone and their mother has made the joke about it, but he really is a complete dick! Dude stays in bed for god knows how many years eating cabbage soup (God, can you imagine the smell?) and not lifting a finger to help his struggling daughter/daughter-in-law, but the second he gets a chance to go to a candy factory he gets up out of bed and has a jaunty musical number!

What an asshole!

Sorry, getting a little ahead of myself. The big gimmick of Wonka's factory is that the gates are shut and everything gets sent out through the mail: nobody goes in, and nobody comes out as a creepy man hanging out outside the factory one evening tells Charlie. It's not long after this that Wonka announces that there are five golden tickets hidden in Wonka Chocolate Bars. As you might expect, Charlie ends up winning a ticket (although the film takes a hell of a time to get to that point), but not before the first four tickets are won by Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner), Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole), Violet Beaurgarde (Denise Nickerson), and Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen) in an extended sequence that introduces them all for later use in the film...which was also done in the book, so hush my mouth, I guess.

It is only once all their powers are combined that they form...Willy Wonka. Or, rather, Gene Wilder makes his first appearance after a good quarter of the film and it is here that we see the reason why Gene took the role. To quote the man himself directly:

"When I make my first entrance, I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause."

And that is just what happens in the film. He got his wish, and the scene is admittedly one of the more effective character introductions put to film. It also makes later scenes a bit creepier, as we're never really given to know what exactly is going through Wonka's head at any given point and not entirely sure where his morality lies. The entire film does have a little bit of uneasiness in the undercurrent of several scenes, sometimes intentionally. This makes sense when you learn that Roald Dahl was unable to meet deadlines the studio had set for him and so the script had to be touched up. David Seltzer, who would later go on to write The Omen would go on to rewrite about 30% of the script...something which Roald Dahl was definitely not happy about.

The music in the film is indeed memorable and is one of the things in the 70% that wasn't changed. All of the songs are either original compositions by Roald Dahl or adaptations from the book and, as we've discussed, have varying levels of quality depending on who is performing them (looking at you, Mrs. Bucket!). As in the book, the Oompa Loompas each have a song for the naughty children when they get their comeuppance, Willy Wonka has the big show stopper with "Pure Imagination", the guy running the Candy Shop gets "The Candyman Can" (which became a #1 hit for Sammy Davis, Jr. - who initially wanted the role of the candy shop owner), and even Grandpa Joe gets the "I am a dick who lazed about in bed until I...I mean, my grandson got our meal ticket outta this dump!" song.

And thus, DeviantArt was born!
Dignity died soon after!

That is one big critique I can give this film, the tone is overall fairly light and whimsical as you might expect for a children's film, until it takes these odd non-sequiturs. The first of these is early on when Charlie passes by the still-sealed factory of Willy Wonka and meets the creepy tinkerer who recites some lines from a poem and tells Charlie about how nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out. The music is, I suppose, supposed to be all mysterious and what not...but it comes off as something out of a horror movie. There's the creepy images tunnel that comes right out of nowhere and seems to exist for no other reason than for Gene Wilder to be absolutely terrifying. There's "Slugworth" coming out of nowhere like he's Batman or something at various points.

There's also the realization that we never see what happens to the naughty children and their parents after the Oompa Loompas take them away. Sure, the book covers that...but we never see anything in the movie itself besides Wonka giving a pat assurance that 'they'll be alright'.

Differences in culture between the 1970s and now? Maybe, but I can't imagine it wasn't a bit jarring even then. It's all more akin to horror than a kid's film (and, ironically, leans more into horror than actual horror movies in the modern era often do) and just kind of comes off as strange.

That aside, that's really the only thing I have too much of a problem with with this movie. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is an oddly timeless classic, held up by more realistic portrayals of children (even Charlie, though he is our protagonist, is far from perfect), memorable musical numbers even today, and Gene Wilder giving an absolutely fantastic performance as the title character. It wasn't a monster hit at the time of its release, although it did manage to turn a profit (making $4.5 million on  a budget of $3 million), but it's a great movie and one I would be happy to watch any time.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is brought to us by Wolper Pictures, The Quaker Oats Company, and Paramount Pictures. Current rights are with Warner Brothers.