Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Caught in the Trap of twin magic as Mills sees double
Following the rave reviews and honorary Academy Award for best juvenile performance she received for Pollyanna, it was obvious to Walt Disney that the only thing better than one Hayley Mills was two Hayley Mills!
That is the premise of The Parent Trap (1961), written and directed by David Swift who was also responsible for Pollyanna, and this year marks the 60th anniversary of one of Disney’s most popular and successful movies.
The story deals with two identical twins who were separated at birth when their parents divorced who accidentally meet at a summer camp. Determined never to be separated again, they decide to switch places in the hope of reuniting their parents. They also have a rival, Vicky; a catty, shrewd little gold digger only after the father’s money.
The Parent Trap is a combination of drama, humour, romance and old fashioned slapstick. One of the film’s brightest assets is the highly impressive title sequence, featuring variations on a sampler using stop-motion animation.
This combined with the catchy title song sung by Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands, who were filming Babes In Toyland in the Disney studio at the time, gets the movie off to a flying start.
The songs were written by Richard and Robert Sherman who were the studio’s resident songwriters. The tune Let’s Get Together, sung in Elvis Presley style by Hayley Mills, turned out to be a smash hit, reaching number eight on the US charts.
Principal photography was completed mostly in various locales in California. The scenes of the house were filmed at the studio’s golden oak ranch
in Placerita Canyon, while the interior of the dad’s house occupied sound stages in the Disney studio.
There is some marvellous cinema in The Parent Trap. The technical challenge of getting the illusion of the twins was achieved by split-screen, a process that masks off a section of the shot while the other area is filmed, then the film is rewound in the camera and the masks are reversed to expose the other side of the scene.
The film is then processed in an optical printer, which was used to give Hayley Mills a twin, and when the shot is complete, she appears to be on both sides. To enhance the illusion, a girl who looked very much like Hayley, Susan Henning
(uncredited), was used as a double for over the shoulder and distant shots.
The actual double exposure and split-screen shots are fantastic and after a while the viewer is hardly conscious that it’s trickery. Best of all is the twins; Hayley Mills truly is remarkable, giving credibility to both characterisations.
For her dual role in the movie Hayley had a total of 65 changes in wardrobe, ranging from blue jeans to a bridesmaid gown. Because she was playing twins, more than two-thirds of the wardrobe had to be duplicated and 25 pairs of shoes were added. Hayley grew two inches during the four months of production and constant alterations had to be made on this extensive wardrobe.
The parents were played convincingly by Brian Keith and Maureen O’hara, once regarded as the queen of Technicolor; The Quiet Man and The Parent Trap were two of her favourite films.
She wrote in her memoirs that Disney offered her only a third of her normal fee of $75,000, but that she held out for her quote and got it. O’hara also claimed her contract gave her top billing but Disney decided to give that to Hayley Mills; O’hara said this caused tension in the studio and was the reason she never worked for Disney again.
However, any grievances she had with the studio were soon dispelled when she accepted Walt Disney’s invitation to attend the premiere of Mary Poppins in August 1964.
The Odeon Cinema in Coatbridge was the venue for the Monklands premiere of The Parent Trap during Christmas 1961. Patrons formed long queues in heavy snow to see the latest Hayley Mills classic and they weren’t disappointed thanks to the creative, imaginative quality of the Disney output at that time and Mills’ radiant performance.
In 1985, Disney decided to produce a sequel when Hayley was approached to repeat the roles of the twins in Parent Trap II for the Disney Channel. At first she wasn’t keen, telling the Los Angeles Times “I did hesitate before saying yes; first, it was always my favourite film and I wasn’t sure about making a sequel, and second because it’s taken me so long to break away from my Disney image.
“But everyone at Disney was so enthusiastic about the project that I finally agreed to do it.
“The film was shot in 18 days and I never worked so hard in my life!”