Review of The Parent Trap (1961) by Brian I — 17 Oct 2010

Who Needs Believability When You Have Hayley Mills?

I really have no idea how they managed a remake of this, which I've not bothered seeing anyway. I mean, judges wouldn't issue divorce decrees like this one, where each child went off with a different parent and, it appears, the other parent didn't have any rights of any kind to the other. Yes, all right, their father seems to exist in a world only populated by his servants and the people at the country club, but their mother does have parents, at least--possibly more, but I suspect that the reference to her as her own father's favourite daughter was a joking reference to only having one daughter. My own daughter will in a few weeks reach about the age Hayley Mills is playing here, and she has contact with family which literally has no legal right to her. Me, for example. It's just considered bad for everyone if you take family away for a child unless it's for a very good reason indeed, and this isn't.

Susan Evers (Hayley Mills) and Sharon McKendrick (also Hayley Mills) meet at camp. They look pretty much exactly alike, and so of course they dislike one another almost on sight. One of Susan's friends refers to Sharon as having stolen Susan's face. After a series of escalating events, they are put alone together in a punishment cabin, this being the sort of camp where you're there all summer. While there, they finally start actually talking to one another. Susan shows Sharon a picture of her father, Mitch (Brian Keith). After a little talk establishes that Susan has seen a picture of her mother but never met her, Sharon, being quicker on the uptake, realizes what's going on and brings out a picture of her own mother, Maggie (Maureen O'Hara), who of course is Susan's as well. The girls then conspire to switch places in the hopes of bringing their parents back together, which is made all the more complicated by the addition of Mitch's new fiancée, Vicky (Joanna Barnes).

The thing is, Mitch seems to have met and gotten engaged to Vicky while Susan was away at camp, and the wedding is to be, so far as I can tell, a couple of weeks after she gets back. This means we're looking at maybe three months. This is not long enough. It becomes obvious almost right away that they really don't have anything in common. Well--Mitch has money, and Vicky likes money. However, that's really not much on which to build a lasting relationship. It's even worse if you have kids. Now, I don't think you should give up your entire life for the sake of your kids. You have a right to date and even marry the person you want, even if your kids don't get along with them. However, how a person interacts with your kids is an important thing to know before you marry them. It's not just that Sharon and Susan detest Vicky, though she is pretty detestable. It's that she's mean to them. That tells you something about a person which is important to know in advance.

Of course, the great improbability of this movie isn't actually the custody arrangement. The fact is, you have to accept that, out of all the camps in the United States, Mitch and Maggie managed to send their children to the same one. It's not even as though there were anything of note about it. Yes, all right, the camp I went to most drew people from all over Altadena [i]and[/i] Pasadena, with a few from a little beyond that, so I don't know much about camps where you don't then pick up where you left off three weeks later when school starts. Besides, mine was a music camp. But the girls seem to go somewhere with just your basic swimming, canoing, arts and crafts, and so forth. Archery, probably. And while I went to those twice, even there, mine was only drawing girls from the Greater Los Angeles Area, so the odds were at least marginally better that I'd run into someone I already knew without planning coinciding stays in advance. (Week-long camps, all of them.) But Monterey and Boston?

Still, it's a charming movie. Hayley Mills mostly manages to create two separate characters in Susan and Sharon, though their voices aren't as different as they're clearly striving for. I'm also enamoured of Maggie's father, Charles (Charles Ruggles), and Mitch's housekeeper, Verbena (Una Merkel). However, I would like to give credit for the quality of the movie, in major part, to two things. First, there is the composite work, which is excellent. The making-of on the Vault Disney edition (and let's bring that idea back!) mentions that, almost every time the girls are in the same shot, there's a vertical line somewhere in the scene--a door frame or a tent pole or something--which was done to make the job easier. However, even that wouldn't have been as easy as it was without Hayley Mills's stand-in, Susan Henning. Not only did she give Mills something to act against when both girls were fully visible onscreen, she herself remained in the movie when the shot was over one or the other's shoulder. And of course she's totally uncredited, so elts' credit her here.