Director: Jacques Demy
Cast: Donovan, Donald Pleasence, John Hurt, Roy Kinnear

It is with some embarrassment that I now bring to you the following confession: For a long time now, I haven't felt the urge to pick up and read some sort of fiction novel. I do read magazines and newspapers, read various articles on the Internet, and I also leaf through non-fiction books mainly for research purposes, but fiction stories I hardly touch these days.The reason for that is because these day I find movies (especially of the unknown kind) to be a lot more interesting and worthwhile of my time. It takes a lot nowadays for me to pick up a fiction novel and read it; one of the most recent novels l I read, author William Butler's The Butterfly Revolution, I only ready because I knew it was the source material for the awful Roger Corman-produced movie Summer Camp Nightmare, and I was very curious to see if the source was a lot better than the movie (and it was.) But in my younger days, I was a lot more enthusiastic about reading fiction books. Even in my teens, I was a voracious reader. While in English class, when my peers would all moan having to read books like Of Mice And Men and In The Heat Of The Night, I would read the books as quickly as I would so that I would find out what happened in the end. Some of these books even encouraged me to read books related to those I read in English class; I think I was the only person in my class who sought out and read the sequel to The Pigman. And I would often go to the school library or public library and look randomly on shelves for any book that looked interesting; that's how I found out things like science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote at least two big joke books.

Before I reached my teenage years, I was also a very big reader, but of course the literature that I read was much different than what I read as a teenager. When I was still in the single digit age, but getting close to having a double-digit age, I read so many different kinds of books, from the Choose Your Own Adventure series to the Encyclopedia Brown series. Though when I was several years younger, my tastes were sometimes not that sophisticated, even though I remember that I was able to read at an advanced level even before I started to attend school. As you probably imagined, sometimes I would partake in stories that were fairy tales. They were almost certainly the same particular fairy tales that you read (or were read to) as a child, so I don't think I have to list the titles of them. But even at a young age, while I did enjoy getting exposed to these fairy tales, there were a lot of questions that often went through my mind while reading the fairy tales or thinking about the fairy tales afterwards. For example, I wondered why so many fairy tales had animals that were just as intelligent as humans, and could also speak. Also, I wondered about things such as why someone couldn't recognize immediately that their grandmother was really a wolf dressed in her grandmother's clothing... why a witch would prefer cannibalism instead of partaking of the candy house that she lived in... or why anyone would think it would be a good idea to have footwear that was made out of glass. (Actually, for that last one, I learned years later that due to a mistranslation of the original language text, the slippers had been changed from being originally made out of fur.)

Then there is the whole business of the fairy tale concerning The Pied Piper. The biggest question I had about the story for many years was what the heck the word "pied" meant - did the piper get whipped cream in his face from Curly, Moe, and Larry? (I don't know why I didn't consult a dictionary.) But there were other questions I had about the story, like why the piper didn't just bring back the rats after he was stiffed by Hamelin's local government, or why the adult townspeople of Hamelin didn't try anything to stop the piper when he was leading the town's children away and into the mountains. I've thought about questions like those a lot over the years, so when I got my hands on the movie The Pied Piper, I was interested to see if the filmmakers would patch up plot holes like those in their expanded version of the tale. The movie takes place in the town of Hamelin in the mid-fourteenth century, which is when The Black Death was ravaging Europe. Naturally, the town is full of rats that are transporting the disease to humans, and Lisa, the child daughter of the local burgomeister (Roy Kinnear, The Last Remake Of Beau Geste) - who is set to be wed to Franz (John Hurt, The Plague Dogs), the adult son of the local Baron (Donald Pleasence, Watch Out, We're Mad) - is gravely ill from the deadly plague. The local Jewish alchemist Melius (Michael Hordern, Yellowbeard) tries to help, but the church and most townspeople have a hostile opinion against him. But when the title character (played by '60s pop music star Donovan) comes into the town with a group of other travelers, Lisa starts to recover after hearing the piper's music. From that point on, it doesn't take long for the local government officials to realize that the piper has some sort of fantastic power, and when the piper offers to get rid of all the rats infesting the city for a substantial payment, the government agrees to the proposal.

