She saw ONE MARRIAGE, TWO REVIEWS He saw
Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
The opening scene of the original 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is every child’s greatest fantasy: running out of school to Bill’s Candy Shop, where he croons merrily about covering a sunrise in chocolate and miracles and making the world taste good while doling out a limitless supply of sweets. I immediately regretted not having our sweettoothed, dentist-fearing kids watching with us. That is until moments later when a mysterious man, pushing a trolley loaded with butcher’s knives, approaches Charlie outside Willy Wonka’s and starts reciting riddles to him in what I can only describe as a paedophile voice about how “nobody ever goes in and nobody ever goes out”.
It was the first of so many disturbing scenes that I assume we’ve either all become incredibly fragile or that films like Willy Wonka are the reason why I can’t be alone at night.
I must’ve seen this film at least 20 times. I know the lyrics to all the songs but watching it through 40-year-old, 2022, eyes is quite a different experience. The fruit-flavoured wallpaper I so dreamed of trying as a child now seems incredibly unsanitary — their germ-ridden tongues smearing their droplets all over the wall, blurgh! And don’t get me started on Augustus Gloop’s neardrowning in the chocolate river, shoes and all.
The lack of hygiene practices aside, this film is much creepier than I remember. The scene on the boat where weird, sometimes violent, images are projected on to the walls of the cave could be plucked straight out of A Clockwork Orange. Gene Wilder’s inimitable crazed expression as he sings, “Are the fires of Hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing?” is the stuff of nightmares.
The most outlandish part of this film though, more than the Oompa Loompas or Violet Beauregard turning into a blueberry, is the character of Charlie. That boy has the sweetest, most angelic face I’ve ever seen and the kindest, most generous nature of any child who’s ever lived. I wanted to scoop him up and replace all my actual children with clones of him. Watching as a kid, you see yourself in Charlie and you see Violet, Veruca, Augustus and Mike
TV as despicable beasts. But, watching as an adult, I think those four despicable beasts are more like kids I’ve actually met. I’m tired for their parents. While the chocolate factory is every child’s greatest fantasy, Charlie is every parent’s.
Not long after we started watching we paused for a toilet break and when we came back, I saw we’d been watching for an hour. I couldn’t believe it. I double-checked, then asked Zanna if she believed it. She did, of course, because she’s always been more pragmatic than me. Nevertheless, I was astonished. It was Wonka’s most incredible trick yet. He’d made the movie slip by almost unnoticed, beneath our eyes. I wondered if I’d been hypnotised, if all those beautiful familiar songs, all that poverty-and-cabbage-soupredeemed had lulled me into a reverie. Or maybe it was more deliberate than that, some sort of verbal Nlp-style trickery. Maybe Wonka’s catchphrase, “So much time, so little to see — strike that, reverse it” was somehow messing with my mind’s perception.
Or maybe it was more prosaic than that. Maybe it was the movie’s structure — surprisingly heavy on the lead-up to Charlie’s golden ticket find and surprisingly light on the wonder and terror inside the chocolate factory, exactly the reverse of how I remembered it from the last time I’d watched it, 35 or so years ago.
But it works! It works! “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait,” Dickens said. So wait we do, mostly while crying. The porridge-stirring of the giant vats of washing in the industrial laundry in which Charlie’s mother works, the horror of the tiny shack he shares with four old people in a bed and his mother, the lack of chocolate in his life: these are the things that give the arrival of the golden ticket its great power. We know the redemption is coming, so the postponement is everything.
Making them wait is also Wonka’s great talent. On the day the golden ticket-winners come to the factory, he comes out slowly, limping his way down the red carpet, taking forever, before finally abandoning his cane and doing his spectacular, crowd-pleasing forward roll. Once everyone is inside, he makes them go slowly, makes them sign waivers, waves his cane in front of them to hold them back while singing one of his admittedly beautiful but unnecessarily long songs, most of which I was unable to hear because Zanna sang over all of them at the top of her voice, which is a voice I love, by the way.
The chocolate room and fizzy lifting drink and three-course meal chewing gum is all good and well, but those are not the things that made the movie an enduring classic, shown on TV every Easter, at least for the duration of my childhood. Anticipation is everything.