Movie Type: Family-Oriented Comedy, Romantic Comedy
Themes: Twins and Lookalikes, Mischievous Children, Assumed Identities
Main Cast: Hayley Mills, Hayley Mills, Maureen O'Hara, Brian Keith, Charlie Ruggles, Una Merkel
Release Year: 1961
Country: US
Run Time: 127 minutes
MPAA Rating: G
Plot
We get a double dose of Hayley Mills in this Disney vehicle: she plays 13-year-old identical twins Susan and Sharon, who meet for the very first time in summer camp. They soon learn that they were separated at a very early age when their parents Mitch and Maggie (Brian Keith and Maureen O'Hara) divorced. On a lark, the girls switch places: the one living with Mitch goes back home with Maggie, and vice versa. Mitch is planning to remarry the "wrong woman," vituperative Vicky (Joanna Barnes). The twins conspire to reunite their parents, but the road to reconciliation is rough indeed. It takes a slapsticky camping trip to get rid of the troublesome Vicky and to prompt Mitch and Maggie to renew their vows. The film introduced a hit song, "Let's Get Together," which represented the high point of Hayley Mills' very short-lived recording career. The Parent Trap was based on Das Doppelte Lottchen, a novel by Erich Kastner, which had previously been filmed in German and British versions (real twins were cast in both); over thirty years after Parent Trap was theatrically released, a short series of sequels were made for the Disney Channel cable service, with a grown-up Mills back in her original role(s), and two sets of second-generation twins. Baby Boom collaborators Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer would remake the film with a new cast in 1998. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
After the success of Pollyanna, Disney made the most of Hayley Mills' star power by casting her as twins Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evans. The split-screen technology and trick photography using a body double looks pretty seamless for the time, and Mills is convincing in the dual role thanks to her charming performance. The adult roles are pretty stale, with the exception of glamorous Maureen O'Hara as Mrs. McKendrick and Charlie Ruggles as the lovable grandfather. The plot is delightfully contrived and tends to drag on too long in unnecessary directions, such as the camping trip with Vickie, the properly evil gold-digging villain. However, a silly story line is a Disney tradition, and all the fun comes from the twins' attempts at deception. The musical numbers are a highlight, written by award-winning Mary Poppins songwriters Robert and Richard M. Sherman, and featuring Mouseketeer Annette Funicello for the title song. As performed by Mills, the song "Lets Get Together" rose to the Top Ten in 1961. A timeless classic, The Parent Trap is a warm and humorous family film that is excellently corny. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
Identical twins Sharon McKendrick and Susan Evers (Hayley Mills) make each other's acquaintance at summer camp, not realizing at first that they are indeed sisters. After both admitted they have come from broken homes, they soon learn that their parents (Maureen O'Hara and Brian Keith) divorced shortly after the twins' birth, with each parent having custody to one daughter. The sisters, each dying to meet the parent they never knew, switch places in order to visit the parent they have never seen. While Susan is in Boston masquerading as Sharon, Sharon is in California masquerading as Susan.
Sharon calls Susan in Boston with the news that their father is planning to marry a gold-digger and their mother needs to be rushed to California to prevent the union. In Boston, Susan tells her mother the truth about the switched identities and the two fly to California.
With both parents and both twins in California, the twins set about (with some slight approval from their mother) sabotaging their father's marriage plans. Mitch's money-hungry girlfriend Vicki Robinson (Joanna Barnes) receives some rude, mischievous treatment from the girls and some veiled cattiness from Maggie. When Vicki is away for an evening, the girls stage a reprise of their parents' first date in Mitch's home with an Italian dinner and a gypsy violinist. The former spouses are gradually drawn together.
Vicki however digs her heels in regarding Mitch and marriage, but the girls effect the coup de grace on a wilderness camping trip: Vicki spends her time swatting mosquitoes after dousing herself with a sugar and water "mosquito repellent" given her by Sharon and Susan, and finds her sleep interrupted by two bear cubs licking honey off her feet. The bear cubs were drawn to her tent by a trail of honey left by the twins. Exasperated, Vicki gladly tosses in the towel. Mitch and Maggie rekindle the love they once held for each other and the two remarry in the final scene with the twins as members of the wedding party.
Cast includes Cathleen Nesbitt and Charles Ruggles as the girls' maternal grandparents, Una Merkel as Mitch's sympathetic housekeeper Verbena, Ruth McDevitt and Nancy Kulp as summer camp staff, and Leo G. Carroll as Reverend Mosby. Hayley Mills' father John appeared in the uncredited role of a golf caddy while Susan Henning was Hayley Mills' uncredited body double for several of the "twin" shots in the film.
The screenplay originally called for only a few trick photography shots of Hayley Mills in scenes with herself; the bulk of the film was to be shot using a body double. When Walt Disney saw how seamless the processed shots were, he ordered the script reconfigured to include more of the special effect. Disney also wanted Mills to appear on camera as much as possible, knowing that she was having growth spurts during filming.
The film was shot mostly in California at various locales. The summer camp scenes were filmed at Camp Cedar Lake, in the Angeles National Forest 5 minutes from Big Bear Lake, California. The Monterey scenes were filmed in various California locations, including millionaire Stuyvesant Fish's 5,200 acre (21 km²) ranch in Carmel, Monterey's Pebble Beach golf course. The scenes at the Monterey house were shot at studio's Golden Oak Ranch in Placerita Canyon, where Mitch's ranch was built. It was the design of this set that proved the most popular, and to this day the Walt Disney Archives receives requests for plans of the home's interior design. Of course, there never was such a house; the set was simply various rooms built on a sound stage. Camp Inch was based on a real girls' camp called Camp Crestridge for Girls at the Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center near Asheville, North Carolina.
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