Welcome to my weekly discussion of the films of the Walt Disney Studio. I’m proceeding mostly chronologically. The title comes from a quote from Walt, “I never called my work an ‘art’ It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.”

Title: Emil and the Detectives

Year: 1964

Source materials: based on the novel Emil und die Detektive by German author Erich Kästner.

Box office: $1,275,000

Plot: Ten-year old Emil Tischbein travels by bus from Neustadt to Berlin, carrying an envelope containing 400 marks that his mother has entrusted him to deliver to his grandmother. Emil falls asleep during the bus ride and wakes up to find the money gone. He is sure that the thief is Grundeis, the shifty man who was sitting next to him.

Emil follows Grundeis to a Berlin cafe and summons a policeman, but Grundeis escapes to a rendezvous with The Baron, his underworld associate. Emil enlists the help of a group of child “detectives” led by the street urchin Gustav, and together they track down Grundeis and overhear him plotting with The Baron and his accomplice Müller to rob a large Berlin bank by tunneling to its vault.

Emil is captured and forced to assist in the criminal plot. After the bank vault is blown open, Grundeis is doublecrossed by The Baron and Müller and left behind with Emil in the tunnel to be blown up by a dynamite fuse, but Gustav arrives in time to save them.

The child detectives pursue the thieves and alert more children in the neighborhood who also give chase. The Baron and Muller are surrounded by the children and arrested by the police. Emil receives a reward which he intends to share with the other children.

Background: It was shot at the Tempelhof Studios in Berlin and on location around the city. The sets were designed by the art directors Isabella and Werner Schlichting.

Changes from the Source Material: The book was written between the wars, but Berlin in the film is the sixties. There is even a ruin left over from the war.

The entire plot with the Baron and Müller was created for the film. The book ends when Grundeis tries to change out Emil’s money at a bank. The Detectives hold him up while Emil proves that the money is his because it has pin holes from where he pinned it to the inside of his jacket.

Cast:

Walter Slezak as The Baron. Slezak is known for his roles in  Lifeboat, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, The Inspector General, Born to Kill, Treasure Island, Once Upon a Honeymoon, The Princess and the Pirate, The Spanish Main, Sinbad the Sailor, Born to Kill, Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, People Will Talk, and Call Me Madam. On Broadway, Slezak played the lead in  Fanny, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

Roger Mobley as Gustav. As a child actor he appeared on several television shows including  Fury,  Route 66, and Death Valley Days.Walt Disney signed him to the title role in the highly acclaimed and Emmy-nominated “Adventures of Gallegher” serials for the Wonderful World of Color. Gallegher is an amateur sleuth newspaper reporter, a character created by the author Richard Harding Davis. When he turned eighteen, he was drafted into the military and became a Green Beret. Heinz Schubert as Grundeis. He is best known for playing the role of Alfred Tetzlaff in the German television sitcom Ein Herz und eine Seele. He was a member of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.

Critical Reception:

• Eugene Archer of The New York Times wrote that “Walt Disney has come up with one of his best children’s pictures,” stating that Tewksbury’s direction “makes all the difference. He has kept the kiddies from gushing too coyly, suppressed the mugging of a comic trio of thieves, photographed the fresh Berlin setting in effective color, and juxtaposed suspense and wit with a nice, bouncing pace.”
• Variety called the film “an interesting project” with “the customary distinguishable Disney mark to give it class,” but without the same appeal to adults as “say, Disney’s previous moppet classic, Mary Poppins.“
• Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film “falls somewhere between the moppet trade and not-too-discriminating adults.”
• The Monthly Film Bulletin found it “pleasantly presented, if without any distinction.”

Legacy: Gold Key put out a comic book adaptation in 1965.

My take: I really liked this. The kids were better than the usual child actors, although I thought it was odd that all the kids had American accents, yet everyone else was European.

Available on Disney +?: Yes

Next Week: Hayley Mills returns in The Moon Spinners