On the Origins and Sources of the Child Catcher: Ken Hughes' Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the Roald Dahl Connection

Something is definitely rotten in the tyrannical state of Vulgaria. Innocent children are being rounded up, locked in cages and sent away, never to be seen and heard of again – all because the wicked, conceited Baroness Bomburst (Anna Quayle) hates children. Ironically, the tantrum-prone Baron (Gert Fröbe) is essentially a child himself, in an arrested state of development. Together they rule the land through terror and intimidation, whereby an irrational hatred of children seems to unite Vulgaria's ruling class in a common cause against a common enemy. Here, the ruthless Child Catcher (Robert Helpmann) is always on call to carry out the Baroness' wishes. The more fortunate children who have managed to escape his evil clutches hide away in the caverns underneath the Baron's schloss, living and scavenging like rats, waiting for someone to liberate them. And so, when crackpot Edwardian inventor Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke), beautiful socialite Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes) and the motherless Potts twins, Jeremy and Jemima (Adrian Hall and Heather Ripley, respectively), find themselves here, they are strangers in a strange land. Caractacus struggles to make sense of this lunacy: "What kind of country is this? No children. Everybody terrified out of their lives?" From this brief description of the 1968 British musical/satirical comedy/fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, directed by Ken Hughes and drawing on Ian Fleming's adventures of the extraordinary, all-purpose vehicle, which features in the title, Vulgaria has all the hallmarks of a police state: a curious amalgam of the German Empire and Nazi Germany, where absolute monarchy meets noticeably modern forms of fascism and despotism.

But, while the film appropriates elements we readily identify with Fleming (most notably, foreign spies and megalomaniacal despots), the film's digression into fantasy set in Vulgaria, which spotlights the figure of the Child Catcher, do not appear in Fleming's stories of the same name (published between 1964 and 1965 and brought together in one volume in 1968). Indeed, the film is only tangentially related to Fleming. When producer Albert R. Broccoli purchased the rights to Fleming's work, this included not only his most celebrated creation, James Bond, but this lesser-known children's property. Conceived by its producer as "Britain's answer to Disney's Mary Poppins [1964]" (Maxford 44), Broccoli reemployed much of the talent for that film, including Dick Van Dyke and award-winning songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, among others. He also re-utilized much of his Bond entourage. This included Roald Dahl, who had been commissioned to write the screenplay for You Only Live Twice (1967). Prima facie, Fleming and Dahl seemed the perfect marriage of talents. By the time Dahl was commissioned to write the screenplay for Chitty Chitty, he already had James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and The Magic Finger (1966) on his resume. As for British director Hughes, his previous credits included crime thrillers and dramas, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Casino Royale (1967).

Hughes was also a writer in his own right on many of his films and he supplied Dahl with the basic storyline of Chitty Chitty—or so he alleges (Treglown 183). According to Hughes, Dahl "'Helped out a bit with the story but didn't seem to get into it. It was Cubby's [Broccoli's] idea that I went off to write the script alone because Roald was so very slow. But a very nice man" (Maxford 45). Despite sharing screenwriting credit with Dahl he insists:

There was nothing about the Baron and the Baroness and the children in the cellars. … That was all Grimm's fairy-tale stuff which I think it needed. The Childcatcher was also my invention—his cage and everything—because in something like that you need a wicked witch or an evil queen. So I got to thinking what sinister thing can we have to frighten the shit out of all the kids, and it was a Childcatcher!

(Maxford 45...