The Love Bug

In the history of filmdom, there have been few box-office draws as unlikely as Herbie, the little car with a mind of it’s own. That a self-aware Volkswagen Beetle should end up starring in a film franchise spanning decades is surprising enough; the fact that his original film, 1968’s The Love Bug, ended up as the second highest-grossing film of the year (for 1969, when it went into wide release) is frankly stupefying. This was, after all, the same period that produced such decade-defining hits as Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and saw the rapid rise of a counterculture-inspired “New Hollywood” movement that made Easy Rider and The Graduate cultural events. And yet this silly comedy, the final production given Walt Disney’s personal “OK,” is steeped in a counter-cultural zeitgeist (at least one filtered through stodgy old Walt Disney Productions) that apparently struck a chord with audiences at the time.



Poor Dean - he thinks he's the star of the movie...

Based on the 1961 book Car, Boy, Girl by Gordon Buford, the film tells the story of down-on-his-luck race car driver Jim Douglas (Dean Jones,) who discovers that his sprightly new VW “bug” possesses a measure of consciousness - and a playful personality to boot. Aided by his new car - dubbed Herbie by his roommate - Douglas becomes a famous racing star, besting a snooty upmarket European car showroom owner Peter Thorndyke (played by David Tomlinson) and winning the hand of Thorndyke’s sales associate and amateur automotive technician Carole Bennett (played by Michele Lee.) Disney’s favorite “everyman,” Jones - already in his sixth role for the studio - plays to his strengths as the befuddled straight man who must come to grips with the extraordinary circumstances he finds himself in. The real genius in Jones’ performance, however, is how he moves almost imperceptibly from a place of understated realism to high drama. Audiences follow along with Douglas’ initial skepticism (even if they already know the film’s central gimmick) and eventual change of heart, having been completely sold on the emotional truth behind the improbable events occurring on-screen. With no other actor - not even such patented Disney charmers as Fred MacMurray - could one conceivably believe the grief Jones’ character experiences while grappling with a suicidal Herbie atop the Golden Gate bridge.

Jeez, first I have to deal with an invisible Peter Ustinov, now a living car!?!

While Jones goes to great lengths to ground the story in reality, many of his co-stars go for the opposite approach, firing on all wacky cylinders from the start. Most obvious in this regard is Tomlinson, Disney’s secret weapon, four years off his signature role as George Banks in Mary Poppins. Tomlinson plays against his “proper English gentleman” persona as the villainous Thorndyke, ranting and gnashing his teeth with perverse abandon. It’s clear that Tomlinson’s having a blast playing the bad guy, gleefully flying off the handle at Douglas and heaping abuse upon his meek toady, Havershaw (played to ass-kissing perfection by Joe Flynn.) Tomlinson’s scenery-chewing goes off the charts during the lengthy “El Dorado Road Race” in the film’s final act; the face he pulls while fainting at the sight of a bear riding shotgun is so over-the-top it feels like the actor may have pulled a muscle.

DEUUEAUGH!!

Bringing the wacky for the good guys, meanwhile, is familiar funnyman (and future Little Mermaid voice-actor) Buddy Hackett as the improbably-named Tennessee Steinmetz. Playing Douglas’ friend and roommate, audiences at the time were likely most familiar with Hackett from his role in Stanley Kramer’s It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Bizarrely, the 44-year old actor's cock-eyed comedic persona (possessing the world’s thickest Brooklyn accent) is utilized for playing Steinmetz as a spiritually enlightened, New Age student of eastern philosophy, who constantly extols lessons he supposedly picked up during time amongst Buddhist monks in Tibet - and who also assembles objets d’art from battered car-parts. Interestingly, the character and his philosophy are not played for laughs (Hackett delivers plenty of humorous asides and physical pratfalls to cover that,) but portrayed as the heart and soul of Douglas and Herbie’s crew, encouraging the initially skeptical racer to listen to his own emotions in order to understand those of his living car.

And den dey made me wind up Hoybee like a giant kid's toy!

A brief aside: there’s a scene shared between Tomlinson and Hackett, in which Thorndyke pretends to get drunk with Steinmetz (from his “Mudda’s own recipe” for Irish coffee) to cover an act of sabotage against Herbie. I’m certain that much of the interaction between the two in this scene was ad-libbed, with Tomlinson “accidentally” squirting whipped cream on Hackett’s hand, who then responds by spending the rest of the scene trying to get the Brit to crack-up and break character. Tomlinson barely makes it, obviously starting to lose it at scene’s end as Hackett sprays whipped cream on a discarded notebook. Watching the pair of comically gifted actors using a scene in a Disney film to crack one-another up is a joy to behold, and one of the film’s unexpected highlights.

