Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang arrives from 1968, a children's musical assembled by people with no interest in instructing anyone. Ian Fleming wrote the source novel for his son. Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes wrote the screenplay. The Sherman Brothers supplied the songs. What they built is a long contraption about a widowed inventor, a flying car, and a foreign tyrant who wants to steal it. The film runs past two hours and never once stops to tell us how to live. In this classification exercise, that makes it a rare and restful specimen.

There is one flicker of modern sensibility, and it is faint. Truly Scrumptious is an heiress who speaks her mind, scolds the hero, and drives her own motorcar. The story then marries her off in the final minutes, her independence folded neatly into a wedding. The Baroness, meanwhile, despises children, and the film treats this as a villainous tic instead of a statement about anything. No argument is made. No thesis is advanced. The romance simply concludes, as romances did in 1968.

The rest of the ledger is blank. The cast is uniformly white British and American. Vulgaria is a white European fantasy kingdom with a griffin on its flag. Race is never engaged. Neither is climate, though the car flies. The Scrumptious candy company and the Baron's regime are plot machinery, not an economic critique of capital. Caractacus is an eccentric inventor played for whimsy, never framed through any clinical lens. Nobody pauses to address body image. Nobody revises history. Nobody lectures. The film wants to show us a car that floats, flies, and sings, and then it wants to go home. That is its entire political program, and it is executed without apology.