Furiousmind

Director: Mel Stuart
Stars: Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum, Jack Albertson
Year: 1971

IMDB Link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0067992/

The other day we have seen the 1971 version of Roald Dahl’s children story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We have enjoyed Tim Burton’s version (2005) and we were a bit excited to compare both films.

The first thing we noticed about the older film is that there are differences in some important aspects:

• there is no mention to Wonka’s father (the dentist) nor to Wonka’s childhood;
• the Oompa Loopas songs don’t mention the children names;
• there is a scene where Charlie and his grandpa taste some funny drink — it seems that the 1971 Charlie is less innocent and angelical than the 2005 one;
• the announcement to Charlie that he won the factory is very different. In fact, it is a bit scary :)
• after Wonka telling Charlie that the prize is the factory, Charlie asks if he can take his family with him. Wonka replies that he can take his whole family. If you’ve watched the 2005 film, you’ll remember that when Charlie makes this question, Wonka says no. And then Charlie replies that he wouldn’t change his family by all the chocolate in the world. A nice message :-)
• we would say that the Depp’s Wonka is eccentric and lunatic, whilst Wilder’s Wonka is lunatic and scary.

We never read the book, so we are now very curious about the real story (it’s always nice to see if the film follows the real story or not). Maybe in the future we can update this post with additional information related with the book.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 12:25 am and is filed under Cinema. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.