I have a feeling that the element in The Pied Piper that you are most interested in me getting into detail with is with the title character, and how well Donovan does in the role. I'll certainly get into that, but first I want to talk about the other actors (and their characters), since they play an important part of the movie (more so than the title character... but I'll get into him soon.) The most interesting character in the movie has to be Melius the alchemist. Certainly, a lot of this interest comes from the warm and sympathetic performance by actor Hordern, but this character is also written to be interesting. Melius is a minority (a Jew) in a hostile society, but he still clings to his faith and beliefs. Yet at the same time, he is open to new opinions and ideas, and with this he tries to be the voice of reason and logic when just about all the other townspeople have closed minds. Every scene with this character sparks up the movie and gives the audience interest, as well as making us hope he'll prevail. But we see the obstacles he faces with the Hamelin government and church. These other characters are written to be selfish, greedy, and with a lust for power. The characters of Franz and his baron father (the latter very well played by Pleasence, who strongly gives the impression his character's struggle for power has weakened his logic and humanity) are shown that they want Franz to wed the young child Lisa not because of love, but so that they can get a handsome dowry from Lisa's father. Lisa's father (the burgomeister) is concerned for Lisa's illness near the beginning of the movie only so she can be cured, married, and give him some say so in the community. The members of the local clergy are pretty much bullies in fancy robes, condemning anybody that has even the smallest chance of giving the common people a new angle or idea to think about that may sow the seeds to weaken the church's position.

As for the Pied Piper... well, that's a different story. Donovan is clearly no actor, at least from what is seen here. He often seems to be a little spaced out, and as a result doesn't show much emotion or depth. But I feel I should in fairness point out that the screenplay didn't give him much opportunity to do anything. Although the movie is called The Pied Piper, the title character doesn't get to do much, or for that matter reveal to us what he thinks or feels about anything. The Piper only makes a few (very short) appearances for the first hour of the running time. When he does eventually offer his services to get rid of Hamelin's rats, this and the subsequent agreement, the getting rid of the rats, and then being stiffed when wanting his fee are all done in less than five minutes. And when he leads the children away from Hamelin (with only eleven or so minutes of running time left), there is no explanation as to why the adults of the village didn't try to pursue him once finding their children missing. Issues about the Piper are not the only issues I had with the screenplay. While I mentioned earlier that some of the other characters in the movie have some interesting features, ultimately there are too many characters, and as a result the movie has way too many subplots and character motivations for its own good. With all of this extra plot, the story unfolds at an extremely slow pace, and the heart of the movie is watered down. The rats don't even make an appearance until more than a third of the movie has passed by, and the powers that be in Hamelin don't consider the rats a threat until after the movie's halfway point. There were several times during the movie when I was thinking, "Oh, just stop this extraneous stuff for a while and get back to the Piper!"

I do realize that the source material for The Pied Piper is pretty short in length, and some extra plotting was needed to stretch out the story to make it feature film length. But I think putting more focus on the Piper and cutting down the subplots would have worked better. I feel I should admit that despite the slow and padded story, I wasn't really bored at any point due to the aforementioned good elements as well as the touches director Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg) put into the movie. Demy (who also co-wrote the movie) gives the movie an atmosphere and a look that really does seem to capture what life was like in Europe in the fourteenth century. Nothing looks really clean and tidy; there is instead a dirty, sloppy, and ragged feeling to everything. We can almost see in the air the feeling of desperation and struggle that hang over almost all of the characters. Individual moments, from the sudden interruption of the wedding banquet sequence to an ending that manages to seamlessly mix both magic and tragedy, really do stand out. And Demy does manage to get the message across that power (and the pursuit of power) will at some point corrupt the individual attempting to get it. As I said, I never got bored while watching The Pied Piper, but at the same time at the end there was somewhat of an unsatisfied feeling inside of me. The movie, as I indicated earlier, was too slow and padded out for its own good for the most part. Yet this isn't a movie I can easily dismiss, because there were some really interesting moments that I got to see and made me glad that I watched the entire thing. I guess the best way to sum up this movie is to label it as "a very interesting failure". While this is certainly not a general recommendation, I do see that there would be a few people out there who might get enough out of a viewing of The Pied Piper. Decide for yourself if you're one of those people.

Note: As you may have guessed, despite the movie getting "G" rating when first released, the movie is not appropriate for very young children, even more than fifty years later.

(Posted February 22, 2026)