Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a 1968 British musical film loosely based on Ian Fleming's novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. The film's script is by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes and its songs by the Sherman Brothers. The song "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" was nominated for an Academy Award.

The film stars Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts, Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious, Lionel Jeffries as Grandpa Potts, James Robertson Justice as Lord Scrumptious and Robert Helpmann as the Childcatcher. The film was directed by Ken Hughes and produced by Albert R. Broccoli (co-producer of the James Bond series of films, also based on Fleming's novels). John Stears supervised the special effects. Irwin Kostal supervised and conducted the music, while the musical numbers were staged by Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood.

Plot

Set in the 1910s, the story opens with a montage of European Grand Prix races in which a particular car appears to win every race. In the final race, the car swerves to avoid a girl and a dog, loses control, crashes, and catches fire, bringing its racing career to an end. The car ends up in an old garage in rural England, where two children, Jeremy (Adrian Hall) and Jemima Potts (Heather Ripley), have grown fond of it. They are told by a junkman that he intends to buy the car from the garage owner for scrap. The children (who live with their widowed father Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke), an eccentric inventor, and his equally peculiar father) implore their father to buy the car before the junkman does, but he does not have the money. While playing truant, they meet Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes), a beautiful upper class woman with her own motorcar. She brings them home to report their truancy to their father. Truly shows interest in Caractacus' odd inventions, but he is affronted by her insistence that his children should be in school.