User Reviews

Dick van Dyke (or his agent, who passed, without van Dyke's knowledge, for him on "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines") made some howling bad choices on movies. Too bad. He had a good personality for movies. Had he made better movies "Fitzwilly" might have been better, too.

The story: a butler for a dotty old lady tries to keep her in the style to which she is accustomed (including giving large sums to charity) even though she's broke. He and his staff spend most of their time cooking up schemes to bilk people out of money (or whatever else they need), some of them pretty darn clever. But a new secretary, kept out of the loop, begins to wonder what's going on . . .

A good cast including Barbara Feldon ("Get Smart"), Edith Evans and an impossibly young Sam Waterston give the star all the support he needs. And John Williams (billed as "Johnny") provided a suitable score (though the song that plays over the action at about the 1 hour mark is a real dog). And the movie did give me some laugh-out-loud moments, and I'm pretty jaded.

But this is one of those comedies that relies on a light atmosphere rather than laugh out loud moments, and that doesn't cut it these days. One can see William Powell or Cary Grant pulling it off had it been made 30 years earlier (it's a lot more enjoyable to me than "My Man Godfrey.")

van Dyke is their heir. Van Dyke saw himself as the heir of silent comics like Keaton and Lloyd. In both cases he was simply too late. Neither silent nor William Powell movies were being cranked out in the mid- to late 1960s.

A good movie, but not a great one. Had van Dyke not made so many AWFUL movies after "Mary Poppins" it might have been a minor van Dyke vehicle. That it's one of his better features makes it a pretty poor showing for his career. With a different agent he might not, these days, have been relegated to TV.

It's a pleasant time-waster and I like it. But it's not the classic it might have been with a better script, tighter direction and a few more bizarre characters.

BTW it has some strong language and the theme is one of constant theft.

In "Fitzwilly" loyal servants led by an ingenious butler steal possessions, mainly through fraud, in order to support their aged mistress. (The poor dear continues to live in style and to help out various charities, not realizing that she is penniless.) As a comedy, "Fitzwilly" contains a number of funny finds, such as the idea of a regional network of closely related servants tipping each other off with a seasoned efficiency an intelligence agency would be proud of. It also boasts a magisterial Edith Evans, as the dotty but kindly employer who's trying to write a new kind of dictionary.

Sadly, the central romance (between the butler and the employer's new secretary) is clichéd ; it's one of these standard thingies where both partners start out loathing each other before falling into each other's arms. Moreover, the ethics of the servant gang seem to be muddled beyond belief. Are they stealing from the poor in order to support the rich ? Stealing from the rich in order to support the poor ? Stealing from the rich in order to support the rich ? Their antics are certainly not as harmless as the story would have you believe. In order to rob a department store, for instance, they organize an artificial rush by luring customers into the building, blocking the exits and creating disturbances all over the floor. It's an incredibly dangerous situation : if a drunken joker were to yell "Fire !" the rush would turn into a lethal stampede. Or what if some older customer were to suffer a heart attack ? There is no way medical help could reach the man in time through such a commotion.

As a viewer you're also not supposed to ask an obvious question, to wit, how can one be penniless if one owns a giant mansion filled with costly books and antiques ? The most obvious solution, here, would be to sell off at least part of the mansion or the furniture, but no : the dear old mistress would die upon having to part with three consoles and four side tables. Ah, well.

Anyway, one thing's for sure, if a very rich heir or heiress donates money to charity, you can be certain that you're looking at stolen money. Perhaps stolen last month, perhaps stolen seventy years ago, perhaps stolen two hundred years ago, but : stolen.

A butler so competent he puts Marmaduke Ruggles to shame, Claude "Fitzwilly" Fitzwilliam is also a crook and con man who robs from the poor to fill the coffers of his dowager employer, Miss Vicky. It's hard to even begin to calculate the ethical problems in this movie, or to untangle the motivations.

Fitzwilly is played by the multi-talented Dick van Dyke at the height of his powers, which are in evidence here, but even his talent can't carry this mess of a movie. Fitzwilly's white-collar crimes are intended to be both comical and admirable, but they are neither. Nor are they victimless. They include: (1) Conning dutiful and/or dim employees, sales clerks and middle managers and etc., out of goods and cash-- people who will probably be fired as a result. (2) Reneging on donations to charities by stealing back the checks that Miss V. issued. (3) Setting up his own fake charity, "Serenity through the Word," which sends lachrymose letters of condolence to mourners and receives donations in return. (4) Spending his ill-got loot on maintaining Miss Vicky's household-- which includes the whole staff (his gang) "living well." Champagne is the most common libation downstairs.

None of the characters could be called admirable, let alone consistent. Barbara Feldon, playing an intellectual hired by Miss Vicky to help research her "Dictionary for Dopes," starts by idealistically defending servants, butlers, and secretaries against charges of inferiority. But when she takes a liking to Fitzwilly, she harasses and then dumps him because he isn't ambitious enough to rise above the status of a butler. Then of course, this being a putative romantic comedy, she reverses herself again to marry him, "I don't care if you're a butler or a chiropodist." As for the wonderful John McGiver, I won't detail his character, but trust me, his motivations twist into a Gordian knot that Hercules couldn't untangle.

There is one redeeming feature in this Christmas casualty: Miss Vicky is played by the magnificent Dame Edith Evans. Her too few scenes are too, too fabulous. I offer a sampling of her best lines, but reading them without her pungent aristocratic delivery is like reading lyrics of "I Got Rhythm" without the music:

"A psychiatrist is a doctor to whom you tell things you wouldn't tell your mother, and if you did she would have the common decency not to believe you."

"He thought I needed a new interest in life after father died, because hating father had been my chief interest up to then, and I was lost without it."

Here's to you, Dame Edith. Would that I'd seen you on the London stage...

"Fitzwilly" has a special place for me, in that it was one of the first-ever movies that I saw in a theatre. When I saw it years later, it did not disappoint. What pleased me more was that it had cast members such as John McGiver and Sam Waterston.

As a kid, I loved seeing Dick Van Dyke paired with Barbara Feldon, and their chemistry is fantastic. The movie may be too low-key for many people in the 21st century, but it is sheer fun just seeing this caper-comedy. It also has an added bonus of showing what New York City looked like in late 1966. It's clear that the exterior shots weren't just stock images, but actually shot at that time.

Some of the movie shows its age, such as the gag involving free color television sets. In 1966-1967, they were still an expensive item and many households didn't have them. Same can be said, of course, for the smoking, which was still prevalent during that time.

Nonetheless, the movie is always a joy to watch. Highly recommended!!!