Sunday, September 4, 2011

The Blue Bird (1976)


Twentieth Century-Fox
Directed by George Cukor
My rating: 1.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Fox Movie Channel)

Only marginally better than the dreadful 1940 Shirley Temple film of the same name. Two cute kids, one of whom is Bobby Brady's brother, go to sleep without supper one night, only to have "Light", Elizabeth Taylor, lead them on a search for the "blue bird of happiness". They go to various lands: memory, luxury, night; never finding happiness, but rather washed-up Hollywood stars. The sets resemble Saturday morning shows by Sid and Marty Krofft, particularly HR Pufnstuf, which I couldn't stop thinking of during their visit to the "forest" and its talking trees. As in the Temple film, there is that awful final stop in the land of unborn children, where Father Time arrives to send them on their way to Earth to be born. Ballet sequences attempt to give it some culture, but instead are completely out of place in the amateur surroundings.

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