Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Wideo Wednesday: The Amazing Mr. Blunden

 

Today’s Wideo is not going to be the series of nostalgic short subjects that I usually link to, but a single full movie that might very well fit in among my old memories without any fuss, so redolent is it of a certain era and genre. As it is, I only watched it yesterday evening on a whim.

It is The Amazing Mr. Blunden (1972), directed by Lionel Jeffries, an actor most familiar to me as Cavor from The First Men in the Moon and the eccentric Grandpa Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Indeed, the eponymous character Mr. Blunden (Laurence Naismith) might well have been played by him, with his balding head and extravagant moustache.

The time is 1918 and the end of the First World War. The mysterious Mr. Blunden engages the widowed Mrs. Allen, along with her three children, to be caretakers of an abandoned (supposedly haunted) mansion in the country while a firm of lawyers try to find the legal heirs. While there, the two elder children, Lucie and Jamie, become engaged in a story of time travel and redemption and a desperate attempt to set right the wrongs of the past.

I’ve known this film existed for years; I’ve run across rather enigmatic references to it in such books as The 100 Fantasy Movies or Fantasy of the Twentieth Century, where they could not go into much detail lest they spoil the mystery. Indeed, I feel it would have been better titled The Mysterious Mr. Blunden rather than The Amazing Mr. Blunden; with a title like that you expect someone rather like Mary Poppins of Willy Wonka to show up. And perhaps it was not best served by its “groovy” poster.

As it is, it fits in rather well with other 1972 fantasy memories, like Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as more modern fantasy film offerings like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or From Time to Time or Tom’s Midnight Garden. I find it was remade in 2021 as a TV movie with Simon Callow in the title role, no doubt to cash in on a certain Harry Potterish vibe, and (shudder) updated for modern audiences. But, in fact, the 1972 film fits in with that holiday fantasy British family film tradition I was talking about, which may be why I’ve suddenly found it so congenial. Tain’t the season, but almost ‘tis!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNI9i_jTBHY

 


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