The Shoes of the Fisherman is a beautifully shot and beautifully scored terrible movie. This film has an excellent cast and it's based on what was, in the mid-1960s, a famous novel, but Michael Anderson's film adaptation is a plodding, self-important, strange mess. It doesn't know where to focus – continually and bafflingly pulling us back to a plot between a newsman and his doctor wife and their marital problems – and even when it's focused on the important plot, the decisions of the new pontiff, it takes too long to do everything and is far too precious with the narrative's events.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a Sherman Brothers movie-musical, also from 1968, that is insane and widely beloved. The title refers to the name of a car that a crackpot inventor (played by Dick Van Dyke) has rigged up, and the two children who star in the film think the sounds car makes sound light "chitty chitty bang bang", so they make up a song with these words as a title and refrain. It's an asinine song that I have been singing for days since I saw the movie.
The plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is also completely bizarre, and the songs really don't go together at all. There's one about a candy whistle our crackpot has invented, and there's a diegetic song set in a circus performer's show in which our inventor is forced into performing but in which he performs astoundingly well. And then there is the flying car, which takes our characters off to a land in which all the children are imprisoned. This is entertaining stuff, and if the film makes no sense at all, it's very fun, and Dick Van Dyke is wonderful. Sally Ann Howes is no fair substitute for Julie Andrews, but her voice is gorgeous, and she performs admirably.
I watched both The Shoes of the Fisherman and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on DVD. It's just a fluke that they were both from 1968.
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