The Boy Who Owned a Melephant explained

The Boy Who Owned a Melephant
Director:Saul Swimmer
Screenplay:Saul Swimmer
Tony Anthony
Story:Marvin Wald
Producer:Peter Gayle
Saul Swimmer
Tony Anthony
Starring:Brockman Seawell
Molly Turner
Narrator:Tallulah Bankhead
Studio:Gayle-Swimmer-Anthony Productions
Distributor:Universal International
Runtime:30 minutes
Country:United States
Language:English

The Boy Who Owned a Melephant is a 1959 American short film directed by Saul Swimmer and featuring Tallulah Bankhead as narrator.

Plot

After seeing his first circus, young Johnnie (Brockman Seawell) asks for an elephant to keep as a pet. To placate him, his mother (Molly Turner) whimsically "gives" him the elephant in the local zoo. The boy's classmates resent his pride in "owning" the pachyderm, and the boy learns to share, making his peers equal "owners".[1]

Production

Shortly after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, future feature-film director-producer Saul Swimmer directed the half-hour[2] children's short The Boy Who Owned a Melephant. Co-written by Swimmer and Tony Anthony, and adapting a story by Marvin Wald, it was produced by a team credited as Gayle-Swimmer-Anthony, which included frequent collaborator Peter Gayle.[3] It was released by Universal Pictures on October 6, 1959[4] or November 9, 1959 (sources differ). Narrated by actress Tallulah Bankhead, it starred her godson, Brockman Seawell (who was also actress Eugenia Rawls' son) and was shown at the Palace Theatre in New York City.

The film screened at the 1959 San Francisco International Film Festival[5] and won a 1959 Gold Leaf award at the Venice International Children's Film Festival. On March 19, 1967, it was paired with the 1952 French short White Mane as an episode of the television anthology series CBS Children's Film Festival.[6]

External links

Notes and References

  1. "A Cavalcade of Short Subject Reviews Part 23: 1958-1963". Turner Classic Movies based on reviews in Boxoffice magazine. Archived from the original on April 24, 2012.
  2. News: Saul Swimmer, 70, Film Documentarian, Dies. . The New York Times. March 22, 2007. January 22, 2018. January 30, 2013. https://archive.today/20130130121936/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/movies/22swimmer.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0. live.
  3. News: Dorothy. Kilgallen. Dorothy Kilgallen. Voice of Broadway. (Syndicated column). Schenectady Gazette. New York. September 13, 1960. The youngest film producers in the United States — 22-year-old Peter Gayle, Saul Swimmer and Tony Anthony — are negotiating for the film rights to Arthur Miller's '[A] Memory of Two Mondays'..
  4. Book: Carrier, Jeffrey L.. Tallulah Bankhead: A Bio-Bibliography. . 1991. 978-0313274527 . 146.
  5. Web site: The Boy Who Owned a Melephant. San Francisco International Film Festival. April 24, 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20160304083741/http://history.sffs.org/films/film_details.php?id=658 . live . March 4, 2016.
  6. http://gymmy.tripod.com/CCFF/1967.html The CBS Children's Film Festival 1967