The Parent Trap (1961)

To me, this movie is perfection.

good back-story, and good acting

Boring

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Live Disney at its quality peak and loaded with delicious scenes that one can watch over and over and still enjoy. Maureen O'Hara was into her forties here and puts her youthful competition in the shade in the sexy department.The one sad thing about this film is that thousands of divorced kids became fixated on the plot, on the idea of reuniting their parents. Luci Arnaz and Desi Jr. watched this a dozen times, dreaming of bringing Lucy and Desi back together (they had been recently divorced). Lucy finally blew up. "NO MORE PARENT TRAP. We are NOT getting back together and its not your fault and nothing you can do would help."

Taking a cue from "A Summer Place" to appeal to both adults and teens, this Disney comedy is a charming reminder of what was once known as family night out. There's two Hayley Mills for the price of one for the teens (fresh from "Pollyanna") and the still sexy Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith as their divorced parents for the adults. This family affair busted up years before thanks to the inability to come to terms with their differences, and the decision for each of the parents to get custody of one of the twin girls, now precocious, boy crazy teens.Unaware that they have a look alike, the very differently brought up young ladies meet at summer camp where it's hate at first sight. Not seeing the similarity in their voices, they don't question that until they are confined together after getting into a cat fight. The two plot to switch places, one ending up in stuffy Boston and the other in sunny California, plotting to get the parents together after a long separation in an effort to rekindle the spark. But with daddy Keith on the verge of marrying an obvious gold digger (a delightfully bitchy Joanna Barnes), they must connive quickly!Disney rarely did better outside their big musicals than they did here, including a fantastic cast of character actors who are all unique and very funny. There's Cathleen Nesbitt as O'Hara's imperious mother, Charles Ruggles as O'Hara's henpecked father, Una Merkel as Keith's plain spoken housekeeper, and Ruth McDeavitt and Nancy Kulp as summer camp moderators. Leo G. Carroll stifles an amusing chuckle watching all the craziness unfold as the minister planning on marrying Keith and Barnes. Having often quoted her ping pong ball monologue from "Auntie Mame", I adored Barnes here, but then again, there's absolutely nothing to dislike. Well, that is except the song that Mills sings as a duet in the reconciliation scene with the parents. It instantly dates the film, but the sequences where the twins take on the nasty Barnes in the middle of the woods makes up for it. This has been remade twice, but for me, nothing bests the original.

Love the pranks the twins played on each other, Hayley Mills gave a lovely musical performance towards the end, and it's also amusing to see her throwing a tantrum. So much for the "trap", the "parent" part though, is pretty horrible. Their dad seems to be the worst dad on earth, probably the worst man too. How can any man not fall in love with MAUREEN O HARA the first time he sees her(after 13 years)?? She has to actually get out of her way to trick them to break their engagement?? And for a man who abandoned her and separated her from her child years ago (I assumed), let her kid be slapped by a stranger and did nothing about it, not to mention he's barely handsome and has no personality what so ever at all. That's just ridiculous. She should have been still mad at him, and he had too crawl on his knees to win her back. Actually she and the kids deserve better.

No doubt as a penance for releasing scores of animated films without cogent family units, Disney released The Parent Trap; a Hayley Mills starring, anti-divorce film that had to have felt dated on arrival. In it, a set of estranged identical twins meet by sheer happenstance at camp, trade places, and attempt to bring their divorced parents back together again. The plot immediately appealed to me, even though I had seen the Lindsay Lohan remake. It's a story about the difficulties of preserving the family unit, the unfairness of divorce on young children and the implications of love when faced with the practicalities of life. So naturally Disney sidesteps such themes to make a film as fluffy and unnecessary as a feather boa.Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little. The young Hayley Mills who had just started her Disney movie blitz is at her best as the likable twins Susan and Sharon. Both characters have personalities that are just developed enough to tell them apart but in case its too subtle one has a bad case of Long Island lockjaw. Their hijinks are fun, their humor agreeable and the end result is one of the more charming performances to come from a child actor.I'm actually quite concerned for these kids who have to deal with such narcissistic parents. Sure Disney glosses over the reasons why they got divorced in the first place but its easy to see their personalities are just too self-absorbed to be loving partners...or parents. If you're the proud parents of twins or triplets or sextuplets, you'd be able to narrow in on who's Justin and Dustin wouldn't you? That puzzle would be even less difficult if one of them had been a stranger to you for thirteen or so years but this all seems to be above their heads. Its only when one of the twins finally blurts out the truth that the families discover there's something rotten in the state of Massachusetts.The parents get even worse when they reunite and start exchanging rancorous chit-chat. The father (Brian Keith) you see is about to marry a much younger gold digger who, of course, exemplifies the evil stepmother trope we've all come to expect. So it only makes sense that the man's ex-wife (Maureen O'Hara) takes a trip to the coast, unannounced, totting one of two Machiavellian moppets, making catty comments, and dressing in the man's bathrobe. She then prances around the grounds while he's entertaining in a twisted game of hide-and-seek. Once they actually meet up, they of course argue until she literally punches him in the face in front of their kids! By that point, the couple was one mimosa away from "Thunderdome".If either of them were smart they'd get a restraining order against each other and shuttle both kids back and forth between California and Massachusetts. Not an idyllic solution, but its better than living with "The War of the Roses" (1988) 24/7. But alas they do stick it out together in the end because everything is supposed to be cheery, rosy and bright. It's a Disney movie after all; there are no tears in Disney movies! I just fear that kids with divorced parents will see this movie and want to imitate it which is kind of sad when you think about it. Its a hard lesson to learn kids, but sometimes a divorced household is better than one where one parent's in the morgue and the other in jail.http://theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com/