Following the box office disappointment of Sleeping Beauty (1959) (audiences turned up and generally seemed to like the film but it cost a fortune and didn’t make its money back straight away), Walt Disney decided that things needed scaling back a bit, even considering at one point shutting down the animation unit altogether. But animation was the bedrock on which his company had been built and he was reluctant to throw it all away and when Ub Iwerks, then working in the company’s special processes team, perfected his labour, time and money saving technique for using Xerox photography to transfer animators sketches directly onto cels, it looked like it might be a way to continue in the business. But it came at a cost – the process could only realistically handle much “sketchier” images and the lush imagery of Sleeping Beauty was out of the question. The process had been pioneered on the 1960 short film, Goliath II, but Disney decided to press ahead with its use in feature production on his adaptation of Dodie Smith’s much-loved 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The results of the cost-cutting exercise are immediately obvious. Although the film adaptation oozes the sort of charm that Disney had honed to perfection and directors Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton S. Luske and Wolfgang Reitherman skilfully turn the final act into an elongated, edge-of-the-seat chase sequence, the film looks very different to its predecessors. Not bad in any way, but not as lush, lacking in the broad colour palette (hardly a problem, perhaps, for a film about spotted dogs!) and overall just less immersive than what had gone before.

But it’s the story that counts and while screenwriter Bill Peet‘s adaptation takes many liberties, he retains enough to please most of the books fans and adds a dash of excitement – while also proving beyond any doubt that he’d never been anywhere near London in his life. It’s in his wholly inaccurate depiction of the city that the film begins, in an unkempt bachelor flat off Regent’s Park where Pongo the Dalmatian (voiced by Rod Taylor) and his “pet”, the aspiring songwriter Roger Radcliffe (Ben Wright) pass the days writing tunes and watching the world go by. Pongo worries that Roger needs a wife and one day spots Anita (Lisa Davis) and her Dalmatian Perdita (Cate Bauer) heading for the park. Pongo engineers a meeting and, after a shaky start, the couple marry, move into a bigger house nearby and employ a nanny (Martha Wentworth) to help around the house. But when Perdita gives birth to a litter of 15 puppies, Anita’s fur-obsessed former schoolmate Cruella de Vil (Betty Lou Gerson) determines to add them to the large collection of puppies she has secreted at a home in the country and make coats out of their skins. The babies are abducted by Cruella’s dim-witted Mockney sidekicks, Horace (Frederick Worlock) and Jasper Baddun (J. Pat O’Malley) and it’s up to Pongo, Perdita, the dogs of London (among them characters from Lady and the Tramp (1955), despite that film having been set in the States…) and various concerned country animals to get them back.

There are, inevitably, a couple of songs and they’re so ordinary that it’s easy to forget that the film even has any tunes in it. Given that Roger is a songwriter, you might have expected more – indeed his profession, changed from the accountant of the book, has no impact on the plot whatsoever. But it scarcely matters. The story thunders along at breakneck speed, barely pausing for breath, and the final act, in which Pongo and Perdita lead their newly expanded family through the snow (the wintry landscapes are gorgeous, despite the cutbacks) back to London is genuinely exciting stuff. There’s more suspense in the scene where the dogs, covered in soot to disguise themselves as Labradors, try to get the puppies into a van, than in most live action films you’ll see this year.

In Cruella, Disney created one of their most memorable and vindictively cruel villains, a properly nasty piece of work without a single shred of decency. She’s a broad caricature to be sure but is so repellent that she works wonders in the story (this was one film from which Disney found it impossible to expunge scenes of smoking as she’s virtually a chain-smoker and Roger is constantly puffing on a pipe) and as voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, she’s an absolute riot. The cost-cutting seems to have affected poor Cruella the most – one animation “cycle”, a sequence of her driving slowly past in a car while looking around and sneering is used at least three times. But she’s still marvellously hissable, a vaudevillian monster who has remained one of Disney’s most beloved bad guys even if by the end we actually know nothing about here – what exactly does she spend her time doing when she’s not arranging for innocent puppies to be dognapped, skinned alive and turned into fur coats?

As well as a scary villain and a thundering great chase scene, it’s also a very funny film – Lucky (Mimi Gibson), one of the puppies who is obsessed with television watches What’s My Crime?, a spoof of the popular show What’s My Line? – though some of the humour is accidental and will only appeal to those with more than  passing familiarity with London. It’s painfully obvious that no-one involved in the film had ever set foot for very long in the capital and that those who had hadn’t bothered to check a road map. That looks nothing like Regent’s Park for starters; Pongo must have one hell of a bark if he can howl from the park during the “Twilight Bark” and be heard by a Great Dane in Hampstead; when the parent dogs set off from Primrose Hill to Suffolk (north of London) they set off south towards Camden Road; and where the hell are all those cliffs that they race along between Suffolk and London supposed to be? But that’s all just nit-picking and there wasn’t a child in the world – even ones resident in London – who would have cared about such fripperies. The breakneck chase back to London with the ever-resourceful dogs constantly staying one step ahead of the idiotic humans would have had them glued to the screen, much as it undoubtedly would today.

Thanks to a relatively tiny budget of $3.6 million (Sleeping Beauty had cost Disney almost twice that), One Hundred and One Dalmatians was a box office hit in 1961 and made even more money during its 1969 re-release. And it’s not hard to see why. It’s a huge amount of fun, with a top-notch cast doing sterling work all round and there’s enough jeopardy, laughs and excitement to engage even the most cynical of seen-it-all child. It was one of the first of Disney’s animated features to get a live-action remake, 101 Dalmatians directed by Stephen Herek in 1995 with Glenn Close as Cruella (a sequel, 102 Dalmatians followed in 2000). Straight-to-video animated sequel 101 Dalmatians II: Patch’s London Adventure (2003) picked up the story of one of the original film’s most popular puppies and in 2021, Emma Stone took the title role in the live-action Cruella which fleshes out all that back story for the character that the 1961 film didn’t bother with.

Crew
Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton S. Luske, Wolfgang Reitherman; Walt Disney Pictures; Producer: Walt Disney; Story: Bill Peet; Novel: Dodie Smith; Editors: Roy M. Brewer Jr, Donald Halliday; Music: George Bruns; Sound Supervisor: Robert O. Cook; Effects Animators: Ed Parks, Jack Boyd, Jack Buckley, Dan MacManus; Special Processes: Ub Iwerks, Eustace Lycett; Production Designer: Ken Anderson

Voice Cast
Rod Taylor (Pongo); Betty Lou Gerson (Cruella De Vil/Miss Birdwell); Cate Bauer (Perdita); Ben Wright (Roger Radcliff); Frederick Worlock (Horace Badun/Inspector Craven); Lisa Davis (Anita Radcliff); Martha Wentworth (Nanny/Queenie/Lucy); J. Pat O’Malley (Colonel/Jasper Badun); Tudor Owen (Towser); Tom Conway (quizmaster/Collie); George Pelling (Danny); Thurl Ravenscroft (the captain); David Frankham (Sergeant Tibs); Ramsay Hill (television announcer/labrador); Queenie Leonard (Princess); Marjorie Bennett (Duchess); Barbara Beaird (Rolly); Mickey Maga (Patch); Sandra Abbott (Penny); Mimi Gibson (Lucky)

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