Herbie Rides Again

It took six years for Herbie, the loveable little car from 1968’s The Love Bug, to zoom back into theaters; and when he did, something felt different. With the “summer of love” now a distant memory, the danger that audiences would be less inclined to follow the misadventures of a groovy little VW Bug posed a bit of a problem for the filmmakers. The solution they hit upon was to amp up the irreverence and throw their vehicular protagonist (and his human co-stars) into an increasingly silly series of comedic situations. Unfortunately the resulting film, 1974’s Herbie Rides Again, ended up showing how little Disney understood about what had made the original film so successful.

He's ugly, but he'll get you there...

The film focuses on the efforts of villainous real estate magnate (and demolition fetishist) Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn) to construct the world’s tallest office building over an existing San Francisco neighborhood. The sole holdouts who refuse to move away are Old Lady Steinmetz (Helen Hayes, apparently playing the aunt of Buddy Hackett’s character from The Love Bug, despite being referred to as “Grandma”) and her displaced neighbor, flight attendant Nicole Harris (Stefanie Powers,) who reside in the old firehouse from the first film. In a last-ditch effort to sweet-talk the kindly old widow into signing over her residence, Hawk sends his naïve young nephew, Willoughby Whitfield (Ken Berry,) fresh out of law school and completely oblivious to the fact that his uncle is a tyrant. Little does anyone know that Old Lady Steinmetz and Nicole have a third roommate, one who is fiercely protective of them and their little firehouse: Herbie, the VW Beetle with a mischievous mind of his own. Before you can say “tediously predictable,” Willoughby is soon convinced of Herbie’s consciousness, as well as his uncle’s greedy ways. He therefore decides to help the old lady, her sassy roommate, and their living car stay in their home, and - through an increasingly wacky series of events - make Hawk receive his overdue comeuppance.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the only returning “character” from The Love Bug is Herbie himself. Our three (or four, if you count David Tomlinson) flesh-and-blood leads are MIA in this sequel, their absences explained offhandedly by Hayes’ character: her nephew, Tennessee, is with his ailing guru in Tibet, while Jim Douglas (who’s never mentioned by name) “went off to Europe to drive foreign cars”; no mention is made as to the whereabouts of Michele Lee’s Carole Bennet. While the lack of familiar characters doesn’t automatically make a sequel bad, the cast of the original Love Bug shared some of the strongest chemistry yet seen in a Disney film, so their complete absence is sorely felt here. It doesn’t help, of course, that male lead Ken Berry (familiar from TV’s F-Troop and later Mama's Family) is no Dean Jones. Lacking the charisma necessary in a film where suspension-of-disbelief is paramount, Berry never injects the feeble Willoughby with any spark of life. The character ends up taking a backseat to just about every other character in the film, never growing beyond the “affable doormat” he's initially introduced as.

Berry pretty...

Additionally, the relationship between Willoughby and Nicole (because of course they fall in love) is played with as little subtlety as possible. Not that I’m saying the first film’s Carole Bennet was an especially well written or acted character, but there was solid chemistry between Lee and Jones that made their characters' budding romance somewhat believable. Here instead we get Powers’ Nicole clocking Willoughby on more than one occasion, since she goes “crazy” if she hears Hawk’s name, while he cowers and apologizes (to which she replies "I can't stand men who apologize" … WHAT!?!) Their romance seems to happen only because it’s what men and women do in Disney comedies.

It’s also quite a stretch for a then 41-year old Berry to be playing a starry-eyed young man fresh out of law school. By comparison, Dean Jones was 37 in the first film, and was then referred to by other characters as an “old man” in the racing circuit. When the supposedly "youthful" main character ends up getting more wrinkle-disguising soft-focus glamor shots than the leading lady, one wonders why a younger actor simply wasn’t hired in the first place.

Also, Ken Berry’s hands are distractingly hairy. Like, gorilla hairy. He should’ve changed his name to Ken Hairy.

Okay, I’ll leave the guy alone now.

Something else you may have noticed in the above synopsis is that there’s no mention of auto racing. As noted in last week’s post, one of the continually popular aspects of The Love Bug is it’s focus on Herbie’s career as a racecar, paying deference to sports-car enthusiasts and racing culture. Since the first film’s other focus on counter-culture and mysticism couldn’t practically be repeated (more on that in a moment,) it would only makes sense for a follow-up film to focus on Herbie’s further exploits in the racing world. Yet for reasons known only to the filmmakers, they avoided this all together. Instead, Old Lady Steinmetz informs Willoughby that Herbie “used to be a famous racing car,” explaining why she has to “humor” him like some temperamental old diva. We are later treated to a lengthy dream sequence of Herbie’s career, consisting entirely of clips from The Love Bug. This sequence serves absolutely no purpose beyond padding out the short film (Herbie Rides Again clocks in at a tidy 88 minutes,) and reminding the audience how fun the original film was.

Why do we put such big wheels on our little cars?

Instead of energetic racing sequences, Herbie Rides Again instead ratchets up the wackiness quotient to almost unbearable levels. The film features numerous chase sequences, in which Herbie flees from Hawk’s henchmen. The longest of these finds Herbie speeding through city streets with an unfazed Old Lady Steinmetz sitting inside, causing massive traffic collisions, driving through the dining room of the Sheraton Palace Hotel, and finally escaping by driving up the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. Later, after ascending a window-cleaning platform (that’s strangely large enough to fit a Volkswagen,) Herbie and his elderly passenger spray gallons upon gallons of foam into Hawk’s office and proceed to chase the raving villain around the building and out onto the building’s ledge (which, again, is amazingly wide enough to accommodate a car.) By this point, one can’t help but miss the first film's humor. Yes, it was silly, but used more sparingly, such as when Herbie would squirt motor oil onto Thorndyke’s shoes or perform silly stunts to win races - not to cause mayhem. Such wrathful behavior (which culminates in a sequence featuring Hawk having unnerving Herbie-centric nightmares) also seems unbecoming of the charming little car, whose entire consciousness had previously hinged on feelings of love.

