I saw the movie 1968 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when it came out and I was a child: six years old. I don’t remember much about it. I remember the flying car. And I think I remember people dancing around and playing candy musical instruments.

It was based on a book by the author of the James Bond novels Ian Fleming, and it was produced by the Bond producer: an odd kind of rip-off of Mary Poppins from a few years earlier. The rip-off paid off, as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was fairly popular and well-reviewed.

My parents didn’t take me to kiddie movies (which this was). They took me with them when they went to movies for grown-up’s, no matter the subject. I remember being traumatized by a flash of a woman’s breast in A New Leaf. Since A New Leaf came out in 1971, I was nine years old, and I’m sure that was pretty inappropriate. But maybe it has something to do with why I teach about movies today. So I may have seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on TV somewhat later.

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Seeing the movie more recently, I see that there are siblings, a boy and a girl, and I had a sister, so maybe I connected with that. The movie siblings’ dad is single, and the movie pairs him up with a perfect blond mother-figure, and I wonder if I envied this image of sweet singing dancing parents who didn’t take their child to grown-up movies. (I don’t remember my sister being with us to see A New Leaf.)

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I think the Child Catcher made the biggest impression on me. Whenever anyone has french fries, and I’m on a diet, I always think of myself as the Child Catcher: detecting fried foot at a thousand paces.  The Child Catcher is a villain. Today we’d call him a predator. His long nose lets him sniff out children. It’s unbelievable the scary things they will put in movies for children.

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I now realized he was played by dancer Robert Helpmann. I would come to know him for his performance in The Red Shoes: a deeply tragic art film about the destructive nature of art. A ballerina is driven to madness by her performance in a ballet about a woman driven to madness by a pair of red shoes. It’s pretty bonkers, as some stills from the movie show. I saw The Red Shoes when I was in film school. It’s considered a masterpiece, and it certainly impressed me. Even now, it’s one of my favorite films. Sometimes I just re-watch the ballet part: the color in the movie is intense–and the movie’s posters seem to aim to convey the same impression.

Helpmann’s ballet performances look pretty intense, too, based on photographs. But doing some research, I find that Helpmann and his partner lived openly as a couple in times when that was not done. And many actors who went on to play the Child Catcher on stage have been openly gay.

Movie roles demand specific talents. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang seems conventional enough–for its time–but now the images of adbucting children are disturbing. (Then again, these images appear in Hansel and Gretel, too.)

In theory, The Red Shoes is a work of art, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a work of entertainment. But they share an emotional intensity and dark themes–and the work of Robert Helpmann.

When we are young, we see one movie and have no idea about the others that are connected to it. The more movies we see, the more we come to understand the diverse set of talents required to make them. Even a cheesy kiddie movie can have some emotional depth. And as we grow emotionally and intellectually, we can appreciate these things that we did not know when we were six.

–Edward R. O’Neill