The Little Prince

A sad disaster for Donen with what was surely a misconceived project from the beginning. At each scene change, The Little Prince intrusively fractures the delicate mood of Saint-Exupéry's allegorical fable about a crashed pilot's encounter with a being from another planet. The book linked its simple line drawings to its text in a way that avoided both cuteness and sentimentality; the film frequently amazes with its grossness, notably in the planet sequence, where a nuance-less distorting lens technique is heavily overworked. Frederick Loewe's music is unmemorable (with Richard Kiley belting through the desert bawling out particularly un-singable lyrics) and the sentimentality often outrageously glutinous. Only Bob Fosse's Snake comes off in a regulation classic dance routine.