IT’S A MADELINE WORLD

The Childrens Hour

Lots of favorite childhood books are being made into movies this year. Madeline is by no means the smallest one

'All age groups in most countries watch moving pictures, and they watch them for many more hours than ordinary people have ever spent in churches,” wrote the late Bruno Bettelheim in 1981. “In many ways and for many people, it is the only experience common to parents and children.”

With a new baby boom in full throttle, the great G-rated movie has become a kind of Grail. Children want it, parents want it—Bettelheim was on the ball. It doesn’t hurt that the big demand for kid cinema splices nicely into the nostalgia pangs of aging baby-boomers. Look how many of the movies being made today are based on beloved boomer books: The Borrowers has just opened, and coming down the conveyor belt are Stuart Little, Curious George, and The Cat in the Hat. It’s Eisenhower’s America Revisited—an era of porch doors and X-Ray Specx.

One of the most awaited book-to-movie manifestations is TriStar’s Madeline. Based on Ludwig Bemelmans’ 1939 homage to Parisian schoolgirls and due out this July, it stars Hatty Jones as Madeline, Frances McDormand as Miss Clavel, and Nigel Hawthorne as Lord Covington. Director Daisy Mayer hints at intrigue on the set. Understand, there are 12 girls in the movie and only one boy, Kristian de La Osa, who plays Pepito. It seems the girls were being really mean to Kristian because he fed mice to his pet snake (yuck!). One morning, however, he found two anonymous love letters under his door, and, two days later, a letter that read: “At First we didn’t like you, but now we’ve decided that you’re really great.” Some things never change.

LAURA JACOBS

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