Fitzwilly (1967)

Director: Delbert Mann
Writer: Isobel Lennart, based on the novel A Garden of Cucumbers by Poyntz Tyler
Stars: Dick Van Dyke, Barbara Feldon, John McGiver, Harry Townes, John Fiedler, Norman Fell and Edith Evans

Index: 2025 Centennials.

While I review a lot of movies on hundredth birthdays, it’s rare that I get to do it while the centenarian is alive and celebrating, but today actually is Dick Van Dyke’s centenary and he’s still going strong. Why not tackle a film that I haven’t seen before that he made when he was forty-two, the ultimate answer?

I enjoyed this immensely but I left it with a string of questions, starting with, “Why wasn’t this British and black and white?” It feels like a classic Ealing comedy remade in Hollywood, keeping Dame Edith Evans because who could replace her, but recasting most other roles.

She’s Miss Victoria Woodworth, delightfully haughty as an old and rich force of nature who requires a vast staff to run her huge New York mansion and signs endless cheques to endless charities. The only catch is that she hasn’t any money and hasn’t had since her father left her a measly hundred and eighty bucks.

The conceit of the movie is that she doesn’t know that because her staff is so devoted that they’re running a lucrative criminal empire in her house entirely to keep her in the manner to which she’s been accustomed. In charge of this empire is her imaginative butler, Claude Fitzwilliam, or Fitzwilly, as he’s known to one and all. That’s Dick Van Dyke, of course.

He clearly had a lot of fun here at a point in his career when the future was wide open. He had only six prior credits on film, though one of those was for Mary Poppins which garnered him a Golden Globe nomination. However, he had just come off five successful seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show, which won fifteen Emmys, including three in a row for him personally. He’d conquered television. Bring on cinema.

He plays Fitzwilly without attempting to be subtle, far more like Tim Curry might attempt it than Alec Guinness. And that’s fine, as long as we’re OK with charm and confidence over a sense of believability. His confidence is serene and his charm effortless, his believability not so strong. His London accent hasn’t improved since Mary Poppins and his French is no better. Fortunately, he spends most of the film as an American, leaving Evans to handle the English.

She really keeps him on the hop. One day of fraud, mostly swindles going through the non-existent St. Dismas Thrift Shop, nets the group a neat six grand, tax free, but that’s more than offset by Miss Vicki giving ten to the Tenzing Mountaineering School in Nepal. So it goes.

It’s a well oiled machine, juggling swindles with scams and outright thefts, and it’s likely to continue in that manner on out, at least as long as Miss Vicki remains alive. Fitzwilly is on that too, continually conjuring up schemes to keep her occupied. Unfortunately, the latest of those may throw a wrench into that machine.

He’s persuaded her to compile a dictionary for people who can’t spell, listing all the ways in which words are horribly mangled, which is fine except she hires a student from Columbia to handle the secretarial work, without going through him. Juliet Nowell is not part of their well oiled machine.

She’s co-star Barbara Feldon, then Agent 99 on Get Smart so her comedic timing is spot on, even if she looks far too much like Velma from Scooby Doo! to our hindsight today. She didn’t in 1967 because it didn’t start until 1969, but it feels like it’s been around forever.

Of course, Fitzwilly needs her out of there so she immediately thinks he hates her and that’s a fantastic way to spark the enemies to lovers trope and, well, we aren’t watching Fitzwilly to be surprised. Van Dyke and Feldon have a fair chemistry, especially as we can’t fail to notice that the butler only gets flustered around her.

To be fair, I did get caught out by one twist, even though it was telegraphed, but I saw the twist on the twist coming a mile away. It’s not a film that survives on twists alone, or even its array of gentlemanly crimes, especially the big Christmas Eve heist at Gimbels in New York, a crime needed to offset all the schemes broken inadvertently by Juliet.

What it survives on is the cast, not only Van Dyke and Feldon, with Evans stealing scenes in abundance, but a large ensemble of character actors, including John McGiver, John Fiedler, Anne Seymour, Cecil Kellaway, Norman Fell... every one of them a face you’ll recognise even if you don’t know their names.

For my money, it’s McGiver, best known for his American Express commercials, if not for his films, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Manchurian Candidate and Midnight Cowboy, who shines the brightest. Of course, Evans is the scenestealer and Van Dyke the worthy lead. He gets to play some piano here and even stand on his head.

I have precious little space to cover a career as long and busy as his, especially given that it may not be over. He made a couple of films in 2018, Mary Poppins Returns and Buttons, and TV as recently as Days of Our Lives and a voice slot on The Simpsons in 2023.

He started out in choir and drama at school, acting alongside Donald O’Connor. Denied as a pilot, he worked as a radio announcer during World War II, while entertaining troops. After the war, he continued on radio, in Illinois, but was talked into comedy and toured nightclubs with Phil Erickson. He made it to TV as a host and expanded from there, adding Broadway to his resume in 1959 and film in 1960 with a lead role in Bye Bye Birdie, having won a Tony for it on stage.

That led him to The Dick Van Dyke Show, after CBS wouldn’t cast writer Carl Reiner. It proved successful with both audience and critics and his star was lit. His horrendous cockney accent aside, he was a hit in Mary Poppins and, after a string of less successful movies, including this one, in another musical set in England, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in which he wisely stuck with his own American accent.

He stretched his acting chops with a serious turn in The Comic, again written by Carl Reiner; starred in a Broadway revival and tour of The Music Man; and a string of TV movies. A trio of those spun off from Jake and the Fatman led to a mystery drama show, Diagnosis: Murder, which ran to eight seasons and gave a chance for his real son Barry to play his screen son Steve.

In 1991, he bought an Amiga, got hooked on computer graphics and created animation for multiple shows. He sang in an a capella group and competed on The Masked Singer. He taught Sunday school throughout his life and wrote five books. Happy birthday, sir! What’s next?