If you're going to San Francisco...

The film’s San Francisco setting seems wholly appropriate to the story being told - especially a San Francisco awash in the lingering haze of the “summer of love.” Besides providing Peter Ellenshaw and his crew an opportunity to produce yet another set of beautiful matte paintings (the painter’s brush somehow making the fog-bound streets of the “city by the bay” feel more authentic than photographic reality ever could,) the flower-power counterculture provides a colorful backdrop to the story of a living car. While I wouldn’t call the portrayal of hippies in the film “authentic” in any sense of the word, the laughs generated by their presence seem more like a tongue-in-cheek play on the ridiculousness of the movie itself. Witness the van-driving hippie at the drive-in (played by a bearded Dean Jones, who clearly wanted in on the fun,) responding to Carole’s plea of “Help! I’m a prisoner! I can’t get out!” with a deadpan “We all prisoners, chickie-baby; we all locked in,” before dismissing our protagonists as a “couple of weirdos.”

… be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

But beyond a few (admittedly cheap) laughs, the contemporary counterculture is a pervasive presence in the film, going hand-in-hand with Steinmetz and his New Age philosophy. This is where the real meaning of the film’s title comes to play. For while many assume the meaning of The Love Bug to be referring to Herbie playing matchmaker between Douglas and Carole, the “love” in question turns out to be something less tangible. At no point in the movie are we given a straight-forward reason as to how or why the little Volkswagen is alive. The closest the script comes to providing an explanation is having characters theorize about mankind’s love imbuing it’s mechanical creations with emotions. Such conversations, when referring specifically to Herbie, tend to focus more on his emotional state than the fact that he can move and think for himself. The big reveal in the film isn’t that Herbie is alive - that’s already a given - but that the apparent animating agent behind his consciousness is love itself. This points to a kind of mysticism rarely alluded to in Disney films. To be clear, I’m not referring to a general kind of fairytale “magic,” but the idea of actual mysticism, the belief that union with an absolute truth - or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the mind - can be attained through contemplation and self-surrender; in other words, the very ideas that Hackett’s character clumsily propagates throughout the film. Douglas and Herbie only become simpatico once Douglas lets go of his preconceptions about his own life and what “life” itself means, and risks his own to save Herbie from driving himself into the San Francisco Bay.

Herbie walks on water...

It’s true that this “peek below the surface” of mysticism may be treated within the script as a mere gateway into a series of wacky race scenes, but this is clearly the kind of thematic material audiences were looking to connect with at the time. While it’s hard to imagine theaters full of actual Haight/Ashbury-bound hippies coming together to experience The Love Bug (although for all I know this may’ve been the case - and no doubt the film would’ve been one hell of a trip under a hashish cloud,) it’s entirely conceivable that more straight-laced audiences may’ve come away from Disney’s latest comedy feeling as though they’d touched part of the “happening” of the time. Little Timmy and Sally may not exactly leave the matinee with a desire to thumb a trip ‘cross-country to follow The Grateful Dead, but they just may end up wearing love beads, or sewing a “Peace and Love” patch onto their Sears bell-bottoms.

Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer...

While The Love Bug’s counter-cultural overtones may’ve helped it become a hit, much of the film’s legacy focuses on the film’s other obsession: that of car culture and racing. Much deference is paid to authenticity in the film's portrayal of the racing community, such as utilizing a number of actual race events for Herbie to compete in, and casting famed sportscaster Chick Hearn and STP CEO and spokesman Andy Granatelli as themselves. While the years following the film's release has seen a number of sequels (which we’ll also be looking at this month) fade from public consciousness, Herbie remains a consistent presence at car shows in the form of fan-made recreations, as well as the occasional appearance of one of the screen-used VW Bugs.

The success of The Love Bug may be an example of the right story coming at the right time - for within another couple of years, the flower-power that permeates the story would find itself burnt out and turned ugly. And so it would seem that Disney, clearly wanting to chase Herbie’s success with a follow-up film, would most likely focus on the popular racing aspects of the film. As we will see, however, they'll end up failing to do so - in the process completely dropping the ball on Herbie’s future cinematic potential.

He who smelt it, dealt it...