FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Lost Cinematic Fairy Tale That is More Than a Little Grimm
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, that old adage from science fiction, that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, applies to fantasy as well…
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)
Distributed by: MGM
Directed by: Henry Levin and George Pal
Once upon a time, there were two brothers who gave the world a major appreciation for folk stories.
And in return, the world turned around and did this to them:
The film’s main focus is on Willhelm Grimm (Laurence Harvey), who is happily married to Deborah (Claire Bloom) with two children, and his brother Jacob (Karlheinz Bohm), who is studious and destined to stay alone despite the attention given him by Frauline Greta Heinrich (Barbara Eden). Both of them during the course of the film have to worry about completing a family history for a local duke (Oskar Homolka) who is paying them to brush up his profile so that the King of Prussia will think better of him.
While Jacob is determined and focused on this, the same way he is with his other works on German grammar and legal primers, Willhelm is too busy collecting fairy stories, which he hopes to collect into a volume that his publisher Stossel (Walter Slezak) will pick up and sell.
As far as the fairy stories Willhelm is collecting, to the point where during the film he gives away the bread money to a story teller and even loses notes for the duke’s propaganda monograph while pursuing a source for the story from Anna Richter (Martita Hunt), we get to see three of them on screen:
- “The Dancing Princess,” a tale where a woodsman (Russ Tamblyn) is tasked by the king (Jim Backus) to figure out why his daughter the princess (Yvette Mimieux) dances the hell out of her shoes, which she won’t explain to her father;
- “The Cobbler and the Elves,” a tale where an overbooked cobbler (Harvey, under a lot of makeup) finds himself unable to meet his client’s needs, which all get addressed by his “Puppetoon” saviors:
- and “The Singing Bone,” a tale of a Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) who cowardly lets his squire Hans (Buddy Hackett) face a dragon alone, but when Hans bests the beast decides to take the credit of the deed for himself, after doing away with the real hero…
The film certainly celebrates the fantastic, even if we barely dance with it in the three times we get stories from the Grimm collection. And no, the main story about the Brothers Grimm is no more realistic than any of the tales depicted, but that doesn’t count here, as the three fantasies pop and sizzle beyond the framing melodrama. They may be light and with a pastel pallet, which may make you cringe if you are into the source material, but that’s how Hollywood did it then.
With Levin directing the bio segments and Pal doing the fantasies (his penultimate work for MGM before The 7 Faces of Doctor Lao) the film can’t help feeling like it was spliced together from two different productions. With the two aspects reveling in what’s expected of them, the need to feed wonder with the fantasies and the overplayed drama in the bio sections, one can’t help feel that there’s two different productions at war for attention on a single screen, neither strong enough on their own and together coming up with less than the sum of their parts.
And the feeling of splicing together separate films is certainly apt, thanks to a production decision made that would make the movie hard to approach for years after its release:
Cinerama was one of the more ambitious efforts to draw audiences away from their televisions and back to the theaters. It promised immersive experiences by having the film all around you; with three screens using three projectors to fill 146 degrees of your field of vision, it certainly made a serious effort.
Like all formats, the big question around justifying itself came down to its content. Most of the presentations shot in the three cameras for three screen format were travelogues that would bring the audience to places they might never get a chance to go to, which would certainly be thrilling to sit through a few times but hardly something you’d want to look forward to regularly.
With that in mind, MGM commissioned two works of fiction to take advantage of the format. While the other film, How the West Was Won, was an impressive undertaking with sweeping vistas supporting the saga of American western expansion, this film felt like a letdown to sit through in comparison.
The original opening of the film, an effort to give people a sense of the time and the explosive politics thereof with cannons and muskets firing at the audience before we follow the Grimms tracking down fairy tales, demonstrates how badly thought out the endeavor was. There are long sequences both in the stories and the biography section where the Cinerama process dictates what we see; we don’t really need to be atop the coach as it races through the night or be at the water level as a steam ship goes upriver, but we get that (and for too long) because we need to fill three screens.
What the process didn’t do, however, was fill seats, and at over two hours the film only made a comparatively modest return, earning just under $9M for a $6.5M budget production. It encouraged the move from a three-camera Cinerama process to a single 70mm projection, with films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Battle of the Bulge learning from this mistake.
Going to a single lens versus three separate cameras, in addition to being cheaper and a lot easier to film with, also allowed subsequent works to better format for other media, such as television and VOD. Brothers Grimm, by comparison, could never be appreciated by later audiences, who either would catch badly compressed prints squeezed to fit a single standard screen or efforts to put all three strips into a single letterbox frame, mushing together masters for the side cameras that just sat in the vault, deteriorating, before being called up.
Because of the lack of care, the movie became a “living lost film,” one that technically exists but is in so bad a condition that the modern viewer cannot help but be distracted. The dark side paneling and blurriness keep distracting the viewer from the film itself, keeping the original from being able to overcome its shortcomings and unable to work any kind of magic to draw you in. And with an anticipated costs of up to $2M to do a full restoration, there would have to be a much larger demand than what we’ve seen so far to get this fixed for modern audiences.
Unlike many of the characters shown in the film, there is for now no happily ever after for this movie…
NEXT TIME: When we’re back (hopefully sooner rather than later), we’ll try and pick up where we left off… if it doesn’t kill us first…