Fahrvergnügen of death...

The over-the-top craziness in this film isn’t even limited to Herbie’s antics, either. Upon learning that Willoughby is not only in Hawk’s employ, but also related to him, Nicole becomes enraged and wallops him with a boiled lobster (a fact that we’re reminded of several times afterward, as if using a lobster as a weapon is the funniest damn thing in the world.) Willoughby, our protagonist, is literally sent flying over the railing of Fisherman’s Wharf, landing in the water below with a massive splash. Jeez! Who does Nicole think she is, Princess Anna!? By far the biggest ham on display, unsurprisingly, is Keenan Wynn. As Alonzo Hawk (a character also featured in Disney’s two original Absent-Minded Professor movies - which means that Herbie and Flubber both exist in a shared universe,) Wynn spends nearly all of his screen-time bellowing at the top of his lungs, flinging insults and firing subordinates left and right. If the goal as Herbie’s nemesis is to top the over-acting of your predecessor, then Wynn makes David Tomlinson’s energetic performance come off as naturalistic in comparison.

After that flying Model T! Wait, wrong movie...

An unfortunate victim of the thematic re-imagining of Herbie is the loss of the emotional mysticism that pervaded the first film. This is an understandable and unfortunate instance of real-world circumstances informing fictional matters, as the flower-power fueled counter-culture that had informed this motif had more or less evaporated by 1974. But again, this being the case, the filmmakers could have opted to leave the more “out there” elements of Herbie’s existence alone and focus on the racing. Instead, they seem to shoot for a kind of magical realism by bringing in a number of other "living machines" - but to little effect. Besides Herbie, the firehouse also houses a sentient Orchestrion (a turn-of-the-century music machine) and a retired San Francisco cable car. In addition, during the film's climax Herbie speeds through town rallying every other VW Beetle he encounters, in order to take on Hawk’s assembled demolition crew. Like much in this film, this sequence was likely thrown in because the visual of a “VW Bug cavalry” chasing after Keenan Wynn struck someone as amusing. One could possibly argue that Herbie’s protective emotions for his human friends grows so strong that they spread to other “like-minded” machines, but this feels like grasping at straws. The addition of other "living machines" seems arbitrary to the script, merely an attempt to make the movie seem quirky. Rather than continuing the undercurrent of mysticism, the filmmakers turn to empty spectacle, filmic conjuring tricks masquerading as whimsy.

Looks like a lemon party...

It may also be worth noting that Volkswagen, who had little to do with the first film, worked with Disney to heavily cross-promote their line of cars (and made sure their familiar “VW” emblem was much more prominent on-screen than it had been in ‘68.). Seeing an army of “heroic Volkswagens” on the big screen suddenly makes much more sense when viewed from a financial point-of-view, rather than a mystical one.

The biggest question here, of course, is “why?” Why did the filmmakers decide to drop nearly everything that made the first film work so well? Why change the cast, exclude the racing, ignore the mystical overtones? Most important of all, why focus on the one element that probably least accounted for The Love Bug’s success: the “living car” gags? Much of the behind-the-camera talent was retained from the first film - including director Robert Stevenson and writers Gordon Buford and Bill Walsh - so why the wide disparity in the script’s thematic tone and (let’s be honest) overall quality? Could this have been a case of Disney completely misreading it’s audience? That may be so, for while Herbie Rides Again was far from a box office disappointment (earning over $38 Million,) it most definitely wasn't the runaway success it’s predecessor was. Perhaps the “love generation” ethos that the original was released during accounted for far more of it’s success than anyone at Walt Disney Productions thought.

Face to face in secret places, feel the chill...

While I’ve spent this review tearing the movie apart, the unfortunate fact is that, while not a very good movie, when taken on it’s own merits it’s not that bad, either. It’s far, far from perfect of course, for all the reasons already stated, but it can be pretty funny. Hell, Keenan Wynn’s bugnuts performance alone is worth the price of admission. For anyone looking for some mindlessly wacky comedy, there are far worse ways to spend 88 minutes. In many ways, the film follows in the tradition of “throw everything at the wall” comedy that categorized 1963’s It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and would eventually spawn such parody-heavy titles as 1980’s Airplane! In fact, Herbie Rides Again really feels like a spiritual successor to Disney’s groan-inducing 1970 yuk-fest The Boatniks (which, perhaps not coincidentally, also featured Stefanie Powers in a lead role.) But the fact of the matter is that this is a sequel not to that knockabout comedy, but to The Love Bug - a well-made, extremely popular film that has rightly become a classic in Disney’s canon. And, for whatever reason, the people who made that film followed it up with something that feels like a very different kind of movie. Whether it’s fair or not, comparing one to the other inevitably makes Herbie Rides Again pale considerably.

Sooner or later, your wife will drive home
one of the best reasons for owning a Volkswagen...

Next time we’ll continue our look at the adventures of Herbie the Love Bug, as Dean Jones returns in an attempt to get the expanding series back to basics. But will it be a case of “too little, too late”?