The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm *** (1962, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Karlheinz Böhm, Barbara Eden, Walter Slezak, Oscar Homolka) – Classic Movie Review 10,431

Directors Henry Levin and George Pal’s expensive, well-crafted, good-looking big-budget 1962 fantasy film The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was made for the huge Cinerama cinema screen. The screenplay is based on the life of the story-telling brothers Wilhelm Carl Grimm and Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and three of their tales – The Dancing Princess, The Cobbler and the Elves, and The Singing Bone.

Laurence Harvey and Karl Boehm [Karlheinz Böhm] star as the brothers Grimm (and Harvey is also The Cobbler), but actually the Puppetoons are much more entertaining. Buddy Hackett as Hans (‘The Singing Bone’), Terry-Thomas as Ludwig (‘The Singing Bone’), Russ Tamblyn as The Woodsman (‘The Dancing Princess’) / Tom Thumb, Oskar Homolka as The Duke and Walter Slezak as Stossel provide the best of the fun for children.

The screenplay by David P Harmon, Charles Beaumont and William Roberts fictionalises the lives of the Grimm brothers and re-enacts three of their stories. The film is technically very adept and impressive for its day, with painstaking, meticulous work behind the scenes. Paul Vogel shoots in lovely Metrocolor.

Levin directs the main story and producer Pal the fairy-tale fantasy sequences. It was the very first Cinerama film to tell a story – just before How the West Was Won – and was advertised as ‘The First Dramatic Film in Fabulous CINERAMA’. Mary Wills won an Oscar for Best colour costume design and there were three other nominations: for Best Cinematography, Color (Paul Vogel), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color and Best Scoring of Music (Leigh Harline). Mary Wills had previously received an Oscar nomination for another film about a story-teller of fairy tales: Hans Christian Andersen (1952).

Also in the cast are Barbara Eden, Yvette Mimieux as The Princess (in ‘The Dancing Princess’) , Martita Hunt, Otto Kruger as The King (‘The Singing Bone’), Jim Backus, Beulah Bondi as The Gypsy (‘The Dancing Princess’), Arnold Stang as Rumpelstiltskin, Betty Garde, Bryan Russell, Ian Wolfe, Tammy Marihugh, Cheerio Meredith, Walter Rilla, Clinton Sundberg, Sandra Gale Bettin, Robert Foulk, Walter Brooke, Robert Crawford Jr, Sydney Smith, Peter Whitney, True Ellison, Pamela Baird, Stanley Fafara, Diana Driscoll, Billy Barty, and Ruthie Robinson.

It premiered with a Royal Premiere in London on 15 July 1963. How the West Was Won also premiered in the UK, later that year, on 1 November 1962.

The budget was $6,250,000, expensive in those days.

It is shot at Bavaria Studios, Bavariafilmplatz 7, Geiselgasteig, Grünwald, Bavaria, Germany, and on various German locations.

One of the puppets in ‘The Cobbler and the Elves’ sequence is The Yawning Man from Pal’s 1958 film Tom Thumb, also with Russ Tamblyn.

‘And they lived happily ever after’…

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,431

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