The Parent Trap - 1961

Released June 21, 1961. Directed by David Swift

At summer camp ("Camp Inch," though it keeps coming across as "Camp Itch,") two girls meet and instantly dislike each other: Susan Evers (Hayley Mills) from Monterey, California, and Sharon McKendrick (also Hayley Mills), from Boston. Incredibly, everyone notices that except for their differing hair styles, the two look exactly like one another.

In the ensuing days, pulling destructive pranks on one another in a focused internecine war, the camp director (Ruth McDevitt) puts them together in the same cabin as both a punishment and to force them to get over their animosity. Instead, the two discover a secret: they're identical twins split up by their divorced parents (Brian Keith and Maureen O'Hara) when they were very young. As the two girls get to know each other and their curiosity grows, they determine to pull a switch so that each girl, disguised as the other, will go home to the opposite parent for a chance for each girl to get to know the father and mother they've no recollection of ever meeting.

Hayley Mills pulls the film along playing the two sisters, double photographed and processed together in a mostly seamless way so that, unless you watch too closely, it does look like two different characters interacting with each other. The story (script by David Swift from the 1949 German novel by Erich Kästner) becomes a plot by the desperate girls to get their mother and father back together after some 14 years ("we got gypped!" they declare), especially since the father (Keith) is on the verge of marrying gold-digger Vicky Robinson (Joanna Barnes doing a very nice turn in the thankless role of film villain) and the mother (O'Hara) is apparently living a life absorbed with facile social functions managed by the twin's grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt as brittle blue-nose Louise McKendrick).

The Parent Trap is mostly a tale of fractured-family love and the need for the twins to get Vicky (who is accused of having "electric hips") out of the way so that our two adult movie stars (Keith and O'Hara) can (once again) succumb to the laws of attraction, and, I suppose, overcome their spiteful dislike for each other through proximity, the same way the two fighting twins did back at "Camp Itch."

Director David Swift moves the tale along with nice pacing. Hayley Mill's comedic skills are juvenile but fit the film perfectly, and, despite a certain amount of unreality, there's a kind of heart-sick center to the movie. Why can't people, whether kids or adults, learn to get a long with each other, especially if they're from the same family?

As with some of the other Disney life-action films of that era, the script operates on two different levels on occasion, with humor and situations that are for a youthful audience, but with a double-meaning that an adult picks up on. With a two hour-plus runtime, the cast and director (and editor Philip W. Anderson) keep the whole thing from bogging down into sentimentality.

AMAZON STREAMING and DVD: The Parent Trap (1961)

What's Recent

Original Page July 31, 2025