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Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Hat's entertainmentSlightly dark and a little weird but really pretty good; more Bourneville than Dairy Milk, then, if you’ll pardon the screamingly obvious analogy. Leslie Bricusse hated the way they presented his song The Candyman so much that he gave it to Sammy Davis Jr to perform, with big results. And that’s about all the factoids available for this Roald Dahl adaptation we have. Better just watch it, then.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Richard Davies

    August 8, 2010 at 7:53 pm

    Tiim Brooke-Taylor makes a cameo as the operator of a computer that should be working out where the golden tickets are, but instead is getting tetchier that Orac from Blake’s 7.

  2. Gary Turner

    September 23, 2014 at 10:49 pm

    This is much better than the recent remake with Jonney Depp. Gene Wilder has ball playing Willy Wonker and sets are really amazing given before CGI that there is now in films.

  3. Tom Ronson

    May 23, 2022 at 12:10 am

    A lot to unpack in this one, even if you leave aside Roald Dahl chucking his toys out of the pram over the producers’ failure to cast either Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers as Wonka in favour of rising star Gene Wilder / the whole shebang being bankrolled by the Quaker Oats company to promote a new line of confectionery / the problematic use of people of restricted growth (slathered in orange makeup) as The Oompa-Loompas / the online hate campaign against Grandpa Joe / the frequently bizarre score by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley / the international cast and the odd Munich locations, suggesting the whole thing takes place in a weird three-way collision of chocolate box Europe, rural America, and early seventies England… I could go on. In lesser hands, it would have been an absolute shambles, but somehow everything comes together and the film overall is a real treat. Also, it’s surprising it has a U certificate, when you think how dark it is – Wonka basically maims or disfigures children he doesn’t like – and how Roy Kinnear uses ‘bleeding’ as an expletive twice, and there’s a shot of a chicken being decapitated in the boat ride scene.

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