I saw this film when it first came out, in July of 1963, when I was thirteen. It was showing at a theater a couple of miles from my home in Washington, D. C. I took a bus to the theater but afterwards I had an urge to walk home, which I did, in a kind of dreamy state. The film is not a great one but it has a kind of sweetness you don't find in movies anymore, and a kind of modesty -- it wasn't meant to be an event, just a pleasing way of passing the time on a summer's afternoon or evening. If you were a kid in 1963 you'd go see any Disney film that came out, knowing you'd like it, more or less.
I was on the cusp of puberty then and Hayley Mills was a person of deep fascination to me. I might not have identified my interest in her as sexual, consciously, but she was a sexy girl -- not just cute but self-possessed in an alluring way. Her good-natured charm allowed one access to her female power, made it approachable.
A few months after this film came out Kennedy would be assassinated and a few months after that the Beatles exploded on the scene, and the Sixties officially got going. It's tempting to think that the dream state this film induced in me, and the long walk home I took in order to prolong it, arose from a presentiment that this summer would be the last innocent one of my life -- that sex and tragedy and cultural derangement would soon transform me and transform America.
I was taking a deep breath, perhaps, knowing that the slow climb of the rollercoaster had reached its zenith and that the delirious fall was about to begin.
