What a delightful film! It was so charming and there's just something about it that I can't pinpoint. Perhaps it's the amazing performances and screen legends. I discovered James Stewart today too and I fell in love. Goodness I am now indebted to this film for introducing me to him.
Yes, I know I am truly late.
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Giving you a slow-clap, Señor Chang style.
For some reason it took me a good while to become a fan of this film, but then something clicked and I fell in love with it.
"In my case, self-absorption is completely justified."
The movie was great.
No question about it.
But there would be problems for present day viewers especially since it is talky and there was very limited action.
I would say that this was a classic but it is definitely dated.
http://www.ronpaul2012.com/
RON PAUL 2012
Can't say that I agree about it being dated.
Certainly we don't see wealth displayed this openly on film much these days - though sometimes they make the ostensibly "middle class" families' lives so opulent - that they aren't that far different from the Lords! (e.g., why make Dennis Quaid's life so fabulously wealthy -- and have Natasha Richardson also employ servants - in the remake of the Parent Trap? Or make Meryl Streep's character again so wildly high-living in "It's Complicated"? if we aren't really meant to think they - and she are wildly RICH though they must be to live this way).
Usually, due to the prejudices of Hollywood, when films portray families this wealthy - they must be evil. (E.g., A Perfect Murder, Wall Street, etc.)
But I think movies are just as talky today. See The Descendants? Midnight in Paris? Good Night and Good Luck? The Reader? The Ghost Writer? Most dramas that do not involve violence - are indeed this "talky".
Following a tangent, but for what it's worth:
In both versions of The Parent Trap both parents "have money" or "come from families with money" because they must for the basics of the plot to make any sense at all.
The parents must originally be from places far enough away from each other so that returning "home" after divorcing can make the we-each-get-one-twin-with-no-cross-visitation custody arrangement to make at least a tiny amount of logistical sense. (Changes in people's travel habits and long distance phone usage changed what that distance had to be in the 30-something years between the versions: opposite coasts of the US in the original, different continents in the remake.)
However, that means that they have to have spent long enough periods traveling to fall in love and end up married. That tends to imply money.
Then, when the girls are adolescents, they both have to be up for sending the kids for a long stay at a summer camp far enough away to span that custody-defining distance. That also tends to imply money. (Seriously, how many people do know that would not count as "rich" who send their kids to multi-week camps on a different continent than their home?)
Hi, what an interesting comment. But I don't agree.
In the original Parent Trap, the fact that some people were far away from their original home - doesn't mean anything. So are the Joads in the Grapes of Wrath - they just needed gas to travel, after all. And once in California, they met and fell in love with Californians instead of Oklahomans. The fact that they met people far from where they grew up - doesn't imply wealth to me. Although mobility has actually been decreaing for Americans, they are famously mobile. Few live in the state in which they grew up - and wealth isn't the reason.
Moreover, by the time of the more recent Parent Trap, to save to afford the $150 for a plane trip to Ameica - just doesn't imply that great a wealth for any English family. More English vacation overseas (particularly Spain or Portugal on packaged trips) than in Britain - and these are people of all income levels. I would guess the proportion of people meeting exotic "foreigners" and falling for them - on their vacation is rather high.
It is truer to say that a summer camp for a long period is not for the poor - and yet when I went to my YMCA camp in Michigan - and when others went to Boy Scout or Girl scoupt camps for weeks at a time - they really didn't seem exclusive or wealthy in any way.
I think the truth is that they simply thought that according great wealth to the couple made the comedy more worry-free - and allowed them to introduce other comic charaters in a butler and cook.
This is getting pretty common. For example, look at just how wealthy the people are in comedies like the Freaky Friday remake or It's Complicated or the remake of Father of the Bride - vast houses, expensive cars, etc. - and no particular point is made of it - it's just that the producers think a wealthy standard of living is well suited for comedies.
But it's interesting to see how this changes over time. It was certainly true in the 1930s that writers, producers wanted a rich family to center the story to allow the escapist fantasies of Depression era audiences to have free rein (and often thus allowing a Cinderella romance between poor working class or lower middle class boy or girl and rich family in comedies. (My Man Godfrey, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, It Happened One Night, The Thin Man series, some of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers comedies, Love Me Tonight, My Favorite Wife, Bachelor Mother, Libelled Lady, The Mad Miss Manton, Theodora Goes Wild, The Awful Truth, 5th Avenue Girl, Easy Living, Midnight, Trouble in Paradise, The Lady Eve, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Smiling Lieutenant, Hands Across the Table, scores of others).
But this had changed greatly after the Depression. Without ever making a pnit of it, there is a rampant materialism - and quite opulent way of life - featured in many of the comedies of the period 1980 - 2000. It hadn't been that way in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s -- most comedies - e.g., think of the comedies with such stars as Gig Young, Martha Raye, Doris Day, Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Tony Randall, Paula Prentiss, - hadn't featured vast wealth.
For every wealthy family featured in a 1950s comedy (as in The Reluctant Debutante -- which did NOT assume we the audience knew all about coming out parties, debutantes, etc. and felt the need to explain them to us - as they would not have felt such a need in an off-hand reference to a debutante in The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth or It Happened One Night), there were far more comedies like "Yours, Mine and Ours" or "The Courtship of Eddie's Father".
Having grown up with such 1940s-earlly 1970s comedies, I'm still startled when I see the grandeur of the houses, the number of reall nice cars, the clothes - all taken for granted - in a movie like the remake of Freaky Friday or Father of the Bride. The protagonists are often now given roles as basically tycoons - having founded great profitable businesses, throwing off enormous sums in dispoable income each year. Yet aside from a brief mention of their job, this isn't seen as the point. It's assumed we'll identify with Jamie Lee Curtis or Steve Martin.
One can see this dramatically in something like the remake of The Shop Around the Corner - the Stewart and Sullavan characters (two lowly clerks in a department store) have become: i) a quite wealthy scion of a long-established family in a wonderfully well-paid job, and ii) the founder and owner of a store that has existed for decades. Why? They could just as easily have been rival clerks - but there's an assumption by Ephron that we will identify more - and want more to see in a comedy - a wealthy pair than a poor pair. It's been a change in comedies generally.
What does that say about "present day viewers"?