A Garden of Fitzwilly

The book’s out of print again. I really ought to check this, but I tend to assume hard-to-find, obscure books will have been uploaded to various illicit sources. However, mostly what you find when you search A Garden of Cucumbers is either Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, a movie starring Holly Woodlawn that I’d never heard of, or else books about how to grow cucumbers, which I do not wish to do. What’s more, his father’s Wikipedia page is more detailed than his. I can tell you very little about the book or the author, and I’ve already given you my rant once this month about use-it-or-lose-it copyright.

The movie version is fun, though. Claude Fitzwilliam (Dick Van Dyke) is the butler for Miss Victoria Woodworth (Dame Edith Evans). Unbeknownst to her, she’s penniless. Fitzwilly and the staff have been stealing from stores left and right to support her way of life. Every time they get a little ahead, she gives thousands of dollars to some charity or another. What’s more, Fitzwilly—a thirteenth-generation butler—takes on the responsibility for all sorts of other relatives of families who have always been in service. Unfortunately for their plans, Miss Victoria hires a secretary, Juliet Nowell (Barbara Feldon), to help her work on her planned dictionary for people who can’t spell, and Juliet is looking around the place.

One of the running issues is that Juliet rapidly decides that Fitzwilly is too smart and capable to be a butler. Ergo, she will keep telling Miss Victoria this until Fitzwilly goes off and does something more appropriate to his abilities. Which is remarkably classist. If he’s happy being a butler, that’s his business. Oh, I think he does the job because twelve generations before him is a lot of tradition to be going on with, but it’s also because he loves Miss Victoria and wants to take care of her as she took care of him when he was a child. And since her father left her with a whopping hundred and eighty bucks, it’s up to Fitzwilly.

There’s a certain amount of “victimless crime” involved here; the running theme is that they’re mostly only hurting insurance companies. And as long as they’re only in it for the benefit of Miss Victoria, I can go along with that. But there’s an infuriating subplot about Byron Casey (Stephen Strimpell), who was hired to decorate the Florida home of a rich family. He’s also connected to the network of staff somehow, so they get him out of trouble for having wasted half of the hundred and fifty grand he’d been paid to do it. Whereas I think they should let him cook.

The cast on this is mindboggling. Oh, Van Dyke, obviously. And Feldon in one of her first roles. There are a lot of slightly familiar character actors—John McGiver, Anne Seymour, and Cecil Kellaway, among others. There’s also Norman Fell and John Fiedler in minor roles, and in his second screen role as Oliver the chauffeur, we have a very young Sam Waterston. And if you weren’t impressed enough, the music is credited to one Johnny Williams. And the whole thing’s directed by Delbert Mann.

It’s a fairly charming movie that culminates in a daring heist at Gimbels. (About half the stores they rip off don’t exist anymore.) Obviously, Fitzwilly and Juliet will end up together, because if they don’t, what are we even doing here? I’d be curious to read the book to find out how similar the two are, but the cheapest I can find the paperback for sale is slightly over eighty bucks. There are some things I’d pay eighty bucks for, but a mass market paperback that will likely fall apart as I try to read it is not one of them.

This is also one of those movies that gets called a Christmas movie and shows up on the lists I’ve looked at. And, yes, technically I suppose it is. Inasmuch as the heist happens on Christmas Eve, making it at least as much a Christmas movie as some of the ones I’ve covered. But mostly it’s that happening on Christmas Eve makes the haul bigger and the heist easier. It’s an extremely crowded in a department store at five PM on Christmas Eve, after all. Other than that, this has nothing to do with the holiday at all and shouldn’t be on the lists.

I know next month’s is available; we’ll be looking into Dark Dungeons, which is almost certainly the only movie ever made based on a Chick tract.